How I did it by Victor Frankenstein, or Reading Scanlated Manga for Beginners

Yes, that's another pop culture reference - this time from the best movie Mel Brooks ever made.

What I'm going to talk about today is the direct result of a conversation with some distant in-laws (shout out to y'uns). After finding out that they had doings in the paper comics/manga community, the inevitable question (that I had never anticipated) came about: How do you read fan scanlated manga, anyway?

So let's talk about sources and methods. I'll address manga first, then anime.

So you've heard about this great manga from somebody. It's not commercially available translated where you are, so your only option is to read it on your computer. What to do, and how to do it?

Well, you don't go to Wikipedia, which does a great job of telling you everything about the manga (or anime) including the entire plot and all the themes. It also doesn't say anything about any non-commercial scanlation/fansubbing efforts. If you're actually looking forward to reading/watching it and making your own decisions, stay away from Wikipedia!

Obtaining the Drug

First, you have to get hold of the manga. The best single place to find out who did what and where you might be able to find it is Mangaupdates.com. The releases page shows you what has come out today, and there's a handy search box in the upper right of every page that will accept titles, authors, and scanlation group names.

If your manga has been scanlated by somebody some time, it will show up as a search result. If you then click through on the title, you get a brief synopsis of the manga, usually with a picture of the cover of one volume. In the middle left column there's a show all scanlated volumes link that will take you to a list. This is good for mangas that have been out for a while and may have been partially scanlated by one group then dropped and picked up by another group(s). You can then click through to the group names to find out how to get their files. If you're really lucky, there will be a DL link at the far right of a line for a chapter or volume. Click there and it may well take you to the file you desire, or to a torrent file for it.

Manga scanlations are available via a wide variety of distribution methods. Some groups use direct downloads from sites like Mediafire or Rapidshare. Some groups prefer to use bittorrent as a primary distribution method. Many have bots serving content on their IRC channels. There are plenty of tutorials out there about how to IRC and how to bittorrent, so I'm not going to get into that here.

So let's suppose that the group doesn't have the chapters you want up on IRC anymore, or that they have disbanded and taken their IRC bots with them. Fear not - the internet is a big place, and there is almost certainly somebody somewhere distributing the files you want.

First, stop by a bittorrent search engine like Mininova or BTjunkie and put in your title. You might find that the manga you want also had an anime done of it, so you'll have to browse through some files. Manga are, as you might guess, vastly smaller files than a TV episode, so look for small file sizes and .zip or .rar filetypes.

No luck with torrents? Fret not - there's always #lurk. Stop by gotlurk.net and put your title in. They don't have everything, but you can rest assured that if they don't have it, it's definitely obscure.

Another nice thing about #lurk is that they have an entire server loaded with raws (untranslated manga). So if you want to know what the original looked like, or you want to check a translation, it's a good place to stop by for that as well.

But how, he asked rhetorically, is one who can neither get on IRC nor download torrents supposed to get a manga fix? Answer: Direct Download (DDL) websites. Mangadownload.net, Mangatraders.com, StopTazmo.com and anime-eden.com all have large lists of downloadble manga. All require that you open a free account to be able to download, which generally also gets you a forum ID on the discussion forums, where lots of manga and anime talk happens. There are a lot of these DDL websites out there, and there's only one universal rule: scanlators work for free. We do it because we enjoy manga, and we want to share it with you. If anybody ever wants you to pay for a fan scanlation, get it somewhere else.

My only real complaint with the (non-Tazmo) DDL websites is that many of them mangle or replace the original filenames of the manga files, making it harder to do file management of a big manga. But it's not that big a deal.

OK, so let's assume you've found the files you want, by whatever means. You now want to read the manga you've downloaded. It is, as I've explained before, usually in a .zip or .rar file. Compressed in this file is usually a folder or set of folders containing picture files like .jpg or .png files.

Consuming the Drug

Because Manga and comics are visual, you need a lot of display space to be able to read them on a computer screen. Believe it or not, display size isn't all that important; it's pixel count that matters. Most manga pages are scanned at about 1000 pixels down. This is generally sufficient to get all the goodness out of the art without making excessively large files. In order for you to see all the goodness without having to scroll, you need to have at least 1000 pixels down available on your monitor. 1024x768 or 1280x720 (720 video) are not really sufficient - you lose too much detail and the text is hard to read. 1280x1024 is good. 1920x1080 (1080 video) is also fine, but you'll have a lot of space left over on the sides. If you're still using a CRT (picture tube) monitor, you'll want to crank the refresh rate up as high as it will go, because flicker is deadly. To be honest, I couldn't read manga very well with a CRT monitor. I much prefer LCDs for this sort of use.

Now for the good news: You need almost no computing power at all. Grandma's Pentium Pro will do fine displaying manga as long as the video card and monitor are up to snuff.

If you have a Windows computer, you can just double-click on a .zip file and browse within it. But viewing the files sequentially is difficult - Windows hides the work, but what happens when you double-click a file in a .zip is that windows unpacks it somewhere in a temp folder and then starts Windows Fax and Picture viewer to display the file. You can't use the back and forward buttons in the viewer this way. It's much better to unpack the whole zip file and then browse it with picture viewer if you want to go this route. The downside is that you now have two copies of the manga chapter you're reading - one compressed, one unpacked. It's wasteful and can become a bookkeeping problem.

I, of course, don't do it this way. I use the right tool for the job: CDisplay.

Why use CDisplay? Well, it's just better than anything else I've tried. It's free (as in beer), it uses all the display space on your screen automatically, it can be configured to display two-page spreads (very important with some manga) and it can be told to display them from right to left, so the page flips are correct.

Another really cool feature of CDisplay: it reads .zip and .rar files. Yup, no unpacking of anything is required. You just download the .zip or .rar file, right-click and choose open with CDisplay.

The only things that confuse CDisplay are 1) files created on Macintosh with their filesystem extensions included, and 2) .zip or .rar files containing more .zip or .rar files. The nested files are easy: just unpack the parent file so that the child files appear in their original folder structure, then start reading the child files (usually one chapter each) with CDisplay. If the files are sequentially named, CDisplay is smart enough to open the next file in order if you tell it to.

The mac files are easy too. Just unpack and view the folder containing the image files unpacked. You can delete the mac folder structure and repack if you like, and CDisplay will then be able to open it.

Starting CDisplay

CDisplay is so simple that it's deceptive. Open it without a file selected and you get nothing but a blank, gray screen. That's because CDisplay uses every last pixel to display your comics/manga. Fear not: everything you care about is a right-click away.

Configuring CDisplay for Manga Viewing

The modes you have to turn on (from the Configure screens) are 'Display Two Pages' and 'Supress for Double Pages' on the image sizing options tab, and 'Japanese mode' on the Program Settings tab. Japanese mode puts the new page on the left, instead of the right, so the manga page turns work correctly. I don't generally use the auto fitting options on the image sizing tab because my monitor is usually big enough, and if it's not, it's too small in the left-right axis and I'd rather scroll than shrink the picture in that direction.

Now you just right click and choose 'Load Files' Browse to your manga, select and choose 'open' in the usual way. To advance a page, press the space bar or page down. Page up to go back a page. Home is first page, and end is last page. If you're navigating forward through 50-100 pages, Shift-P (or right click/page movement control/go to page - slider) pops up the navigation slider, which will get you where you want to go quickly even if you're not sure at what page it was you stopped.

Of course, if you didn't load another manga since you shut down last night, you can open CDisplay and use the 'Resume Reading' option, which picks up exactly where you left off when you shut down CDisplay last.

The only other trick to using CDisplay isn't really an application problem. Many scanlations don't have page numbers on the outside corners of the page, which makes it sometimes hard to tell which is the binding side of the page, and which is the edge. You care because a lot of manga is drawn across two page spreads, or depends on a mood foreshadowing at the left edge of the left page before the flip which then colors the whole next page, or even the two page spread.

You're missing some compositional detail with a lot of manga if you can't tell where the middle versus the edge of the spread is. Accordingly, if you know where the middle and the outside of the spread are, you want to bump the spacebar twice to get to the next two-page spread.

Sometimes there are page numbers down there. That makes it easy. When I edit my own scanlations, I very carefully leave them for this exact reason. Even if there aren't page numbers, there may be plate or drawing numbers in teeny-tiny print in the middle of the art on one edge. That's the inside (binding) side, believe it or not.

Sometimes, though, you may start on a chapter, get four pages in, and realize you've got it backward, then go back to the start and reread the chapter to see what compositional cues you missed. Oh well, it's worth what you paid for it, right?

...Which leads me to the sticky issue of copyright. Manga are copyrighted works that are generally published for profit. Simply distributing a manga as published is a violation of copyright. It can be argued that a scanlation is, as a derivative work, still subject to the publisher's copyright. As a rule, nobody in the business seems to care about electronic distribution of a manga outside of Japan unless somebody has bought distribution rights to the manga in your market. Further, copyright enforcement centers around economic gain at the creators/rights owners expense, which is emphatically not happening with free fan scanlations. Publishers seem to realize this and limit their copyright enforcement to cease-and-desist letters or DMCA takedown notices.

Now for the key point: possessing a scanlated manga is not (currently) a crime, nor is it a violation of copyright (and no, these are not the same thing). Distributing it at no gain to yourself may, or may not be a crime or violation of copyright depending on the way the wind is blowing legally in your locale right now.

