Senile_Seinen Rants and Raves

The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi Movie

2011-01-20T09:00:00.002-05:00

Last Edited Jan 20, 2011
[HERE THERE BE MILD SPOILERS. BEWARE.]

Yes, I finally got around to watching it. I wasn't in a special hurry to do so, both because I'd read the novel (vol. 4 in the series) something like three years ago, and also because I was not all that enthused with what Kyo-Ani had decided to do with the lump of short stories they had animated in to series season 2.

At left: the OST disc cover art catches the mood well.

I'm not going to provide a review. I've read five or six, and the best one indubitably was Gia Manry's at Anime News Network which hits all the high points and correctly determines that this movie is so plot-bound that nobody should watch it who hasn't watched both the Haruhi anime series, or (equivalently) read the light novel volumes 1-3. You simply won't know who these people are, what's going on, or why it is going on.

Instead, I'm going to point out what I noticed in the film having read the novel twice previously. Animation shows differently than novels tell, and the animators did pull out some details that weren't so obvious to me in the text. Think of this as a reader's guide to the story as told by Kyoto Animation.

Here psygremlin and I are on Mangacityforums discussing the movie as a potentiality near the end of 2009:

Psygremlin: Might be jumping the gun a little here, but after the horror story that was Suzumiya Harumi season 2, I see next year we're getting a movie-length feature on "the Disappearance of Suzumiya Harumi", which was one of my favourite tales in the light novels. Even with a 2 hour playing time, it'll be shorter than the hideous "Endless Eight" sequence, for which I'll never forgive Kyoto Animation.

Me: This actually makes sense to me. In fact, this explains everything Psy suffered through. Kyo Ani was stuck with a problem: a bunch of short stories in two volumes, and arguably the most compact and continuous narrative in the entire series in another volume.

I suspect there was a /lot/ of political/internal wrangling about what to do with the material. They all knew that they had to be faithful to it or alienate the fans. They also knew that Tanigawa seemed to have taken an indefinite break, so couldn't be relied on for help or additional material.

So they padded the promised (and probably contractually-required) anime season with a nearly-endless Endless Eight, and saved all of volume 4 for a theatrical release. I wonder if they're going to put vol 4 and vol 7 in the film together - the same plotline continues there...

I must, not so modestly, admit that I called this one. The only thing I got wrong was that I underestimated the care that Kyo Ani were going to take with the story, which was a perhaps understandable mistake on my part after the fan abuse that was Endless Eight in the second TV series, and Kyon no imouto stealing Kyon's spotlight in Lone Island Syndrome with Phoenix Wright gags in the first series. They didn't cram Volume 7 in the movie with Volume 4, which would have created a hurried mishmash of epic proportion. Nope. Instead, they did something that Hollywood has forgotten entirely how to do: They took their time just with one story: Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu and did it right. There was not an excess of pratfalls, explosions, panty shots, or imouto moe development (imouto, in fact, occurs exactly as much in the movie as in the novel). There wasn't even a noticeable amount of blue and orange going on.

There were many quiet sequences. There were places where characters stopped and stared, sometimes for five seconds at a time.

At Right: Tsuruya has a word with Kyon. Note the wintry grey brightness of the sky and the leafless tree peeking into the middle of the shot.

Before some of the most detailed backgrounds I've ever seen in an animated film the entire plot of the novel was very carefully and literally spun on screen. It is not (mostly) Ghibli-bright, for the simple and honest reason that the story mostly happens near the end of December in urban Japan, when it's frozen winter and nothing is bright and colorful.

The backgrounds are cleverer and subtler than that, though. Not only are they literally correct, they also set moods perfectly. Most of the backgrounds are simultaneously detailed and uninteresting for the simple reason that they echo the world in which Kyon has found himself - Haruhi has gone missing along with the supernatural, and he has discovered how lackluster such a world is.

The one noticeable point in the film where the gray world bursts with color is when Kyon has finally tracked Haruhi down.

At left: Haruhi's world is just as gray without the SOS-dan as Kyon's is without her supernatural whimsies.

He waits impatiently for her to emerge from her exclusive private school in front of a colorful flower shop that (after all that gray) looks like it belongs in Kiki's Delivery Service. It portrays his inner mood more vividly than any monologue could.

At Right: Kyon's flower shop. How do they keep the plants from freezing?

I haven't seen a movie that so deliberately and successfully manipulated viewer mood with backgrounds and color palette since I watched Blade Runner in the theater 30-odd years ago.

There's yet another reason that the world of the Disappearance is gray. The principal character sharing screen time with Kyon through most of the film is Nagato Yuuki. The SOS-dan's slightest, palest, and subtlest member is not exactly the life of the party here, either. But she is as changed as Kyon's world is, and it could be said that some of the world's missing color has brightened her cheeks.

At left: Yuuki is as changed as the world.

