Ethnic Misrepresentation in Anime

Following up on my last post, I'm gonna talk about anime again but this time about the faulty representation of race in character designs.

Mr. Popo from Dragonball was a pioneer of the Japanese idea of a black man. Actual jet black skin, thick lips and googly eyes. How cute, I like the extra touch of lighter skin on the palm of his hand.










I just added Jinx from Pokemon in to reinforce the misconcept and of course to show a comical relation between it and Mr. Popo.









Takenori Akagi from everyone's favorite basketball manga, Slam Dunk. You see the immense progress with character design that's true to the character's intended ethnicity.











I really don't know this guy's name, but he's a Union flag fighter in Gundam 00. This recent anime attempts to incorporate a diverse number of races in order to propel the theme of a global conflict. It has a couple of booboos which I will address later but this guy here is done pretty well. At least he doesn't look Japanesque like the rest of the characters do, despite the fact that most of the gundam 00 characters aren't of Japanese origins.

Soran Ebrahim, better known by his alias Setsuna F. Seiei is supposedly a Kurdish boy from the fictional Republic of Krugis.
I somewhat consider this a big leap from previous animes. At least his nationality is a more specific and obscure one, rather than just being black or white or asian. Although, I still consider his features very mainstream Japanese looking. I wonder why animators never consider face shapes, brow bones, eye or nose sizes when determining a character's race. They all seem to have pointy chins and noses and gigantic eyes. Is that the Japanese ideal because they themselves have slitty eyes and flat noses?

Lastly, Louise Helevy also from Gundam 00. Her projected ethnicity is Spanish.......but wait a second, purebred Spaniards have black to auburn hair and dark brown eyes. I guess she could very well be a hybrid, but blonde haircolor is recessive and if they were to make her a racial mix then they really didn't have to be misleading to say she's Spanish.

So in conclusion, I'd say there was improvement over the years but they still gotta keep working at it.