In article <leCdnelpRor-ARyiXTWJig@gbronline.com> "Charlie Smith" <casca913@gbronline.com> writes:
>
>"Richard Qunt" <r.c.qunt@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>news:bls1rk$jmd$1@news8.svr.pol.co.uk...

>> Just about everyone in Evangelion has normal-looking hair color, except Rei
>> Ayanami. Do you think that her hair is naturally blue, or does she dye it?

>I can see where you are deriving your question from but that is the nature
>of anime.

Yup.  I've just come to assume that all these unusual hair colors that are
totally unnatural in real life are perfectly normal and natural in anime
worlds.

>We might as well ask if Trunks dyes his hair because he is the
>only person, besides his mother and sister, in that world with an
>"unnatural" hair color.  But then we have to ask what is natural?

I believe someone else made the point here that there is a genetic aspect
here.  I remember watching some episode of DBZ (I guess it was Z) where
Vegeta was complaining that the time travelling Trunks couldn't be a
Saiyan because all Saiyans have black hair and he has blonde hair.  He
must have gotten it from his mother then.  But anyway, I thought I'd
comment about that since it's something I did remember seeing in the show.

>As I recall, from several years ago when I
>first started watching anime, in an attempt to make characters different
>from one another the branch of different color hairs were used.  The blacks
>turned to blues and greens and purples since if everyone had raven hair then
>it would start to get somewhat hard to tell some people apart....

I'm no expert either, but from what I've heard/read and my understanding
of that stuff, you're basically right except that it started with the
printed manga rather than TV/movie animation.  The main characters were
given different hair colors to make them stand out from each other and
so that readers could easily tell them apart.  So, as I recall, you
ended up with hair of basically three colors -- black, white (so blonde
I guess), and something in between that would be grey-ish in black and
white print (red hair?  brown?).  I guess the same general concept holds
now even with anime where the different hair colors provide a fast, easy
way to tell characters apart especially if they look similar in other
features.  Now I'll follow with the same sort of statement you did ;) --
I could easily be wrong here, but this is what I've heard and as I
understand things it does sound like a reasonable explanation.  If we're
both totally wrong here, I'm sure someone will correct us.

-- 
      .      .        .       .         -- James Marshall     (ORI)  *   ,
 ,.  -- )-- ,   , . -- )-- ,            marshall@astro.umd.edu
          '             '       http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall    ''' 
"Astronomy is a dyslexic's nightmare."                               ,   *