I've run across a few curmudgeonly old bloggers like me recently who decry moe and moe otaku culture as the root of all evil. I can certainly agree that otaku self-affirmation and lolicon/moe fascination has not been one of my favorite trends in the last decade of Anime, but I think my crabby cohorts miss some important points here:

Anime has always been ephemeral. This particular decade it is moe blobs. Last decade it was magical girlfriends. Before that it was supernatural or supertechnological cop shows. Before that it was mecha shows. Remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud. In any decade, most anime created is junk, just like anything else. There has always been a herd mentality to anime creation and it is always and forever steeped in the Japanese pop culture of the constantly-changing moment.
Artists create. It doesn't matter what the limitations of the medium are. They will always find a way to create their art. And their art will be exactly as good as they are capable of making it. Making anime is expensive. There are therefore big limitations in concept attached to getting money to make the stuff. But an artist with the drive to tell a story will find a way to tell that story whether or not the sponsors (and viewership) require moe blobs/giant mecha/whatever. Nothing else explains shows like Sora no Woto, for instance.
Sometimes, artists create things that are very well made and rise above the limitations imposed on them. Toulouse-Lautrec painted mass-printed posters to advertise the "Gentlemen's Clubs" of his day. Some of them were good enough that they hang in the Louvre today. The concept of the lotus blossom is not only applicable to seeking human perfection in an imperfect world.

I am not leading up to the idea that this movie made by a studio that specializes in animating dating sim games is great art that deserves to be enshrined for the ages in the Japanese national gallery of art. That said, it's a fair sight better than OK, especially taken on its own terms - moe character designs or no.

That said, there's definitely more to the Suzumiya Haruhi franchise than moe stereotypes prancing around for otaku amusement. Tanigawa is a clever writer who has cooked up a very interesting post-modern stew of geeky trope deconstructions and recursive self-references in an otherwise very serious plot with excellent character design and development. Because this movie (in particular) is so slavishly faithful to the source novel, it isn't really even on the axis of otaku moe infatuation, as dotdash points out so successfully in his blog posting about SHnY TV series I. If I ever make it to Japan, having a beer with this guy is definitely on my list of things to do. I suspect he could point me to some good music I've never heard, as well...

The moe Yuuki of this movie is both detailed in the book and derives logically from the plot in which she is elucidated. There's also some clever analysis of Kyon's character going on here: Kyon has protested for three volumes that he likes to look at Haruhi, but really can't stand her when she opens her mouth and gets domineering. What he says he finds attractive in girls is helpless femininity - personified in Asahina Mikuru.

But Mikuru is fairly fully defined to Kyon by the beginning of volume 4. He even knows how she's going to turn out, because he's met her future 20-something self.

At right: Mikuru traded in her moe for something more powerful during the transition between little and big.

Asahina-san (big) as he refers to her has grown into a calm and poised pinup-grade bombshell, and is no longer moe. But confronted with the cipher of a breathing, blushing Nagato Yuuki with a silent crush on him, Kyon (and the viewer) finds Asahina-san (small) suddenly the absurd over-the-top moe poster child she is undoubtedly supposed to be (and, it is suggested in later volumes, that she might actually have been designed in the future to be, specifically to appeal to teenage Kyon's protective urges.) Blushing Yuuki, by comparison, is almost irresistible to him (and to the viewer). This isn't moe designed to sell hug pillows. It is completely logical as a plot device. I, at least, remember being Kyon's age, and I certainly remember feeling that half-parental, half-desiring abstract feeling that the otaku community have dubbed moe. It would be odd if teenage, pensive, literary Kyon were immune to the sensation. It's notable how quickly the viewer gets accustomed to the Humanized Nagato Yuuki. When we eventually meet the AI original again, the difference is stark, for all that it is composed mostly of vocal intonation and gesture. Neither Yuuki is verbose or prone to verbal introspection, but the differences between the two are instantly obvious to the viewer thanks to excellent voice acting and detailed character animation.

It is also worth mentioning that there's a sort of cold-war dialectic between Mikuru and Yuuki: both are representatives of powerful shadowy organizations that have specific and somewhat-opposing interests in the outcome of Haruhi's evolution. Mikuru, the clumsy, moe 'waitress from the future' (who even manages to lose her implanted time-travel gadget at one point in the series) is in constant low-grade fear of the immense poised power that Yuuki controls without visible effort. It's so bad that Asahina-san (big) is still terrified of ethereal, silent, powerful Yuuki when she returns to the past to help Kyon deal with his changed world.

At the end, though, Mikuru has empathy and pity for her notional opponent Yuuki, who gave away the strength of her nature in order to gain what she hopes is to Kyon an appealing frailty. Kyon understands most of her motivation, but misses (with an undetermined amount of willfulness) the romantic element in her efforts, as he does with Haruhi. Thus we see some character growth even for Mikuru in this mostly Yuuki and Kyon show.