Of course, if you enjoy a manga, you should consider rewarding the mangaka's work. Buy the hardcopy - mangakas make most of their money from tankobon sales. "But wait," I can imagine you saying, "the manga isn't published in English, or I'd be reading it that way!" I'll let you in on a secret: mangakas aren't well paid from foreign distribution, if they're paid at all. If you want to reward the artist, buy the Japanese tanks. Sasuga books, YesAsia, and Amazon are common sources.

Reading manga electronically is a great way to check out a lot of manga without having to hunt them down in a bookstore. It also enables one to discover mangas that were never translated into English commercially. Enjoy.

ha ha only serious

(that's a jargon file reference) Or: How Different People Have Said Interesting Things With the Really Silly Idea of the Magical Girl Story.

Senility. Yes, it must be truly setting in. I've gone from talking about serious anime and manga to talking about magical girl (魔法少女 - mahou shoujo) stories. But stick with me on this one. As I've said before, if you bother to dig around in the chaff, you can often find some truly golden wheat. Here, then, are three stories that star girls with supernatural powers that explore bigger ideas than just saving the world from some over-the-top evil organization in weekly installments.

Kamichu!
かみちゅ！～かみさまでちゅうがくせい～
Kamichu! ~Middle-School Goddess~
'Kamichu' is a contraction of Kami (god) and Chuugakusei (middle-school student)

I haven't written about Kamichu! in detail here before, which is a regrettable oversight. Kamichu! was the show that convinced me that there was stuff worth seeing in the world of anime, and that it was time that I started watching it again, and that if I was going to watch this pretty, high-definition stuff, I'd have to upgrade to some computing hardware that could cope with playback. I've just built my third-generation 'media box,' so you may safely assume that I'm not planning on stopping with anime any time soon. You can blame Kamichu! for starting me down this path.

At left: cover of the Kamichu! manga with the three lead characters in front of Onomichi and its harbor. L-R Matsuri, Yurie and Mitsue.

Kamichu! is about Yurie, a middle school girl (chuugakusei) in the city of Onomichi, Hiroshima
prefecture circa 1983. Yurie doesn't get her superpowers from some mysterious magical realm full of unpronounceable katakana names. She gets it the old (very old) fashioned way: she wakes up late for school one morning and realizes that she is now part of the Shinto pantheon: a kami. (or, more accurately, an arahitogami) Divinity has, for some reason, reached out and touched young Yurie, and she is now part of the spiritual firmament.

At Right: Yurie in her god getup. She usually looks even more miserable than this while wearing it.

She can see and interact with other denizens of the spirit world, does in fact have magical powers capable of altering the world, but still has to go through the daily grind of being a middle-schooler. She can bestow blessings, and attend god conventions, but she still has to get her frowsy self to school on time, still has a silent, blushing, suffering crush for the weirdo president (and lone member) of the calligraphy club, and is still the smallest and frailest late bloomer in her class.

One of Yurie's first challenges, after trying to convince her friends that she's a god, is to find out just what sort of god she is.

At left: View of Onomichi from mountaintop Raifuku shrine.

Her powers are as undeveloped as her stature, so it takes some careful probing by her friend Matsuri (who just happens to be the senior miko of an impoverished local mountaintop shrine) to get any idea at all of how to use her newly-found godly powers.

Sure sounds like a magical girl story, doesn't it? So what sets Kamichu! apart? Three things:

1. Yurie comes to magical girl status from a very human direction. She's not exceptionally smart, not exceptionally pretty, not exceptionally athletic. Indeed - she's not exceptional at all, except that she has definite, if rather ill-defined divine powers, but she has no idea why. She didn't grow up being a fairy princess, and she certainly doesn't think like one. She thinks like the 12-year-old daughter of a civil servant in a sleepy provincial town.

At Right: Yurie's nascent divine powers prove less useful than her knowledge of constitutional law in this situation.

When confronted with geopolitical complications and the leveled assault rifles of JSDF troopers in episode four, her solution is to recite, schoolgirl-like, Article 9 of the Japanese constitution at them until they realize the error of their ways.

2. Yurie herself: she's about as far from the traditional cute, perky, certain-to-grow-up-beautiful mahou shoujo as she could be and still be female. Yurie and her friends are in the exact middle of the awkward years of adolescence - no longer girls, but a long way yet from being more than notionally womanly. They're definitely not sexified pedo-bait.

At Left: Yurie sidles slowly down the path of love. Her beau is checking out calligraphy brushes.

We're presented with comparative images of girlhood (in the form of Matsuri's grade-school sister Miko) and womanhood (in the form of Yurie's ditzy-but-comely mother) that show us just where Yurie and her friends came from and where they're going. They are not especially comfortable with the journey and are uncertain about the desirability of the destination. It's a long way from the hundred episodes of unchanging fifth or sixth grade seen in most magical girl stories.


3. The setting and incidental characters. Onomichi's distinctive geographic and architectural features are carefully detailed.

At Right: More of the cast in an illustration done for the R2 DVD release. L-R Yurie's brother Shoukichi, Matsuri's sister Miko, Kenichi, Yurie, Matsuri, and Mitsue. The little humanoids are kamis of the things they resemble.

I knew I was watching something unusual in episode one when I realized I could see the entire far side of the bay from Yurie's schoolroom window, and that everything was carefully drawn to resemble something real. I suspect that this is Onomichi near its prettiest, but it's not scrubbed overly clean. There is rubbish in the streets and fishing boats chug in and out of the bay regularly.

Character designs, likewise, resemble real Japanese much more than some ideal never-world. Yurie's desk-bound father is plump. Her miko friend's father, who would rather be a farmer than a shinto priest, is always seen in his farmers coveralls, boots and tattered straw hat. He throws his back out periodically and has to lie belly-down in semi deshabille on the floor with a cold compress on his backside. On the spiritual side, the shinto belief in everything having a divine spirit creates a busy world of chattering kamis. It's remarkable that Yurie is able to do her schoolwork at all when the pencil eraser kami is pestering her with questions.

It is also worth mentioning that Kamichu! is a very Japanese show. It's rather obvious that it was not produced with an eye on the export market, as many shows are. It's a measure of the show's goodness that it was licensed by Geneon in spite of this, and is one of the titles picked up by Funimation for distribution after Geneon's implosion. A lot of the content deals with Japanese ideas of appropriateness, right and wrong, etc., and it makes some political and social commentary as well, as Dotdash details in two excellent blog entries here and here.

So what's it all about? It's about living and growing and learning to make decisions, compromises, and agreements like adults do, or at least should do. It's about shinto, sort of. It's about being 12 years old. It's about life. It's worth your time.



Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo
奥様は魔法少女 - Bewitched Agnes
My Honored Wife is a Magical Girl - Bewitched Agnes

Remember Bewitched - That TV sitcom from the '60s about a generic white-bread American family with a witch (yes, the black hat-and-cape kind) as the housewife? I wouldn't either if it weren't for syndicated runs on independent TV stations in the '70s and '80s.

It originally ran 1964-1972. It was apparently very popular on American TV (was rated #2 in its first year), so it was quickly picked up for international syndication in a lot of places, including Japan.

The Japanese, with their own history of alien goddess/princess stories (Kaguyahime, anyone?), put some rather different cultural freight on the idea of a wife with supernatural powers. Clever mangaka Yokoyama Mitsuteru aged the concept of a magical woman in a mundane milieu down and created the original magical schoolgirl, Sally (魔法使いサリー, Mahoutsukai Sari), in 1966. Sally herself was a huge hit - there were obviously a lot of Japanese baby-boomer girls who enjoyed the fantasy of a schoolgirl with superpowers saving the world, or at least her friends. Sally was a princess from a distant magical realm who wanted to hang out in the middle kingdom (Earth in this case) and meet humans because it looked fun. I'm guessing Yokoyama was borrowing from Hans Christian Anderson for that bit.

So what does any of this have to do with our second entry? Well, everything and nothing. When Bewitched ran in Japan, it was titled 奥さまは魔女 Okusama wa Majou (My honored wife is a Witch). Take Bewitched, stir in 30+ years of magical girl manga and anime in Japan, add a sprinkling of Ah! My Goddess (Aa Megamasami). Stir.

At Left: Ureshiko/Agnes doing the mahou thing, complete with broomstick.

Sounds formulaic, doesn't it? Everybody knows all the standard rules of a magical girl show by now, after all. Well yeah, but we left out Mysterious Ingredient X: Actions have consequences: there is duration, cause and effect, and everything that happened last show matters next show. Oh, and this has been going on for a few decades with a succession of magical girls...

Confused yet? Let's put it another way: What if there really were a magical girl from some magical realm protecting some nice little generic Japanese town?

At Right - Ureshiko hard at work managing her boarding house. Note that she's a little well-built for a mahou shoujo...

What if she had to obey all the peri-adolescent constraints - she can't start being an adult and stop being a magical girl because her town will be unprotected? No kissing. No kids. What if it goes on for years and years? She graduates middle school. She graduates high school. Her friends settle down, get married, have kids.

She can't. Because if she does, something bad will probably happen to the town/planet/universe she is sworn to protect. Sounds pretty hellish, doesn't it? Welcome to the world of twenty-seven-year-old Asaba Ureshiko. She's ready to get on with life, but she doesn't trust the replacement magical girl protector sent from the magical world of Realm (yes, that's its name this time) with her beloved town.

At Left: Tatsumi and Ureshiko.

