What’s Harder To Draw: Horses Or Kisses? We Asked An Expert

As a fan of everything animation and an occasional doodler, I’ve seen my fair share of superb art, whether it’s the emotional climax of my favorite ship finally sharing a kiss or heroes riding in to save the day on their noble steeds. One burning question I’ve had during my 28 years of watching anime is whether it’s harder for artists to draw kissing scenes or the anatomy of a horse. So, taking advantage of my privilege as an off-diary writer, I asked an expert.

To provide some context for this rather random apples-to-oranges question, two things triggered my curiosity. The first was the announcement of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run, the seventh part of creator Hirohiko Araki’s ongoing manga series. Besides being the best arc in the series, it also features a cross-country horse race that JJBA fans have wondered how animation studio David Production would handle—not because of the stands battles, but because horses are notoriously difficult to draw. The only thing harder than drawing a horse is drawing teams of galloping horses, and that’s the main focus of this part. 

The second reason is that I’m a big shojo romance fan, even though I often have to write about shonen. Still, kisses between my ships in any genre make me go “Yippe, dopamine!” while reblogging gifsets on Tumblr. However, not all kisses are equal, which has led to moments of romantic catharsis that sometimes look a bit awkward: For example, Guts and Casca’s first kiss in Berserk. For some reason, the way the bottom of Casca’s face shifts and seems to magnetize toward Guts is so uncanny that it pulls me out of the touching moment. 

Another moment that never quite sat right with me was Inuyasha and Kagome’s kiss in the anime’s second movie, The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass. While most of the fandom swooned, I found myself quietly cringing while watching my first slow-burn anime romance ship kiss. Kagome’s lingering kiss landed squarely on Inuyasha’s teeth—an oddly specific detail that took me out of a moment that was supposed to be an emotional crescendo. 

Needing a credible artistic soundboard, I reached out to Samuel Deats, co-director of Netflix’s Castlevania and Castlevania: Nocturne. As a fellow anime enthusiast who, along with his brother Adam, elevated the vampiric Konami series with distinctly anime-infused grandeur, and who’s been generous enough to unpack the nitty-gritty of compositing in Western animation, Deats was the ideal person to bounce these shower thoughts off of. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that his show features a healthy dose of passionate kisses (some steamier than others) and heroic horse charges. 

Hearing my above preamble, Deats responded to my question with another point of contention, saying that the issue is less about what’s harder to draw and more about what will be more scrutinized.

“If you screw up drawing a horse, unless it’s a really important horse, you might get a few chuckles from people. But if you screw up an important kiss, everyone’s gonna notice,” Deats said. “Everyone’s gonna give you shit for it.”

Deats says that, objectively speaking, horses, especially animating horses, “is a nightmare” for artists. “Famously horrible,” even. Unless an artist is a part of the rare few coalitions that got good at it, it’s hard for an illustrator to pull off the kinds of wizardry craftsmen like Disney animators have been pulling off for years, animating the mechanics of a horse in motion. By that same token, while it takes significantly less time to draw a kiss, drawing the perfect kiss that sells the moment to an audience is a challenging task in its own right. 

“I think [kisses] requires a very special kind of eye. With horses, you’re thinking about 3D shape, muscle structure, all kinds of stuff,” Deats said. “With a kiss, it’s getting the feeling just right. It’s a character thing, too. All of this comes together in what could be a nightmare if you do it wrong.” 

Instead of keeping things at a draw, Deats’ verdict was that there’ve probably been more kisses in animation that’ve gone awry than galloping horses. Still, horses, on a technical level, are harder for artists to draw. Deats does not envy David Production for having to tackle that in Steel Ball Run because Castlevania studio Powerhouse Animation has drawn its fair share of “ugly horses,” too. Fortunately, nobody’s made a stink of it. 

Deats says what makes kisses hard to illustrate factors down to strange character designs that are not built to interlock like actual human faces. Even so, as was the case with Inuyasha, sometimes a clumsy kiss comes down to the smoocher and smoochee’s designs and body proportions looking oddly mashed together.

“Even without taking that into account, I think it’s a struggle because—depending on the angle of the kiss—there’s almost a competition for whose face is going to be the focal point in the moment. Naturally, you go towards a profile kiss, ‘cause that’s how you get both characters in there,” Deats said. “A lot of shows will do three quarters where you have a character in the foreground, or they cut around it. But when you’re doing that classic profile kiss, there’s an awkwardness in how you’re angling faces. It’s a hard thing to pull off, and it’s a hard thing to get right.” 

While Deats doesn’t remember the last time he’s drawn or animated horses or kisses, he does recall times when they were a technical challenge in Castlevania and Castlevania: Nocturne. With the style of production, Deats said things often went awry when Powerhouse Animation’s storyboard artists sent their key frames to Korean studio Tiger Animation to handle the in-between frames, which led Powerhouse Animation to make corrections to ensure intimate scenes looked as tight as possible. All these troubles became trickier when drawing kisses escalated to depicting the beast with two backs, such as Castlevania season 3’s famous sex scene between Hector and Lenore. 

“That was the real struggle during those episodes in particular, ‘cause we were trying not to have these things end up looking super strange. Hector ended up being naked a lot in that season, and we unfortunately had some of our team having to put a fair amount of their time just fixing his ding dong a lot because he would have a weirdly drawn ding dong,” Deats said. “Even our crew was like ‘That’s weird junk he’s got there.’ If we’re gonna share it, we might as well make sure it’s done right.”

Besides “junk fixers” resolving phallic issues, retouching kisses in Castlevania proved to be an ordeal in its sequel series, Nocturne, most notably in the culmination of Richter and Annette’s kiss in the final scene of the show’s season two finale. Deats credited illustrator Katie Silva’s Herculean effort in handling the layouts for most of the sequence. However, even managing the main connecting points as Richter and Annette drew in for their kiss and illustrating the in-betweens of their smooch, despite Silva’s best efforts the kiss had its own weirdness that required Silva to get particular about sorting out. 

“There were weird points where the lips were almost like they were fused together,” Deats said. “Just strange stuff like that, and [Silva] was like ‘I can’t let this slide.’ So she went in there messing with that a lot.”

While it definitely helps that many of Deats’ coworkers on Castlevania practice not-safe-for-work art, which gives them experience drawing kisses, they still have to work through the process to get it right; there is no shortcut in Deats’ professional experience for making drawing kisses or horses any easier. Much of it depends on muscle memory from the last time an artist drew a kiss or involves picking up a pencil, rolling up their sleeves, and using trial and error until they get it right. But if any artist needs a reference for certain kisses and horses in animation, Deats recommends checking out Mulan or Cowboy Bebop’s twenty-second episode “Cowboy Funk” to help aspiring artists get their pens working.