The other interesting items of character development happen toward the end of the film: We see a world in which 'normal' Haruhi and 'normal' Koizumi are just classmates. Because Koizumi is not a member of a priest-like 'organization' devoted to serving the Goddess Haruhi, he is, instead rather smitten with her and has enjoyed being the momentary center of her attention since his transfer to her school. He retains his astute analytical mind, however, and quickly decides that Goddess Haruhi adopted Kyon out of simple liking because he alone among the SOS dan has no supernormal powers. Koizumi is disappointed, but not surprised that normal Haruhi seems just as responsive to Kyon as the notional Goddess Haruhi was reported to be.

For her part, normal Haruhi is the same bored, frustrated Haruhi we meet at the beginning of the series - an older version of the same bored, frustrated middle-school Haruhi that Kyon assisted at Tanabata three years ago.

At left: Kyon wordlessly tells Haruhi to calm down and sit still. That he doesn't get a beating for it tells you all you need to know about 'normal' Haruhi's reaction to Kyon.

Here, too, there's a subtle surprise in the story - Haruhi starts out sullen and bored, but very quickly latches onto the idea of the SOS-dan when it is explained to her, and just as quickly starts responding to Kyon as her governor and stabilizer, which is, if you think about it, remarkable given that she has known Kyon for all of an hour or so at this point.

At right: Haruhi's charm increases by 38% after meeting Kyon. Here, incidentally, is more of the greenery that was missing from the first half of the film.

Some stuff doesn't change, though. The story, as in the book, is told from Kyon's point of view. As it is a complicated story, Kyon spends a fair amount of time narrating his thoughts. I'm sure that Kyo Ani hate it just as much now as when they did the first TV series, but I suspect that they, now as then, realize that there is just no other way to get you the necessary information that is in Kyon's head except for monologues - lots of the plot happens there, and flashbacks or dream sequences would inform the viewer with emotional, but not factual content. The good news is that here, as everywhere else, they never hurry. Kyon has time to speak his piece at a normal human rate. If he's nonplussed and silent for a few seconds, he is allowed those few seconds. It's definitely not the wordless Russian formalism of Tarkovsky, but it does share with his works a willingness to let the story come out at its own pace, the clock be damned.

Watching the last third of the movie, the thought occurred to me that Tanigawa might have started off by thinking of Pinocchio, the greatest creation of a master toymaker, who wished with all his heart to be a 'real' boy, instead of a wooden toy. What if Pinocchio had been able to make himself flesh and blood, but only by altering the world so that his toymaker no longer existed? This movie provides one possible answer to the question.

Kyon, for his part, decides that the problem is with Yuuki's character design itself. As she is an A.I., she could have been designed any way at all.

At left: blushing, or logical Yuuki?

Having been made completely logical and emotionless and then thrown into an illogical and emotional world, one could reasonably expect interesting results. One would be right in this expectation...

I would be remiss in not mentioning the quality of the score. The OP is predictable, but everything else is new, different, and evocative for the moment. The BGM uses off-the-shelf classical material in some places, but it is to good effect, and it sets the mood well. I have to say, though, that the lurking aural prize is the ED song, sung by CHIHARA Minori, Yuuki's seiyuu, who, it turns out, isn't a seiyuu so much as she is a musician and singer who does seiyuu work on the side. Having done some recording studio work, I know how this must have been recorded. Even with a click track, a rough track, and accutune it's still a hell of a job of singing. The song is perfect for the movie, the character, and the moment, and Chihara's delivery of it, as well as all of her voice work in the film, could not be improved upon.

Yes, I know I'm a subtitle snob. But seriously, even if you hate subs, watch this movie with them in order to get the benefit of the Japanese audio track - you've got two of the best seiyuus working today in it and I strongly doubt that an American dub crew will manage as good a job.

At Right: Ryoko says eat your veggies and watch it subbed or else

In conclusion: It's a fun movie. It's long. It's better than anything mainstream Hollywood will release this year. Or last year. Or next year. Don't watch it unless you've either read volumes 1-3 of the light novels or have watched seasons 1 and 2 of the TV series. And lastly, watch (and listen to) all the credits. There's an easter egg at the end, a-la Miyazaki movies, and you don't want to miss it.

It's worth your time - all three hours. Enjoy.

Ore no Imouto

2010-11-21T19:00:00.001-05:00

Complications Involving Big Brothers and Little Sisters

I'm one of those people who didn't really like the upgrade that Kyon no Imouto got in the Suzumiya Haruhi animes versus her more distant supporting role in the source light novels. She usurped an important character development point of Kyon's.

That said, I'm following the Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai anime and I must admit to some complex opinions on it.

At left, the cover of volume 1 of the Ore no Imouto light novels.

Beforehand, I was worried that it was going to be some variation on inappropriate pervy/incestuous stuff like Kodomo no Jikan, which could be cute, but is mostly just creepy. (See Hanamaru Kindergarten for this same plot done without the creepy lolicon) Happily, it isn't, at least not so far (ep 7).