Since Ureshiko can't very well still be a schoolgirl anymore, she has settled in as the manager of a boarding house. Yes, one of those boarding houses, like in Maison Ikkoku and Love Hina, among many others. Sure enough, a handsome young man (22 year old former college athlete Kagura Tatsumi) starts renting a room at her boarding house at the beginning of the first episode. If you've ever run across Maison Ikkoku (probably the greatest of the boarding-house romances and first big hit of Takahashi Rumiko's manga imperium), as everybody in Japan of a certain age has, then you automatically assume that she's the hot widow landlady and that he's the dim young guy who will single-mindedly try to win her love for hundreds of torturous chapters to come. You'd be wrong in this assumption, as you were when you assumed the same thing while reading Chobits.

There's a lot of toying with viewer expectations in the early episodes. The more you know about the back stories of various magical girl and boarding house romance stories, the more likely you are to be tripped up when the show delivers something else. Thankfully, the producers are actually pretty clever, so it all works out.

Right: Sayaka (in stealth schoolgirl mode) getting advice from an older mahou shoujo on the mechanics of dating.

There are three principal characters in Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo: Ureshiko, Tatsumi, and Ureshiko's appointed (by the Powers that Be in Realm) successor: Kurenai Sayaka. Sayaka is twelve going on 25 - so much so that she sometimes ages herself up magically to about 16 so she can go on dates and not be taken for a kid. Tatsumi is 22 going on 17 - he was a college athlete, and doesn't seem to have worried much about life after the high jump until it was thrust upon him. Now he has to grit his teeth and learn to be a salaryman. The transition is not an easy one, but he has intestinal fortitude and strength of character. Sayaka, likewise, is trying to transition into the magical girl protector role, but doesn't really understand what is at stake, or just what her duties really are.

Left: Sayaka takes advice, magically ages herself up and gets a beach date. Pink keitai symbolizes young womanhood, Kuma-tan childhood.

Ureshiko seems to mentally alternate between age 17 and her actual age 27, but it's pretty obvious that 27 is more natural to her.

According to her friends, Ureshiko is alternately serious and young-at-heart. Which, if you think about it, is pretty much the doomed existence of any magical girl protector. She can't be a flighty little girl because she has a world to save.

Right: Ureshiko, constructed on sound structural principles, doesn't fit her mahou shoujo outfit very well these days.

She can't be all serious and duty-oriented because it's both unappealing to the audience (who presumably like the shoujo archetype or wouldn't be watching) and because, one hopes at least, that it is contrary to the nature of her being.

Left: Sayaka uses magic of a different sort along with the age-up magic on her date.

The show also deals with the contrived nature of the milieu in the typical magical girl show. Wonderland (the town) is, in fact, entirely artificial. It's built to be a perfect little world where a magical girl protector from another dimension can live and do her thing without actually having to deal with the unpleasant realities of human perception, persistence of memory, and the fact that normal people tend to find daily destruction, mysterious magical reconstruction, and 27 year old women in very skimpy clothes flying around on brooms remarkable.

This leads me to discuss another feature of Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo - the show very deliberately pokes fun at the more dubious conventions of the mahou shoujo genre. Did you ever wonder if Sailor Moon, Nurse-Angel Ririka, et-al being sometimes little girls and sometimes full-developed women was weird to Japanese people, too? Wonder no more: Ureshiko's fully-developed 27-year-old self stuffed in a magical girl getup is very purposefully skewered for humorous effect.

Right: Sayaka, like Ureshiko, says 'hai' to all the dirty old men in the audience at the end of her powerup.

Likewise, the power-up sequences verge on softcore porn (or Ecchi, if you prefer). There's even a fourth-wall break moment when a bunch of adult men shout the mahou shoujo's name at the end of the power-up sequence, and she replies with "Hai!" Likewise, some of the humor directed at aged-up Sayaka/Cruje by her (unaware) classmates borders on sexual harrassment...

So what is Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo really about? There's pointing out the absurdity of the Mahou Shoujo format, of course. It's about changing roles, finding one's place in the world, the difference between make believe and the real thing, and the importance of letting go when the time for something has passed. In this last respect it's a little like Kaiba, oddly enough.

Kiki's Delivery Service
魔女の宅急便
Majou no Takkyubin
'Federal Witch Express' is a pretty close translation. Takkyubin (宅急便) is a trademark of Kuroneko Yamato Transport, which is similar to FedEx or UPS in the USA.

Yes, Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli did a magical girl story as well. In an entertaining switch, our magical girl (actually a witch in the Western sense) just has to leave home, travel to a different town and set up shop. It's her rite of passage from childhood to a witch's adult life, and it happens when she turns 13. Kiki comes with all the standard equipment - a broom, black clothes, and even a witch's familiar - her black cat Jiji.

Left: Kuroneko Yamato Transport's logo. Any similarity to Jiji, and particularly to Jiji and his progeny late in the film, is probably intentional on Studio Ghibli's part.

It's not Miyazaki's deepest work, but it's a good exploration of coming of age themes and an entertaining mixture of magic and technology set in a European '50s neverworld.

Right: Our Heroine considering the radio weather forecast and her future before departing home. The red hair bow is a feature in the original collection of short stories by Kadono.

It shows that Miyazaki spent some time in Europe gathering material that eventually became Alps no Shoujo no Heidi - the milieu is a bit of an alpine mishmash, but it generally hits the right notes. It's also a colorful feast for the eyes, as we've come to expect from Ghibli productions. Perhaps surprisingly, given the chosen specifically European setting, there are none of the all-too-common glaring Japanese cultural misappropriations or wild anachronisms about. Anachronisms do exist, but they're quite deliberate. Miyazaki gets the little things right, leaving us free to pay attention to the story.

Left: Kiki's chosen town for her journeyman year. Scenes like this make me wish for an HD copy.

To a degree, Majou no Takkyubin is sort of Anne of Green Gables with broomstick aviation. This isn't particularly suprising since Isao Takahata - Miyazaki's partner in Studio Ghibli - directed the still-best adaptation of the L.M. Montgomery novel (as Akage no An) in 1979 for World Masterpiece Theater.

Right: Street scene in Kiki's new town. I wonder what Ashland Refining thinks of their trademark on the store facade. Given Miyazaki's confirmed gearhead status, it can't be an accident.

As is usually the case in Ghibli films, particularly those directed by Miyazaki, the music is both evocative and appropriate. Kiki prefers to fly around with 1950s pop playing on her transistor radio hanging from the broomstick. Likewise, Hisaishi's incidental and background music seems always to reinforce the story. It is all that it could be, and never strikes a wrong note.

Left: Kiki making a delivery on foot amid more Ghibli beautiful backgrounds. It's a throwaway scene, but speaks volumes about the care put into the film.

Something that isn't all it could be is Disney's dub. As I've complained before, while the Disney dub cast do an acceptable (though not inspired) job with the material, the dub track and script itself is not a thing of beauty - Disney decided that soda-pop swilling American children didn't have the attention span for the lovely film Miyazaki had directed, so 'helped' it along with verbal slapstick in place of music and new throw-away one-liners that add nothing of value to the film, and detract from its great strengths of plotting and framing. The Disney English sub track is nothing spectacular (I think it was written from the dub dialog sheets), but isn't as bad. I would be curious to see the Carl Macek sub track for comparison.

Right: Because there was no WWII, (and possibly because there were witches around for airmail) aviation has not advanced as rapidly in this world as in ours. When this Zeppelin has trouble later in the story, Disney couldn't resist adding 'oh the humanity' to both the dub and sub tracks.

Incidentally, after seeing Wall-E in the theater, I am inclined to believe that Disney might have been right about the sugar-and-jump-cut-addled attention span of American youth. My (anime- and PBS-raised) four-year-old son was entranced through the whole movie, but a flock of 8-12 year olds two rows back from us didn't stop chattering at each other until the action started in the second half. Wall-E might as well be a Miyazaki movie - it is very similar to Nausicaa thematically, and Pixar are avowed Studio Ghibli fans. Whether or not the dub directors and writers were right about the American audience, it wasn't their place to be making significant editorial content changes to a film by an acknowledged master.

Left: The youth of Kiki's new town don't exactly embrace her with open arms. There's some social commentary about the differnence between children of privelege and those who must strive.

Oh well, at least the Ghibli/Disney distribution contract forbids clipping even a single frame of film.

Right: ...but Kiki tries hard and does good deeds (here tending a wood-fired oven for a parcel customer when the electric one fails) and earns her place in the town.

The message is more succinct, but very similar to that of Akage no An: A lively, determined girl can make a place in the world for herself if she tries earnestly enough, believes in her own abilities, and is smart enough to ask for help when things go against her.


Left: bonus pic: Some things are the same in this alternate universe. Behold a Fiat 600 Multipla taxi, circa 1956. Kiki's walking the other way as it whizzes past - she can't afford a taxi and didn't bring her broom.


I considered doing a section on Gunslinger Girl here as well, since the first-generation girls obviously riff off of the idea of a mahou shoujo story in some important ways. But I've tilled that ground very thoroughly before, so didn't want to go over it again.

Total Recall

Huh? What? Senile has finally lost it. He's referring to cheesy Schwarzenegger movies now.

Maybe. I almost titled this post We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, which is the Philip K Dick story that inspired the movie. But then I decided that, since nobody in the anime/manga fan world seems to pay attention to anything but anime and manga, I might as well title it with something from pop culture in hopes that somebody would get the reference.

