Cosplay the Right Way: Look Like You Wear

The thing about emulating movie characters from realistic movies (Forest Gump, Patch Adams, Erin Brockovich) is that, in as much as you want to try to play them, you can only go as far as internalizing their characters and imbibing their values.

With anime, cartoons and sci-fi, however, there’s a myriad of specifics that you will need to take note of to say that you “got the character right.” You have to get the voice correct, not to mention word choice (some characters can tend to be 2 dimensional), mannerism and what have you. But the most basic would be to get 2 things down, mainly…

The Garb

You have to get the dress correct. Because of course! One of the biggest things that define cosplay or costripping is the flamboyance of dressing up and getting it right. It could go from something as simple as a Homer Simpson’s white shirt and pot belly, to something more detailed like this one.

The Gaze

And like with the cosplay above, you’ve got to get the look down. There are people who easily look like their anime counterparts just from sheer facial features. Some of these can be grown like hair length. Others need to be bought like contact lenses for sale or hair dyes. An easy way is to cosplay a character you may already look like. Otherwise, you’d have to go out of your way to get wigs, contacts, and make-up to fit the bill easy. Case in point, here’s a random look alike.