The lead character (Kyousuke - 京介) is a Kyon sort. He's the mild-mannered man seeking a normal life being constantly (at least during the plot) thrust into abnormal situations. It's not a new idea in comedy - several of the great Hollywood and UK comedies of the 20s and 30s use the straight man comic lead (Harold Lloyd and the young Alec Guiness come to mind), but the Japanese seem to have come late to it. Tanigawa's leading man in the Haruhi stories has become a trope. I can't regard this as an entirely bad thing, nor an entirely good one. I'd rather have quirky original non-trope characters, but if they had to use a trope, at least they picked a non-annoying one. The good news is that at least they didn't choose the iconic Sugita Tomokazu (the voice of Kyon, Yuichi in Kanon, and Rin in Shuffle! among thousands of other cool, detached male characters) to do the role. Instead they got the guy who played Tomoya in Clannad, and Ryuu in Kimi ni Todoke to do the deed. I think he's an excellent choice - someone as detatched as Sugita's characters would not fit the quiet desparation that drives Kyousuke to take muscly dad's right cross in place of his little sister.

Kyousuke is, by any measure, a late bloomer. He's 17 and seems to just be noticing that girls can be something other than annoyances or platonic companions.

L and R: If Manami had anything to say about it, Kyousuke would have more action than a pinball machine in an earthquake.

Something that
the anime does well is provide an initial expected trajectory for Kyousuke's life. He's perfectly happy to be a good student, go onto college, and then settle down to some sort of civil service job for the next 40 years or so. He expresses an interest in a simple, relaxed life, going so far as to purposefully delay taking the logical 'next step' in some of his relationships to maintain it. While he doesn't appear to be interested in police work (his father's career), he does seem to have a strong sense of and appreciation for the proprieties and gentilities of quiet existence, including brotherly duty to his junior sibling and valuing peace and order above self-expression.

There's a surface similarity here to Kyon in the Haruhi books, but the difference is that Kyon mostly uses the 'normal man' suit as a sort of camouflage. He eventually admits even to himself that he loves being the straight man consort to a fickle goddess because it livens up his otherwise somewhat dull life. By comparison, at least as of episode 7, Kyousuke really does seem to be more desirous of 'comfortable' than 'interesting.' The source light novels are currently being translated, and I'm curious to see how much depth the characters gain relative to the anime.

All of this set up gets pushed around in the first couple of episodes in which he discovers that his 14 year old little sister is not a noisy annoyance but a person, and that she seems to value his opinion and support, much to his surprise.

Fourteen-year-old Kirino-桐乃 (the little sister in question) is practically a walking stereotype. Not a trope, mind you,

At right: The core cast. L-R: Saori, Kuroneko, Kirino, Manami, and Kyousuke

although she embodies several of those as well, but she actually is very close to what I remember many/most middle-school little sisters of friends being like when I was in high school and college. She's not especially bright, is very focused on appearances, and is certain of her own certitude until she makes some misstep or is challenged, whereupon she collapses into a weeping puddle or has a fit of pique.

Her relationship with Kyousuke is mostly tsun-tsun, with increasingly common moments of mild dere creeping in as she begins to trust him as a source of support.

The OP music is the same every time but there's considerable variety in the OP animation including character introductions new to that episode. The ED songs vary by show and have unique animation for each one. I like this trend - if you have to tack on the OP and ED stuff, at least make it entertaining and different every episode.

So far, so good. Now the predictable, eye-rolling bits.

1. Her need for 'life counseling' is a consequence of her infatuation with otaku culture. And no, not just any otaku culture.

Couldn't be Harlock, Gundam, BL or Yaoi, nope. She has a thing for magical girl stories (and, a-la Genshiken, she has a 'bogus' favorite mahou shoujo anime that we'll no doubt be seeing animated in a couple seasons) that has, as she has grown to her current surprisingly-mature-looking 14 years, grown(?) into an obsession with erogames. Little sister erogames.

At left: Kyousuke deflects trouble from Kirino by claiming the eroge is his. Otou-san is not amused.

As I commented when I had just seen episode 1, "Basically, it's just a crossing of the characters of Kyon and Kyon no imouto from Haruhi with the plot from Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu."

Yeah. Pretty weird. And if it were played for irony, deconstruction, or social criticism, it would be predictable and possibly cogent and incisive, but probably not very popular with the viewership.

So far, though, Kirino is taking the traditional (and hollow) youth culture tack of declaring that her self definition is dependent on self-expression through eroge and expressing her inner otaku.

Her relationship with her favorite fellow otaku (a taciturn goth-loli) is similar to her relationship with her brother. Again, very typical in my observations. This is not the eye-rolling part. The eye-rolling part is that she's an otaku despite there being no reason given why she might be or why she picked up an interest in imouto eroge of all things. It's counterintuitive, and would bear exposition. So far, (ep 7)they haven't even hung a lampshade on it.

2. Her income stream. She has to be cute. It's in the title after all.

At left: Kirino's secret closet of addiction.