At this point, you're bound to be wondering what I am writing about. Relax: It's all new stuff (currently airing anime) and it all relates to the theme of moving memory and identity around technologically. I'm going to order these by personal preference - most to least favorite.

1.
Kaiba
カイバ
Madhouse/Yuasa Masaaki

Ever seen Fantastic Planet, or any other eastern-bloc animation from the '60s or '70s? Nah, I didn't think so. Well, if you had, you'd say "Wow, this looks a lot like animated Eastern-European formalism from the '60s or '70s!" As it is, you'll just have to take my word for it. Since Madhouse did the animation and production, you can rest assured that it looks exactly how it is supposed to look. I think they were warming up for this when they were making the dream world sequences in Paprika...

At Left: Kaiba awakens knowing nothing of who he is or why he is here.

This is one of those shows that keeps me looking at anime. It seems that for every thousand shounen fanservice fests out there there is only one show like Kaiba, but that one is so worthwhile that it justifies all the crap. You just never know when you're going to stumble across the concentrated results of creative imagining. Kaiba is bright, beautiful, dark, puzzling, on the surface and deep and mysterious all at once. It involves space travel, mind control, thought transference, the definition of self, and the ethics of terrorism...and that's just in the first four episodes.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the enigma that is Kaiba. It's bright, colorful, complex, and it (unlike nearly everything else this season) even has good OP and ED music. Be forewarned: everything you see in episode one relates to everything else, so even if you don't understand what's going on, pay careful attention. It'll all be explained later on...probably.

2.
RD Sennou Chousashitsu (Real Drive)
ＲＤ 潜脳調査室
Production I.G/Shirow Masamune (yes, that's the pair that did last season's Ghost Hound)

This show has two things in common with Kaiba: 1. It deals with the abstraction of intelligence in a virtual world, and 2. It throws you into the plot already running at full speed.

The differences are just as significant. While Kaiba is set in some measurelessly distant future, There's a date explicitly set in the middle of the 21st century for Real Drive. Likewise, while the art of Kaiba is formalist and fantastic, Real Drive is set in a world so real and literal that you can almost taste the sea foam when the 'camera' pans across a shoreline. Beg, borrow or steal enough computing horsepower to watch this one in High Def if you must - there's a lot of detail, both painted and rendered on the screen. And if you wait for the DVD, you'd be well-served to see it on Blu-Ray.

At Left: The years have not been kind to Haru Masamichi. But at least he has great views.

Meet Haru-san. He's got a problem. He went for a dive one afternoon and woke up fifty years later. Luckily for him, and for his world, the nursing home he inhabits these days is fully wired. Also lucky for him, he draws a smart and genki candy striper (Aoi Minamo) to help him in his dives into the Meta-Real Network (usually known as 'Metal'). Extra points to those who bother to parse Minamo's surname kanji, btw.

At Right: Is 15-year-old Minamo-chan Shirow's first genki girl? She gets extra points for the brown eyes, hair bow, and lack of idealized features. She even has chubby thighs, just like the real thing. Think "Matsuri from Kamichu! meets GITS".

I haven't watched a lot of this one yet, but Shirow's plots seldom disappoint. There's some talkiness at the beginning, but once Haru wakes up from his dive, the show gets on with it and the talk is driven by the plot, instead of vice-versa.

3.
Himitsu - The Revelation
秘密 〜The Revelation〜
Madhouse/shoujo manga by Shimizu Reiko

If you find Real Drive a little too futuristic, there's always Himitsu. The idea here is a pretty simple one: Cops in the near future do the Law & Order thing by sucking the memories out of a dead person's head with a computer. Since the last thing a murder victim saw is often the murderer, it helps a lot with criminal investigation.

At Left: Uke, meet Seme-san, your new boss. But who's who?

Our protagonist is the 'new guy' on the detective squad. He has been hired in to replace a detective who died of unnatural causes. His special ability is lip reading, which turns out to be very useful to the detective team for the simple, if unexplained reason that the computer sucks visual, but not auditory memory out of dead (but not too-long-dead) brains.

But wait, it gets better: In order to get all the memories out of somebody's brain, you have to crank it up to 120% of neural function, as indicated by dramatic bar graphs that go into the scary red zone right before stuff starts happening. Huh? Try running this idea past a research psychologist. For extra amusement value, make sure that the boffin is taking a drink first... Let's just say that this show has the same relationship to neurological science that Star Trek has to nuclear engineering.

Since it's based on a shoujo manga, there's a lot of hand-wringing involved about the ethics of knowing a dead person's innermost thoughts and the basic 'yuck' value of the whole thing, at least in the first show. Our protagonist doesn't exactly show himself as a shining example of intestinal fortitude. The super-plot is all about solving murder mysteries. There are sub-plots involving some light yaoi themes and the aforementioned hand-wringing.

At Right: Seme-san is revealed by his important posing in front of racks of blinkenlights. That is, unless he really wants to just give it all up to the new hire.

The storytelling is rather conventional murder-mystery stuff. Frankly, Arthur Conan-Doyle did this better more than a century ago in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery," and thankfully spared us the boys love angle. The 'thrilling climax' failed to thrill me. It had the feeling of an Agatha Christie story: All the chess pieces move around on the board with just the endgame shown to the audience, and then Miss Marple recites the game for you at the end. Meh. I watched one episode and haven't looked back. If you have read enough actual detective fiction to know good from bad, you'll do the same.

If you want to see a better version of this same basic plotline done with genetics and the paranormal instead of technology and the mental, consider watching Witch Hunter Robin.

Gunslinger Girl - Further Thoughts and Anime Series 1 and 2

I've been reading Gunslinger Girl again. This is prompted by having finally acquired all five volumes of GSG in print in the US (from ADV Manga).

Here's review of the recent ADV releases from a conversation on Mangaforums:

Read through the ADV release of Gunslinger Girl vol 5. My conclusion: it's just as good/bad as their vol 4.

In particular, the very last conversation in the volume between Hillshire and Triela is an excellent point of measure. Psygremlin and I had a conversation here on exactly how this should be translated which culminated in me translating it myself from the Japanese raws. In short, ADV fails. I wouldn't translate '褒める' as 'congratulate.' My dictionaries are rather clear that it's 'to praise,' which coming from Triela has a very different meaning than 'to congratulate.'

There's another place where they get it not quite right. Somebody else's translation of the Henrietta and Giuse in the former monastery scene looking at the portrait (I think it was Toukoubi?) included a nice cultural note explaining what is the deal with the monk, the cell, and the portrait. Nada from ADV.

If it were Naruto nobody would care. But here the mangaka has gone to significant trouble to put his fictional story in the real historical Italy with real buildings, artwork, cars, guns, etc. Because of the nature of Japanese college entrance exams, it's distinctly possible that many Japanese (at least the ones attracted to Gunslinger Girl) would recognize much of what is missed by less-well-educated English speakers...

Cultural notes, people. They don't take up any space, and they often add a lot of value...

My final grade for the ADV translation of Vol 5: C (adequate, but the fan scanslations are significantly better).

And that pretty much sums it up. The first place to look for a quality scanslation of Gunslinger Girl is Toukoubi. Sintendo also did a good job, but have disbanded. Sadly, I know of no fan scanslations circulating of any volume earlier than four, which means that I might just decide to adopt a darker cover and do it myself when I feel like spending an hour a page improving my Japanese reading comprehension someday. As I've said about Ai-Ren and Chobits, Gunslinger Girl deserves a best-possible scanslation and (with the exception of Toukoubi and Sintendo's work) hasn't had one.

Gunslinger Girl is thought-provoking. It's full of moral quandaries and no-win situations. Like Ai-Ren, I think it it some kind of emotional litmus test, possibly of one's ability to be compassionate.

Looking at the printed manga has been an interesting experience in itself. The eye catches different details on paper than on the screen. I was especially interested in the contents of Giuse's desk in vol 3 - he's building a ship in a bottle, and has an aquarium. A patient fellow, our Giuse.

Here's part of a long conversation between me and psygremlin at mangaforums about Gunslinger Girl, among other things. I'll edit to reduce spoiler content, but if you click through to the original, you'll be entering a spoiler minefield, so be warned. Here's Psygremlin, having just watched the original 13 episode anime (there's a sequel in production now).

Just finished watching the series, and although I have a lot to say about it, I'll keep it brief for now, because I don't know how far you are in watching it, plus there's probably going to be a raft of spoilers.

But salient points are:

- I love the artwork in the show, very nice and crisp. That caught my straight from the lovely opening sequence.

- Now that I'm finished I can see exactly why you bought it up in response to my comment about the brutality in Here & There. Except I feel that in many ways GSG is more 'horrific'. Here & There deals with war and people are brutalised during wartime. In GSG, it's about the indifference and almost contempt the girls are treated with. Most handlers treat them like the machines they've designed to be (despite clear traces of their inner humanity shining through - think Triela and her bears). Most of the handlers (apart from Jose) seem to see the girls' devotion towards them more like a dog's loyalty and obedience than "love" - for want of a better word.

- Although one scary part of their conditioning comes through in the interaction between Rico and the bellboy (as you mentioned). The soulless, mechanical way in which she says "sorry" literally sent a shiver up my spine. She wasn't sorry at all - she was doing her job and he got in the way.