She doesn't, however, have to be a model. This is rather obviously a simple plot device to a) explain her ability to afford a secret closet full of (really expensive) erogames and anime, and b) will presumably serve to get her involved in the anime business pretty soon. Middle school models aren't particularly common. Again, it's just a little too convenient and there hasn't even been a vague attempt to explain it or lampshade it.

3. Complete lack of recognition that a hardcore otaku lifestyle might be marginalized by mainstream Japanese culture because it's - oh yeah - antisocial and unhealthy.

At Left: Kirino's 'normal' friends are not thrilled to find that she's an eroge otaku.

Tthe downsides of otakudom are either glossed over or handwaved away. This makes some sense for Densha Otoko, but a 14 year old girl with welcoming access to mainstream society is a different matter.

4. Fan Service. Yes, they were doing fan service with the 14 year old girls. Not much, thankfully, but it was definitely there.

At right: Kyousuke is always willing to give his sister a hand.

There's been a spate of this lately in a wide variety of shows - you'd think middle school girls were the apotheosis of feminine sexuality from the number of upskirts and low angle shots we've had lately. Factoring in a) that Japanese girls develop more slowly than they do in Europe and America and, b) they don't eat as horrible a diet as American kids do, it's reasonable to assume that a Japanese middle school girl wouldn't be cuter/more developed/more feminine than the American middle school girls I see every day when I drive e-chan to school. Quite a few of them are cute, yes, but generally not in a 'want to see her pantsu' way to any healthy male over about age 18.

5. Complete ignorance of the Westermarck effect. No, I don't expect Fushimi-sensei (the author of the light novels) to know about a fairly obscure bit of imprinting research, even if it is iconic in the psychology business and even if it is a standard checkbox item in Psych 101 classes the world over. That said, all you need to do is ask anybody who has a sibling what they think of getting some action in that quarter. Put simply, the only people who actually find the idea of sexual hijinks between siblings interesting are those without siblings. If either party cohabited with the other before the age of six then there never is romantic interest between them.

The 'love my imouto' stories that have been popular lately all have this blind spot. It's pretty much a requirement for the plot to go anywhere. A better question is: why are these plots popular in Japan now? My theory is that it's a consequence of Japan's low birth rate - relatively few Japanese below the age of 30 have a sibling. The concept of a sibling is an abstraction to them and they don't see any reason why there wouldn't be some sexually-charged moments between siblings.

So having named its deficiencies in considerable detail, why am I still watching it? Because it's entertaining and ambiguous. I'm curious to see which of the possible plot paths it will take, and it has consistently been willing to go anywhere with the characters to get a laugh out of the viewer.

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

2009-06-09T17:01:00.008-04:00

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

2008-09-14T20:35:00.000-04:00

(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

2008-05-31T22:39:00.003-04:00

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

2008-03-01T12:44:00.002-05:00

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

2008-01-01T23:05:00.000-05:00

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:

He compulsively diarises everything in his cell phone.
He is the coolest hand with darts and a dart board you've ever seen.
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?

2007-12-18T22:42:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-09T16:46:00.000-05:00

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.

Hotman and Other Bedtime Reading.

2007-09-11T12:25:00.000-04:00

Milady and I finally finished Fruits Basket. I feel like I should have a t-shirt that says something like "I survived Fruits Basket." I shouldn't complain - as shoujo goes, Furuba is definitely top-tier. That said, it'll be a while, probably quite a while, before I get around to starting on another shoujo angst-fest like (say) Kare Kano simply because shoujo is, after all, the chick-flick of manga and anime and I'm definitely not a chick, and particularly not a middle/high-school-aged chick.

Of course, finishing Fruits Basket leads to the inevitable question: What shall we read next? The only reason I was reading Furuba (again) in the first place was because I needed something for Evening Manga Reading with Milady. We'd read Video Girl Ai, Chobits, Midori no Hibi, and several other manga over the years, and after getting through all 136 chapters of Fruits Basket, it was time to pick something again.

I looked through things on my laptop (we were still in temporary digs at the time), and considered manga on my hard drive that interest me. I tend to like medium-to-long complete manga for this application. We get through 1-3 chapters in a typical night, so it's not hard to finish up a short manga in less than two weeks. Likewise, it's nice to have the story end when you're reading it with someone else, instead of having to go back and remind everybody what whas happening in this story three months ago when the last chapter came out.

Unfortunately, these two requirements remove many good manga from the list: Mahoraba, Karin (currently stalled in scanslation), Mirai Nikki, Doujin Work, and a host of one-shots all are too short, non-terminal, or both.

I didn't want another boarding-house romance (because we'd finished up Love Hina before starting Furuba), and so my list came down to a few entertaining choices. At the top of the list was Ai-Ren, both because it's so good, and because it's unlike anything she's seen before in manga.

She promptly shot that one down because she didn't want something sad/depressing. Now I don't ultimately regard Ai-Ren as depressing, but it's definitely not the feel-good manga of any year, either.

So I was left scrambling. I considered Ah! My Goddess, but we had a magical girlfriend story before in both Video Girl Ai and Chobits, and I wasn't looking forward to the degradation of story qualty I've heard about after the first 100 chapters, which would leave me the choice of just stopping (which we almost did with Love Hina a couple of times), or suffering through an unknown number of bad, reductive, franchise-milking manga chapters a-la Berman and Piller-era Star Trek.

And then, scrolling through the hard drive, I stumbled across an old friend: Hotman.

Hotman was perfect: It isn't mostly about kids, it's not depressing, and there are at least ten volumes translated. Will we get to the end of the story? No. It's not fully translated. In fact, it may never be fully translated, and the scanslation that has been done so far is...well, quick and dirty is probably not a bad description. To be fair, Null are doing an HQ re-scanslate of it, but they're only on volume 1 of that project. So, if you want to read it in the near future, you are going to be looking at the quick-and-dirty version.

Which is OK - it's still thoroughly worth reading. One note: the translators have elected to romaji some common Japanese words instead of translating them. This is, frankly, a good thing most of the time. Not only is it difficult/impossible to come up for a conversational equivalent to "Aniiki" for instance, it would also remove some cultural flavor to do so. The untranslated words are usually things like "tadaima," "sensee," "gochisousama," etc, so are good survival words to learn if you have an interest in Japanese anyway.

So what is Hotman, what is it about, and why should you care? Good questions.

Meet Takaya Enzou

He's an art teacher in a middle school. Yes, I know - I never had an art teacher that looked like that either. At left is one of the advertising-knockoff chapter opening pages Kitagawa sensee uses. Enzo is also a former gang leader. Sounds like GTO, doesn't it? Well, yeah, but, ahem, Hotman, and GTO came out at practically the same time, as did Salaryman Kintaro and Gokusen. Obviously 1994 was a good year for heroic characters in authority roles. There are also some crucial differences between the two: GTO is shounen, Hotman is seinen, Enzo really is passionate about art (actually, he's passionate about a lot of things).

He quit being a gang-banger because he was presented with a baby girl (Nanami) on his doorstep five years ago who is supposedly the result of his misspent youth. He decided that being a responsible father was his penance for being such a such a menace to society in his younger days. Caring for sickly Nanami is the focus of his existence, and her well-being is never far from his thoughts. At right: Enzo and Nanami take a much-deserved vacation.

But there's more to Enzo than teaching art and being super-dad. He's the eldest son of a deceased TV and film star mother who had a number of kids with a succession of husbands. Enzo has gathered all four of his half-siblings togther in what was his mother's house in Tokyo. He's at once the man of the house, father figure, eldest sibling, and primary breadwinner for the assembled family. His siblings (who are between 23 and 14 years old) are sometimes annoyed by his blowhard/overbearing ways, but seem always to understand that he really does love them and wants the best for them and that Enzo's effusive grand gestures are the only way he can express his feelings.

Each of Enzo's siblings has his own stuff to deal with. Shima (eldest sister, 23) is so busy being a responsible mother figure to Nanami and her siblings that she may never actually be a mother for lack of a man. Hinata (16) is an amusingly typical high-school girl. Athletic Haiji and bookish Ryu (twins, 14) are an indivisible pair of opposites who often seem more mature than Hinata, and at other times are reckless in their youth. They all miss their mother, and hold her memory sacred even as they recognize that she really wasn't all that good at being a mother. At left, Enzo talks about the importance of family meals to his siblings and daughter. L-R: Shima, Nanami, Enzo (standing), Hinata, Haiji (standing), and Ryunosuke. At right: Enzo teaches art like he does everything else - with passion.

There are friends and acquaintances associated with everybody as well, some of whom are minor characters, and some of whom are pivotal to the primary plot.

After looking at these sample pages, you've probably observed something else about Hotman: its art is topnotch. Kitagawa-sensee draws faces well and distinctively and his anatomy is generally quite good. Backgrounds are distinctive and page design is straightforward. We've had exactly two pages in eight volumes that required a second look to figure out who was talking to whom. Given the vagueness of English pronouns compared to the specificity of Japanese pronouns, that's pretty good page layout. Given that the manga originally ran 1994-1997, it really isn't dated at all, except by technological objects and the lack of much two-page composition. Even the action scenes are well-drawn.

Kitagawa-sensee has essentially given us the variety of a harem manga without actually having a harem. Frankly, it works better than most harem romance mangas. It has a certain Leave it to Beaver/Father Knows Best quality about it even as it plays with topics like anorexia, poverty, and the slacker lifestyle. It's an amusing juxtaposition, especially when Enzo's street-thug past comes back to haunt him, as it does periodically.

I'd read through vol 8 by myself a couple of years ago and generally enjoyed it. Now we're reading it together, and it's just as popular with Milady as I'd hoped it would be.

Hotman was apparently quite popular back in the day. Popular enough that it, like Salaryman Kintaro, GTO, and Gokusen, was made into a live-action drama series in 2003. I have yet to see any of it, but it was quite popular at the time. I believe it has been fansubbed and should be available somewhere out there...