- Strangely (and possibly highlighting the 'wrongness' of their situation) if I compare it to the last girls with guns anime I saw - Noir (altho this is more a lolis with guns) the main difference is that although Noir killed more people than your average Tarentino movie, not a drop of blood is ever shown on screen. Whereas in GSG, there's plenty of blood flying when bullets hit home (not to mention poor young Elsa). Add to this the fact the girls are running around in clothes more suited to the mall (and their ages) than say a military style jump suit highlights their youth, perceived innocnce (which could be more naievety - afterall, Henrietta no longer knew what Venus was), and wrongness of their situation. (a bit like the girls wearing their school unifoms in space in Voices of a Distant Star).

- Funnily enough, I found the OP (which I now love) became more and more poignant for me as the story progressed each episode. Especially the opening line "In truth, there is no better place to be" - when you consider the girls' situation before they ended up at Social Welfare (great pun too - they remove people that could affect the welfare of society), they are in a "better place".

And here is my reply:

You got what I hoped you would get out of the Rico/Bellboy scene. It's not what she does, but how she does it that makes it so horrible.

One of the ways that Aida really tweaks the reader/viewer's sensibilities is with the brutal, bloody reality of what the girls do versus their native personalities. Is innocence the same as naivete, or is it simply that they don't have vivid memories of what they did on missions because of the conditioning?

Something worth mentioning too is that children really are the ultimate pragmatists. Aida seems to understand this. Rico might be fully aware of what she's doing, but she knows it's the only because of what she does that she isn't stuck in a hospital bed anymore. Jean may beat her, and her missions may be horrible, but it's obvious that to her, at least, being able to walk and do things for the first time in her life is so good that it's worth all the bad.

One thing I find interesting is how the handlers are portrayed. They're generally not soulless bastards. Marco is detatched from Angelica precisely because he was emotionally hurt by her progressive amnesia due to the conditioning. I think Aida does a great job of making everybody (even the "villains") someone worth knowing and understanding - much like Miyazaki does in his best work.

Concur on the clothes - not only are they necessary for urban camouflage, but they point out that the cyborg assassins are girls who, left to their own devices, think as girls think, and wear what girls wear. Jose's gift of the expensive fashion over coat to Henrietta is very definitely a gift of human affection, and Henrietta treasures it as such.

Ultimately, GSG is not about lolis with guns. It's not about mind control. It's not about the ethics of terrorism and anti-terrorism. It's not about cyborgs. (although all of these things are touched on). GSG is about people and the consequences of actions, both anticipated and unexpected. That's why there's blood - it's a consequence of shooting people. GSG works as a story because it always follows through with the consequences.

It's art, and I'm surprised it's not more widely seen here, given that the anime is both accessible and commercially available. But then nobody has read Ai-Ren, either, which is as profound in its own way.

Which provoked this reply from psygremlin:

What's interesting is there are essentially 5 very different relationships (6 with Elsa) portrayed in the fratellos. And each seem to work on their own levels. Obviously we feel most for Jose and Henrietta, because he treats her more like a human - as Triela says "his kid sister" - than the others. Yet I got the feeling that even this approach - while humane in our eyes - wasn't right. There were a couple of moments when Henrietta does something - like the way she first holds the coat, or wants to keep the wrapping from the camera - that bordered on the obsessive. Add to that the fact she knew what happened with Elsa and her handler, and I'd have to say of all of them, she would be most likely to do the same.

To which I said:

The treatment of Elsa in the manga really brings it home - Jose/Henrietta is the literal fratello attatchment at its closest and most intimate. If the wheels come off this relationship, it turns into Lauro/Elsa. It's made quite obvious that Henrietta empathizes completely with Elsa, and that's why she's the only one who can answer the question of Elsa's fate of all those who have been asked. Her empathy is what I found so heartbreaking in the manga scene. She obviously isn't abstractly considering doing what Elsa did when considering Elsa's condition.

Yes, Henrietta is obsessed with protecting Jose (to both his worry and discomfort at times), and is obsessed with being the precise center of his attention. This is all creepily familiar with anybody who has seen the responses that military working dogs have toward their handlers (yes, same term). All it would take to upset this particular applecart would be for Henrietta to discover that Jose had a serious girlfriend...

Hillshire/Triela is presented as an alternate and (I agree) generally more functional relationship. The difference here isn't so much in the relationship itself, I think, as in the difference between the participants. Henrietta and Rico are the emotionally youngest of the girls, and from their stature I guess that they are the physically youngest as well. They're emotionally very different from Triela, who is enough older that she's dealing with menarche and the change of perception that comes along with it.

Since Triela's more emotionally mature, she needs a friend and partner much more than she needs a protective/loving big brother. Teddy bears are an amusing choice of gift for her because she, of all the girls least wants/has a use for stuffed animals. She seems to know that she ended up here because she was nearly killed in a snuff film, and it gives a certain edge to her perspective. Hillshire, accordingly, fills the friend/partner role. As much as anything, he humanizes her when she's prone to indiscriminately kill. The conditioning adds a certain creepy reverse-lolicon quality to their relationship, which Hillshire (being a both a wounded but still determined idealist and all-round decent guy) carefully ignores.

I thought that sending Triela off to train with the green-beret equivalents of the Carabinieri was a stroke of genius. It also thought it pointed out that they (section 2) had spent a lot of time training the girls to behave like perfect SWAT team members (policemen, basically), but had neglected several thousand years of experience in the basic rules of human strife that every good soldier (or good martial artist) knows. It's sort of a variation of the question asked by Neviril in Simoun - You send us on these missions and tell us to act like soldiers, and then you train us to be police. Which do you want us to be, and are you willing to accept what we will become if we do what we must to win?

It's worth mentioning that Giuseppe and Hillshire are alike in that they don't like to blunt their charges' awareness with heavy conditioning, preferring instead to teach their charges appropriate behaviors the old fashioned way. Giuseppe and Jean are brothers (actual fratelli), but couldn't be more different in their approaches to fratello management.

...which was true when written, but the more recently scanslated chapters of the manga have developed Jean and Giuse's relationship as brothers, and shown some complexity to Jean's treatment of his Cyborg charges (he's also responsible for Claes) that was not apparent before Vol 3. As in real life, people in GSG change, and their actions in the present are not always predictable from those of the past.


Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino Anime

In other Gunslinger Girl news, Gunslinger Girl II: Il Teatrino is running now in Japan. It's another 13 episode show, and it is, so far, very canon to the manga. Aida-sensei is supposed to be prominently involved in production and scriptwriting, and they're getting a lot of little things right.

Sadly, what they're not getting right is the animation, which is...acceptable at best. It's obvious that the animation is both rushed and done on the cheap. The first episode is the worst (crowd scenes had me cringing), but other than that, it's watchable. The first series was done by Madhouse, who do Kon Satoshi's movies now, so probably couldn't be bothered to do a TV show like GSG2 even if the budget had been big enough (it obviously wasn't).

Here's my take from having just watched the first episode:

I've also heard bad things about the AEN sub (from different sources) so I waited a whole day and pulled the torrent for the Triad release. When I added the torrent last night before bed there were 300+ seeds and 600+ peers. Completion time was limited by recipient bandwidth. It was sitting on the hard drive this AM when I woke up.

{edit - later}
Watched GSGII ep 1. My initial impressions: OP song indifferent. OP animation (partially - looked like some posterized photo capture there) OK, but not spectacular. Does get the point across, though.

I got really, really tired of the lame moving-block animation in the crowd sequences. Either animate the people or do snap cuts between stills. Don't bother with Hanna-Barbera-style moving cutouts. OTOH, Backgrounds were great. They were playing with a watercolor wash look (probably to hide that they'd ripped some scenery out of photos) but it worked OK.

Something that didn't work quite as well was the character animation. Henrietta's face wasn't as mobile as in the manga, which is something of a trick given that the manga is still pictures. Likewise, they didn't show the payoff scene in the walking-on-the-curb sequence (I suspect it was cut for time). Things improved after Hillshire and Joze returned from France, although the animation was still rather clunky. The vehicles aren't generic (thankfully) but haven't gained the stature of the manga yet. I suspect they will - writing the Alfas out of the plot would probably not please Aida-sensei. Likewise, nice to see that the Vespa is yellow...

The cyborgs' eyes seem to be intentionally creepy. Fine. I can cope with that, and it does fit, especially when 'Etta does her trick on the scooter. I don't think I'll ever get used to Joze's hair, though...

All of the scenes are canon from the manga, though they are rearranged in chronological order to provide a good introduction episode before starting on the Pinnochio arc. I didn't much like how Henrietta came off looking robotic, reverse-lolicon and incompetent while Triela looked thoughtful, mature and capable, though this may be dramatic setup for the first Pinnochio encounter - 'pride goeth,' etc. They did get the feel of the dynamic between Joze and Henrietta fairly well. They touched on that between Hillshire and Triela, and showed very little of Jean/Rico, but nothing out-of character happened.

I liked how they introduced all the Section 2 supporting cast. We only know a couple of names, but we have seen all the faces and characteristic mannerisms. Nice touch. I was also amused by Beatrice's cameo...

ED song and animation - not bad at all. As evocative as 'The Light Before We Land,' if with a rather different text. Gets the point across well, I think. I wonder if they'll sub in different animation vignettes as we go along.

I have to say I wanted a higher-res encode from Triad. Lots of artifacts, etc. I'm guessing their raws weren't wonderful, but ugh. Since the filesize of the AEN sub is about the same, I suspect they're both from the same raw. Oh well. I'm sure it'll go to DVD sooner or later.