Not quite slice-of-life comedy (there is a definite, if rather relaxed plot arc), not quite episodic drama, not quite seinen romance, Hotman does a great job of just being entertaining in the best seinen manga tradition. No villains are defeated, no worlds are saved, no panties are exposed in female pratfalls. Instead, it succeeds the old-fashioned way - by telling a story worth reading. Enjoy.

Anime versus Manga

2007-08-15T21:10:00.000-04:00

Yeah, everybody has their opinion on this one, and I'm no exception. What surprises me, though is that some people are so dogmatic about it.

Often the story first appears as a manga, and is then translated into an anime. Sometimes the anime comes first. Sometimes the source material is a light novel, or even some piece of heavy literature (Les Miserables comes to mind as a recent example). Maybe I'm more open-minded than other people about this because of taking a few classes in literary criticism in my college days. One thing that postmodernism was good for was opening peoples' eyes about what constitutes literature worthy of study. It's a core tenet of postmodernism that all texts (text here defined as anything that tells a story, including film, tv shows, etc) are created equal as objects of study. Like most things, they went too far with it, and so there's some utter crap now being seriously reviewed by academics. This is not entirely a bad thing - at least they're less likely to miss good stuff now.

If I haven't convinced you on this point, I'll remind you that Shakespeare's plays were populist universal entertainment performed (usually) in an open-air theatre on the wrong side of the river (that's like saying "the wrong side of the tracks," because there weren't tracks yet) in London. In a very real sense, plays like Love's Labors Lost are the direct ancestors of manga like Fruits Basket or Maison Ikkoku. Likewise most of the novels from the golden age of the prose novel were not regarded as serious literature in their day, either. Serious literature was epic poetry - stuff like The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, or The Idylls of the King (to choose a later example). - prose novels were trashy reading for the masses. It may seem strange to regard something like Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice or Les Miserables as popular fiction, but that is what they were when initially published.

So with that said, the first thing you must do is imitate the academics (after all, they think about this kind of thing for a living) and accept that manga and anime are both forms of literature (pop lit, to be sure, but lit nonetheless) and that one is not inherently superior to another.

Now the next big step: allow for detatchment - the offspring need not be an exact copy of the parent. Frankly, I wish the Japanese did a little better with this one. Example: Stephen King wrote an OK supernatural horror book called The Shining. Stanley Kubrick made a very good psychological horror movie called The Shining, which was loosely based on the King novel.

If you're a hardcore Stephen King fan, you probably don't like the movie very much, because it's not especially faithful to the King story. It's a pretty easy case to make, though, that as a movie, the movie is a better piece of literature than the book is - the plotting is tighter, the characters are more vivid, and, frankly, King has always needed a cruel editor with a sharp knife where his novels are concerned - his best work is his short stories and novellas.

And so it goes with anything - the Karin anime has to be judged on its own merits as a show. Maybe it doesn't tell the same story that the manga does (in this case it definitely doesn't). That doesn't matter. What matters is how well it tells whatever story its attempting, and if the story is worth telling in the first place. And no, I don't particularly like the way the Karin anime is plotted for all that I'm quite fond of the manga.

That said, I think it's fair to say that if the manga came first, it's often better than the anime, simply because adding more cooks to the kitchen seldom improves the product. Or, to put it another way, the mangaka had a concept in mind when writing the manga. The anime producer (who often thinks of himself as an artist forced to deal with somebody else's art) seldom has the same concept in mind when plotting the anime. Two different (sometimes conflicting) views of who the characters are and what the story should be about. There also often seems to be a repurposing of content - Seinen manga are bowdlerized into all-ages anime entertainment (Chobits). Shounen manga sometimes get a fanservice and adult themes infusion in the anime to give them appeal to older viewers (Midori no Hibi).

On the other hand, there are a few situations (similar to the Stephen King example above) where the manga is too long, baroque and complex and the anime producer successfully distills it down into its essentials and makes it into a better story as a result. These are, however, in the minority.

The stories that seem to reliably survive the manga-anime translation the best seem to be character-driven talky mangas - Hataraki Man, Honey and Clover, Bokura ga Ita, Kamichu!, Mushi-shi, etc. Frequently, the action-intensive manga seem to get too frantic when translated to anime. Taken too far, however, you end up with talky anime, which isn't load of fun. Consider how hard Kyoto Anime had to work to make the Suzumiya Haruhi stories (which are fairly cerebral and very talky light novels) work as anime. Sometimes, the story is so obviously visual that it's hard to figure out how it could have been popular as a manga, but it is a shoo-in as a good anime. Binchou-tan is a recent example.

July 2007 - What's on my mind now

2007-07-16T20:57:00.000-04:00

Ho dear reader - I bet you thought this was another one of those 'four posts and it's over' blogs, didn't you? Well, since my blog subtitle includes 'life,' I thought I'd clue you in on a little of mine.