Conclusion: Animation nowhere near as good as Madhouse's work in the first series. Right now it gets an A for backgrounds, a B for character animation, and a C for misc. animation. Music: OK but nothing wonderful - isn't as evocative as that of the first series. Character development and plotting: A. If it stays at this standard I'll grumble at the animation gaffes, but will enjoy watching. If they're saving up cash for later eps, all might be forgiven, though I'd say they were stupid to short-budget the first show.

And here from a little later on:

Re GSG2: to be fair, the bar was set very high by Madhouse. They are a cinematic-quality shop, so naturally their work looks very good indeed (and I think that GSG II is a victim of their success - I'm sure they're working fulltime on Kon Satoshi's next movie right now). That said, it looks like Artland wasn't really trying. I don't know about the budget, but so far this falls in the category of 'cheap TV animation.' Which is fine for something like Hidamari Sketch, but not so good for something as immersive as GSG. Re 'shiny' I think that's both a stylistic choice and a way to hide a lot of the splice work holding the backgrounds together. That's fine - it is sunny Italy after all. I didn't like that cars on the street are mostly matte polygons with dropover textures. Quick, cheap wireframe CGI work.

They definitely got a lot of the important stuff right, which is why it's watchable with such marginal animation. Yes, Henrietta with Joze's shirt was done very well (but I was a little annoyed at them getting the surfaces of his desk right - there's a bottle, a tank, and a computer, but not showing any detail - you don't know what's in the bottle or the tank. Joze's character remains more opaque than it might to the viewer because of that). My reaction - and Hillshire's - to the the way Triela looked after the big shootout was well done. Likewise Triela and the manhole cover. In both cases, it does a good job of setting up the essential tension between the characters and their job.

And here, I talk a little more about it after having seen episode three:

It's becoming apparent to me that, while there's no budget (and this is a great pity), they're trying very hard to tell a good story. The placing shots of Montalcino at the beginning of the ep were reminiscent (in a somewhat low-res, fuzzy way) of the trip to Sicily footage from the first series. They got the feel right, which indicates that somebody in this overworked and obviously underpaid art department is trying hard to get it as right as they can. Likewise, pacing and direction are quite good. Even the spots that should be draggy aren't too draggy. The only places I feel like the art quality hurts is in facial expressions- Aida's art style gives a lot of expressiveness in a face, and we don't always see those subtleties carried across to the animated character.

Yes the framing rate could be higher - the jerky motion does bother me, and is reminiscent of a lot of mediocre TV animation of the last two decades. But if they had to sacrifice plot, backgrounds, or frame rate, I'm glad they chose frame rate. On the upside, there was actually good BG music in this ep. It was distinctly reminiscent of the happy Italian town BGM from the first series, which is no bad thing. The OP continues to leave me cold (cheap drum machines usually do), although I sorta like the still montage. The ED works better for me, and I still like the inset vignette. Stark works well with GSG, so the stark titles and credits are good. I suspect that when we see a higher-res picture, they'll suffer significantly less than the animation will.

My conclusion, as of ep 3 at least: ArtLand doesn't suck. They're just underpaid. And if they had to scrimp on something, I'm glad it was the opening episode, which was barely canon to the manga and mostly existed to establish characters. I just hope it didn't hurt the ratings for the rest of the series too much - after all, Aida's still writing, and if this show does badly we'll never see a GSG season 3.

Scary Girlfriends

I was debating how to introduce this post, and decided that the song that crystallized it for me was just too good an introduction to pass up. ZZ Top's Got Me Under Pressure:

She likes wearin' lipstick, she likes French cuisine
But she wont let me use my passion unless its in a limousine.

She got me under pressure.

She likes the art museum, she don't like pavlovs dog.
She fun at the mind museum, she likes it in a London fog.
She don't like other women, she likes whips and chains.
She likes cocaine and filppin' out with great danes.
Shes about all I can handle, its too much for my brain.

Its got me under pressure.

I'm gonna give her a message,
Heres what I'm gonna say:
Its all over.
She might get out a nightstick
And hurt me real real bad
By the roadside in a ditch.

Its got me under pressure.

Yeah. Scary girlfriends.

Female romantic interest lead character types in manga and anime for male readers are usually pretty generic. You've got your tsundere, you've got your yamato nadeshiko, you have the childhood friend (in both remembered and forgotten variations), you have the magical girlfriend - though sometimes (as in Chobits) she comes with scary fine print. There are a few variations on the theme, but they're rare, and usually they're just twists on the familiar.

It's not surprising. Japan was entirely a feudal, agrarian society until about 150 years ago. As in the Western feudal tradition, women were expected to keep the home fires burning and produce the next generation, and were valuable as bargaining chips in land and property negotiations. The difference between us and them is that all of this mostly came to a halt in Western societies about 300 years ago, but it was still going strong as an expected standard of behavior for Japanese women as late as the 1940s. Marriage for status is alive and well today in Japan, as is arranged marriage. Both are leftovers of the same feudal system.

When you're trying to wrap your mind around the dynamics of something like Minmei suddenly wanting to settle down with Hikaru at age 19 in Macross, Aoi at age 19 running away from home to latch onto her guy in Ai Yori Aoshi, or any of countless other similar cases in shounen/seinen mangaworld of the female lead aspiring to be the stay-at-home housewife (奥さん) as her highest goal, try to apply something like a 1930s-1950s USA mindset to it. They didn't have a women's liberation movement in the 1970s, and most Japanese women don't see the point of one now.

Because of changing demographics and economics, women in Japan are doing steadily more work outside the home to make the wheels go around and keep food on the table. This creates a strain with men's expectations. I believe that a lot of the doormat qualities of shounen/seinen romatic interests have to do with wish fulfillment - you can't find a real girl like this, but we can surely draw one for you in a manga.

The bad girl exists in male-oriented manga, but not normally as a romantic interest. Usually she's a spoiler in a harem story (as with Akemi in Maison Ikkoku, or Rin in Midori no Hibi) or sometimes she might be some sort of fairy godmother/hot landlady to the male lead (as with Haruka in Love Hina). Inevitably, she'll develop some side-plot that vaguely points to a happy ending for her at the end of the story after she has finally given up on messing up the primary relationship in the story.

But there has been, in recent years anyway, a small trend toward making the bad girl the female lead in a shounen romance. The results are generally interesting, as you would expect. Here then, are three examples of girlfriends who, to quote ZZ Top, just might hurt you real, real bad.


I've mentioned Mirai Nikki previously in my blog, but I hadn't really gone into much detail. Here, then, is a proper review.

1.
未来日記
Mirai Nikki
Future Diary
Serialized in Kadokawa's Shounen Ace

Amano Yukiteru, 'Yukki' to his friends, is a rather boring Japanese schoolboy who acts and dresses like someone growing up to be a hikkikomori like Satou from Welcome to the NHK. He's detatched from school, his classmates, and life in general. He has three noteworthy characteristics:

1. He compulsively diarises everything in his cell phone.
2. He is the coolest hand with darts and a dart board you've ever seen.
3. When bored, he imagines conversations with his imaginary friend, a super-powerful being named Deus Ex Machina.

At right: The inside cover to Vol 1.

One day, his imaginary friend declares that it's time to upset things, and so adds a special new feature to Yukki's cell-phone diary. It now shows entries from his near future. Yukki has the ability to alter his fate by changing his actions based on the cell phone's predictions.

Sounds like fun, right? The diary even provides the correct answers for school exams. Well, it is fun...for a while. Then Yukki meets Gasai Yuno. As he thinks to himself when checking her out in class, "Good grades, and beautiful. Our school's very own idol."

At left: Yuno at her cutest cluing Yukki in. This is a good example of the art at its best. Sorry for the resize artifacts - they're not in the scanslation original.

Seems like some variation on the magical girlfriend story, doesn't it? Well, it's true that Yuno very much wants to be Yukki's girlfriend. She wants to be Yukki's girlfriend so much that she also has a cellphone future diary...except hers tells the story of her relationship with Yukki with a ten-minute resolution. 'Stalker' is not too strong a word to describe her. Indeed, I'm not sure there's a word that is strong enough to describe her feelings toward Yukki. It's also true that she tends to have...violent tendencies toward people who get between her and whatever she wants. Did I mention that she seems to be quite talented with a variety of edged weapons?

There's more to the plot, of course. Yukki and Yuno are just two of many people who have been given some sort of prognosticating diary, and they're all trying to kill each other as rapidly and efficiently as possible so that they can get 'the prize.' Nothing especially original there (it was an old plot when The Highlander was made in the 1980s), although the treatment is good, and the manga's overall story telling ability isn't bad.

At left: Yuno and Yukki share a tender moment through Yukki's mail slot.

It's shounen, so don't expect a deep and complex plot. There is, however plenty of action, and it does a good job with varying things. So far (we're currently scanslated to vol. 5), plot is still fresh.

Because foretelling is such a big part of the plot, nearly every chapter starts off with something that would normally be called a spoiler. Truth is, though, that the 'spoilers' are missing context. As with a teaser for the next episode of a TV show, they serve to heighten the reader's interest, rather than actually spoil anything.

At right: Yuno definitely qualifies as a scary girlfriend.

2.
謎の彼女X
Nazo no Kanojo X
Mysterious Girlfriend X
Serialized in Kodansha's Afternoon monthly

For our second entry in the scary girlfriend sweepstakes, we're going to take a step into the seinen zone - the bizarre and quirky corner of the seinen zone, to be exact.

Tsubaki Akira was a typical Japanese second-year high-school student leading a completely unremarkable life. One day, mysterious Urabe Mikoto transferred into his class mid year and was seated beside him. Shortly after that, Akira's life became considerably more remarkable.

At left: Mikoto and Akira share a few words about drool early in Chapter 0 in their first private meeting.

It's not an accident that drool (and I agree with the translators' word choice here) figures in this page. Drool is, in fact, the vital lubricant that keeps the wheels of this manga turning. Mikoto and Akira do eventually become attached...sort of, but I'm not going to spoil the how and why.

Your art sample at left illustrates Ueshiba's character designs. Yes these are supposed to be high schoolers. If it makes you feel any better, Akira's older sister and his homeroom teacher both look young for their ages, too. I don't think he's aiming for the lolicon market - he draws males the same as females and when we see figures they're appropriately developed for the stated character age.

At right: Mikoto chastens Akira

Oh well, it's not jarring once you get used to it, anyway. From what little I've been able to find on his two prior mangas, Discommunication and Yume Tsukai (which was also made into an anime), he just draws people like this. Discommunication's plot, incidentally, sounds somewhat like Mysterious Girlfriend X's plot.

At left: Akira takes the hint.

About now, you might be wondering, "so what's so scary about Mikoto, anyway?" Well, Mikoto is pictured on the cover of volume one in an action stance holding a pair of scissors. Yes, scissors. Blunt-tipped ones with ergonomic plastic grips, to be exact. She's never separated from them. When Akira steps out of line, out come the scissors...

Who knew schoolgirls with scissors could be so scary?




3.
まほらば
Mahoraba
(difficult to translate. 'Mahora' is something like 'great and splendid place' in the ancient Yamato language).
Serialized in Square Enix's Gan Gan Wing monthly

Our third scary girlfriend story is a little different from the prior two. For one thing, no edged weapons are involved. The male lead, likewise, isn't cut from the same cloth as the prior two, either. Shiratori Ryuushi is not a shounen schoolboy. He's left his unspecified two-hours-from-Tokyo hometown for the big city to pursue his dream of being a children's book author at the Sumeragi School of Design. As you may already know, the hardest part of being a student in metro Tokyo is finding someplace affordable to live. Our young gentleman lucks out on this - distant relatives own the Narutaki-sou apartment house, which happens to be quite convenient to his school, for all that it's in the shadow of skyscrapers. He's determined, disciplined, very polite and soft-spoken, and, now that I think of it, is a little like Mr. Rogers must have been at age 19. He's also totally unprepared for what is about to befall him.

At left: ooyasan kawaii! Ryuushi discovers that Narutakisou's biggest attraction isn't its location, but its landlady.

Things start well enough, as you might expect. Indeed, the setup feels a little like a story from a Key bishoujo game. Bubbly, cute (and distantly-related) space-cadet schoolgirl landlady Aoba Kozue remembers Ryuushi, but he remembers neither Narutakisou nor her. We meet several of his fellow tennants, who look like the usual set of stock characters set on impeding the progress of love between the two obvious protagonists.

And here's where Kojima-sensei earns my admiration. He takes what could be the same plot we've seen with variations before in dozens of boarding-house harem romances (Maison Ikkoku, Love Hina, Ai Yori Aoshi, Chobits and Ai Kora all come to mind), and sets you up perfectly. You're expecting a cross between Ai Yori Aoshi and Maison Ikkoku full of the standard character tropes and well-worn gags, and what you get is something else entirely.

At right: the mysteriously capable Tachibana's tarot card. Yes, there was a complete set of them which I'd love to have. from here

None of the characters in Mahoraba (he wrote, loosely quoting G'Kar) is precisely what he seems. You'll see what appears to be a bottle fairy, a tsundere, a hot mamasan, the ditz, a genki girl, and an assortment of others. Indeed, when described, it sounds like a generic hack job like...say...Love Hina. But if you stick with it through the end of volume 1, you'll discover that appearances can be deceiving. By the end of the series, you'll know everybody's back story. Even some of the minor characters who are never assigned names get a little bit of a back story. And the back stories aren't generic. If you're like me (an unabashed Tachibana fanboy), you'll wish you had some more back story for some of the characters when the series ends.

At this point, you're bound to be wondering who the scary girlfriend is. No, she's not Tachibana, who is quite capable of being scary, but isn't, as far as we know, anybody's girlfriend. It's no spoiler (since it's the very first page of the manga) to say that a principal character has DID (also known as MPD).

Further, it's a very, very small spoiler to add that the afflicted character is the Kozue, the cute landlady. You may or may not know much about the pop culture or clinical theory of DID, but suffice it to say that the manga actually stays relatively close to the clinical expectations of such a case. Kojima-sensei again earns my respect by avoiding cheap gags relating to Kozue's condition. The diesase isn't the subject of humor, but its effects on the other inhabitants of Narutakisou are indeed played for laughs. At some point you realize that the carefully happy family of Narutakisou exists to both keep awareness of Kozue's condition from her, and also to protect her from the vicissitudes of the uncaring world beyond its walls.

The first of Kozue's alternate personas we meet is Akasaki Saki. Saki-chan is as aggressive and physical as Kozue is kind and polite. Shiratori meets her when Kozue retreats from an embarrasing situation and leaves Saki to manage things. Saki automatically assumes the worst about Ryuushi and then proceeds to abuse him both physically and mentally until even the nominal bottle-fairy character feels sorry for him and extricates him from the situation.

At left: Ryuushi meets Saki-chan...or at least her iron fist.

I won't spoil any more of the fun about Kozue's nature, except to say that at least one other persona is as tough on Shiratori's mental self-image as Saki-chan is on his body. It's a slow reveal that takes quite a few chapters to complete, because there's plenty of other plot going on in the meantime. We meet Ryuushi's memorable classmates and his even more memorable instructor. Likewise, a slow exploration of the stories of the other inhabitants of Narutakisou begins, and several of these subplots take up whole chapters as they work toward resolution. They're nicely interspersed with other chapters and help to fill out a mosaic image of the world of Mahoraba. This is one manga that definitely doesn't have the Fruits Basket floating world problem.

Another thing I like about this manga is that Ryuushi never has to go through the shounen rite of 'growing a pair,' as I call it. Usually, shounen leads in harem romances (and Mahoraba is nominally shounen, even though it has unusually complex characters), start off too weak-willed to deserve the love of their intended, and have to go through some painful rite of passage in which they suck it up and get a backbone to make them worthy of the female lead's love/able to provide for her/get her out of her predicament/blah blah blah.

At right: Ryuushi trying to come to terms with Saki's existence
At Left: Saki demonstrates that she doesn't need a fist to beat Ryuushi up.

For instance, in Maison Ikkoku (1980), Godai is a poor ronin student studying for his college entrance exams who has to get a direction to his life and a reliable income source in order to prove his worthiness to the female lead (the apartment house manager). Likewise, in In Love Hina (1998), Keitaro is (again) a hopeless ronin student who finally gets some traction with the love interest only when he gets into university with her after something like ten volumes of bad scholarship jokes and physical abuse by the female lead (yes, I thought about including Love Hina on the list of Scary Girlfriend manga, but I don't want people to think I'm recommending it). See also Suzuka, Video Girl Ai and Ai Yori Aoshi among many others.

Yes, it's a recurring theme, and frankly, it has been overdone. Male leads like Shiratori Ryuushi in Mahoraba and Motosuwa Hideki in Chobits are refreshingly different in that they're perfectly functional guys who don't have to better themselves to get on with the plot. Our first clue that Ryuushi is not quite the pushover he initially seems to be is in chapter 7, where he rewrites the rules of a game to improve his chances of winning and then plays to exhaustion because he has reached the limit of polite acceptance of his neighbors' loud partying. At that point, he clearly departs from the generic harem lead, and shows us that, in Mahoraba, at least, nice guys definitely don't finish last, and that he lives up to his given name's dual meaning (noble gentleman/noble samurai).

At right: Mahoraba Ch. 7: Mr White Swan lays down the law on the peach one. No directionless wuss he.

In closing on Mahoraba, I have to mention yet another rare and good thing about it: it has been entirely, excellently, and lovingly scanslated by only one very talented scanslation group. So far, Mahoraba is Hiyoko no Gao's only product. They obviously love the manga and try very hard to carry the meaning and semblance of the manga into the English scanslation. They also put out a translators' notes file with every chapter released - a wonderful practice that I wish more scanslation groups would adopt. There's not always room for a cultural note or a detailed explanation on the manga page, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to miss the information, especially if it deepens my insight into the culture or the story. The only other manga scanslation I can name that is consistently anywhere near as good and uniform over such a long run is Snoopycool's work on Midori no Hibi.

Whither Manga?

As I've explained before, most anime was something else first. Sometimes a light novel series, sometimes the plot from a first person computer role-playing game (like a dating sim game). Most commonly, however, the source material for anime is a successful manga.

We use the loanword because a manga is not precisely newspaper comics (though it's usually originally serially published in a magazine with other manga in a weekly or monthly format) , nor book comics, nor graphic novel (though it usually has a strong plot arc with defined beginning and end, and usually has better art than US comics). There is, however, a simple linear-panel variant still popular in Japan called the four-panel comic (yonkoma) which is frequently published in general interest publications and is very similar in sensibility to a US newspaper comic strip. Jumpy sketch-comedy animes like Azumanga Daioh, Hidamari Sketch, and Doujin work are derived from yonkoma.

In any event, historically there has been a steady and large demand for a lot of different manga. Couple the big demand with the low production cost (newsprint, black ink, and staple binding is a cheap combination), and the result is dozens of weekly and monthly manga magazines catering to every possible niche of the manga market.

At least that's how things used to be.

Manga circulation in Japan is dropping. It's way down from the boom years of the mid-1990s, and it has lately been dropping at a steady (and not especially gentle) rate. I can't regard this as a good thing, because a lot of the manga (and manga-derived anime) I like are from marginal stories in marginal magazines. If Shounen Jump (the biggest single circulating manga magazine) is falling in circulation, I have to be somewhat concerned - I want mangakas (authors) to make money and keep making manga!

So why is this happening and what are some of the likely results? Here I tie into a post I made on mangaforums when Sphinx asked about the recent spate of erogame-based anime.

Frankly, I think the v-novel based series are a symptom of a somewhat worrying trend. The reasoning goes like this:

1. Japan is busy having a population collapse. As a proportion, it has one of the oldest average ages in the world.

2. this means that there are, proportionately fewer young adults, fewer high school kids, and even fewer still elementary school kids than at any previous time in living memory.

3. guess who the biggest consumers of manga and anime have historically been? Yup. Kids. Adults frequently read manga as well, but not so religiously - they also tend to gravitate toward the slick monthly manga aimed at adults and away from the pulp weeklies where most manga are published.

4. add in the Nintendo factor - "books are old school, my console is cool."

5. result: manga consumption is dropping rapidly.

6. result: the anime market is getting increasingly bimodal: one group is A. the traditional kids and young adults, the other group is B. the otakus who obsess over manga/anime, but have somewhat different perceptions of goodness than the average population.

7. result of 5: manga are going to get somewhat rarer, and new mangakas are going to have a harder time getting published. Most mangakas will likely also make less money.

8. result of 6. b: More and more otaku-centered manga/anime out there: Lucky Star, Genshiken, Doujin Work, Welcome to the NHK, as well as more 'moe-moe' extreme character designs (Misaki Chronicles, the generic kawaii loli character, etc.).

9. result of 4: since kids aren't reading manga, but are playing dating sim games, guess what you make anime around if you want to target a young audience. Yup, eroge anime isn't going anywhere any time soon.

I wonder where this leaves complex stories like Ai-Ren, Gunslinger Girl, or Hataraki Man. As the non-manga-reading kids age up, they're not going to be interested in seinen or josei manga, either...

We may all be hanging out at manwhaforums in a few years...

The last remark is a comment that Korea has a steadily growing but not-very-mature graphic story telling medium called 'manwha,' which is basically the Korean version of manga.

There has been a lot of computer game-based anime lately. This season, for instance, we have Clannad (from the Key game of the same name), Ef-A Tale of Memories, (derived from Ef- A Fairy Tale of the Two by Minori), Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai, School Days, and Myself, Yourself among those I could easily spot.

It's true that there are plenty of good manga-based anime coming out as well, but the scripted computer games (I refuse to call them visual novels, as some of their creators do) definitely seem to be here to stay.

Is this bad?

Right now, yes, it is bad. All the sim games follow pretty straightforward plots, and, because the total text content of one of these is small relative to a good anime or manga, there's not a lot of room for subtlety of character or convoluted plot twists. I have yet to see a character in an erogame-based anime as complex as, say, Enzou from Hotman, Aaeru from Simoun, or even Kozue from Mahoraba, and I don't think it's likely that I will anytime soon. The formats are conventional and the plots are either straightforward schoolboy love stories or murder mysteries.

We can hope that the sim game consumers mature into desiring more complex plots, but the format doesn't encourage that sort of growth. I have 20-something coworkers who spend large amounts of their free time playing MMORPGs. They don't seem to grow bored with the sameness of trying to beat a rigged system with a small decision set, and they never seem to become interested in reading the Tolkien novels that form the basis of the thin milieu in which they play.

The one upside to this is that there does seem to be a minority trend in focusing more effort toward complex seinen and josei stories in manga. A manga like Honey and Clover would never have been published 20 years ago, and would never have been made into a successful anime even ten years ago.

That said, it's starting to seem to me that the Japanese love of shiny flashing things may mean the loss of a lot of diversity in the manga and anime market.

I really hope I'm wrong.

Suzumiya Haruhi Uncut

About now, you're wondering if old Senile is really trying to live up to his nick(name). It's true that when the Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu (The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi) anime showed up in the 2006 spring season it was an immediate hit, and it developed a huge following among both Japanese and international viewers. Haruhi was everywhere, and the anime was so ubiquitous that it actually pushed other deserving anime offerings of that season (Simoun, for instance) out of the limelight.

But it's also true that 2006 was last year. So it looks like I'm in that horribly 'uncool' place of talking about old pop culture that is still fresh in memory. And if I were writing a Japanese blog, that appearance would be correct.

But I'm a gaijin writing for English-language readers (Hi to both of you). Which means that you'd be wise to keep on reading.

As you probably know if you've been reading my blog, or have just been paying attention for a while, most anime series are made from successful manga (Japanese comics/graphic novels). Since there is a Suzumiya Haruhi manga, it's a reasonable assumption that the anime derives from the manga. It's also an incorrect assumption -- the manga appeared after the anime.

But, unlike Simoun, Haruhi's aggressive genki personality did not spring straight from anime scriptwriters, either. The Suzumiya Haruhi anime derives from a very successful series of light novels written by Tanigawa Nagaru. Tanigawa-sensee is a lawyer by training, so you'd be right in expecting him to be a fluid and skillful author of Japanese prose.

He has written nine volumes starring the members of the SOS Brigade, and the tenth is anxiously awaited by his many fans. He has also written twelve other books, according to his wikipedia entry. I think it's a safe assumption that lawyering isn't paying his bills these days. Fine by me - lawyers aren't generally known for contributing to the richness of human society. But I digress.

The novels have all the essential characteristics that Kyoto Animation tried so hard to preserve in the anime. They also have some things that just don't translate well to animation. Kyon is the first-person narrator, and his internal monologue often blends seamlessly with the dialog. KyoAni tried to preserve the feel of this, but they couldn't put a lot of it in without hurting the anime. The books are a lot of fun, and I highly recommend them to you if you would like to find out what the fuss was really about. If you enjoy Kyon's laconic/sarcastic asides in the anime you'll certainly enjoy him in the books much more. He's a keen observer and is master of the understated smart aside.

At left: the cover to vol 4: The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi Yes, that's who you think it is.

Making the inevitable comparison between anime and novel, I'd have to say that it's almost a tie, but I prefer the books. Why? Well, you do miss some of the working of Kyon's mind in the anime, which is a loss. Likewise, some things just describe better than they show. Contrarily, some things (like the band concert in the cultural festival) show better than they describe.

The tie breaker for me is the tweaking Kyoto Animation did to the Lone Island Syndrome short story. I'm not a purist, but the story's major purpose was to show a side of Kyon's character (and abilities) that had not previously been seen. This character development is of vital importance, because the future of Kyon's world will hang on his reasoning abilities in volume four (Which, along with vol. seven is my favorite of all the books). Kyo Ani took all that out and replaced it with little sister and Phoenix Wright gags that just flat didn't work for me, and apparently not for this guy either - I found him when I googled to find the name of the US localization of Gyakuten Saiban. He came at the episode from the other direction - having seen the anime before reading the book, and he agrees with me. Seems like a smart guy - I'll be checking out his blog in the future.

There's no official effort to translate any of Tanigawa-sensee's books into English. Luckily, there is a crew of hard-working volunteer translators at Baka-Tsuki.net who slavishly translate the novels into English as they're released. Their work is generally very good, and is free for the reading on their website. Here's a helpful chart on their website that shows the chronology of anime episodes, novels, and stories.

Milady prefers the printed page. Accordingly, I spent a fair amount of time reformatting the Baka-Tsuki translations into MS Word format, tipping in the intertextual pictures, doing color covers, and writing up notes (containing helpful answers to questions like "What is a benjo-korogi?") on each chapter for her consumption. All of my work is also available free for the download at senile-seinen.4shared.com Look for the Haruhi folder. Hint: find a printer that does duplex, or print a short sample and practice your manual duplexing skills...

At right: the cover to vol 8: The Indignation of Suzumiya Haruhi

Wondering why there hasn't been more Haruhi anime since it was initially so popular? I suspect that the delay is at least partly due to Kyoto Animation being a small studio. They do exactly one project at a time, and their bread and butter has been anime adaptations of Key's visual novel games, including the 2006 Kanon remake and the currently-airing Clannad. I don't think it's an accident that they were the studio to take on the Haruhi books - most other studios could not have handled translating such a text-intensive storyline into a watchable show. The buzz is that the second season of Haruhi will appear in Winter/Spring, 2008.

We novel readers have been annoyed by the slow appearance of volume 10 of the novel series (they're quite short - each one is what I'd call a novella). Volume nine (The Dissociation of Suzumiya Haruhi) was released last summer. Volume 10 is the second half of the story started in volume nine, so we're very much stuck on a cliffhanger. I suspect that it's a simple money-grubbing move on Kodansha's (his publisher) part - they want the release of vol. 10 to coincide with the airing of season two of the anime. I've also read a rumor here or there that Tanigawa-sensee was taking some time off.

In any event, there are ten volumes already translated out there waiting for you to read them. Enjoy.