Old geezers like me have things like jobs and responsibilities. Usually I can reschedule this sort of thing around more important stuff like anime watching, manga reading, board posts, and blog entries, but sometimes life rears its ugly head and I have to pay attention to it.

In this case, Milady and I had decided that some basic things needed to change. The anime/manga chestnut about following your dreams and being true to yourself certainly figured in the reasoning, as did a recognition that we weren't very happy with the way some things were going, and that it was going to require some dramatic changes to alter this.

So, about a year ago, I started seriously considering moving from Western Pennsylvania, where the weather is cold and grey much of the year, people are old (the average age is among the oldest in the USA) and rude (Not as rude as further East, but not polite, either), taxes are high and ignorance and machine politics are bliss to someplace nicer.

Heightening this desire was the knowledge that the large multinational consumer electronics conglomerate that employed me was 1) going through some hard times financially, making my job less stable than it once had been, 2) making some really stupid business decisions that suggested that the hard times weren't going to get better soon, and 3) had failed to give me a raise for three years in spite of a steady increase in responsibilities and good performance reviews from all quarters. If a certain Welsh-born CEO wants to know what his company's problems are, and why they lost an employee like me, I'll be happy to give him a detailed list...

It was time for a change. I was ready for promotion, more money, and new challenges at work, and ready to live someplace less generally depressing with people who had more intellectual hobbies than morning radio shows and bar fights.

So I started looking seriously just after the new year, focusing my attentions on a particular town in a particular state on the eastern seaboard. Why that particular town? We had friends in the area, the countryside is beautiful, and the politics, while not wondrously pristine, at least sometimes benefit the many, instead of the empowered few.

Opportunity finally knocked...well, actually I kept beating on the door and opportunity finally answered after about four months. However, once the door was opened, I was invited in for the longest, chattiest job interview I've ever had. And a sequel a few weeks later. After some silly circumlocutory negotiations, I agreed to start work there in the beginning of July...which gave me about a month to give notice, pack, find some place to live, move several hundred KM, start work, and set up house.

It didn't all get done in the proper order. House still isn't moved. I'm staying with friends commuting an hour to work at the new job. Milady and e-chan are still at the old house packing things. I have no idea where they'll be living when they get here. But it's happening.

So what's going on with the interesting stuff? I've been downloading a pile to tide us over until we're settled with high speed in the new location. I also put in an order with rightstuf.com when they had their geneon midnight-madness sale. They're slow to ship, so I may have to change the address...

I'm staying with friends in the new town, and have somewhat different media tastes than they. Accordingly, I'm reading a a fair amount of manga (Maison Ikkoku and Mirai Nikki lately). I've got a list of other things recommended by friends over at mangaforums.org to download and read as well.

Maison Ikkoku is an interesting item. For one thing, it identifies the origin of the hot-widow-landlady trope in Chobits. Yup, the centerpiece of Maison Ikkoku is an off-again-on-again semi-harem romance between a mediocre college student (who is both more attractive than and not as big a loser as Keitaro in Love Hina) , and the hot landlady widow, who married straight out of high school and was widowed in less than a year of marriage. Result: landlady and college guy are pretty close to the same age. The supporting cast is the usual wacky assortment of characters who exist primarily to get in the way of the obvious-as-bricks-down-a-well romance.

The female lead (Kyoko) runs hot and cold - not in a tsundere way, really, but just in an insecure way, similar to Nagisa in Yume de Aetara. To her and Nagisa's credit, both have good reasons for their behavior - they're not arbitrarily tsundere like Naru in Love Hina.

The art is likewise interesting. Since we know that the author is the queen of manga - Takahashi Rumiko, and that this was a huge hit that pretty much established both the harem romance and the rooming house romance as genre staples in manga in the same way that Ranma 1/2 (by the same author) did, and since it's old (1980), it's logical to expect that the art is both dated and probably pretty good by the standard of the day. Right on both counts. It lacks the detailed perfection of Crying Freeman, but the facial work is actually a little better, and the character designs, while simple, are both expressive and identifiable (well, except for the male lead and his principal competition). One can also see how it borrows from the successful serial US comics of the 1960s and '70s. The art has a certain Archie and Veronica flavor, or possibly some Mary Worth about it. This is the first time I've ever looked at a manga and said - "yeah, I can see how the American dailies influenced the art here."

The only other Takahashi I've read in any detail was a one-shot (Vacation-in-law) and the Mermaid series (which I, and apparently the Japanese like a lot). The mermaid series, though, is one of her occasional special projects - it'd probably be a doujin if she weren't the queen of manga. She obviously puts a lot more art into it than into the potboiler stuff like this and Ranma.

This one is so interesting because it obviously has a lot of kids. Yume de Aetara borrows some character traits. Love Hina borrows setting, setup, and some character tropes. Virgin Na Kankei borrows the relationship dynamics of the characters and rips off some supporting characters (the chiisai cutie with a crush on male lead) wholesale. Even Mahoraba, dear as I hold it, has the same setting and a bereaved landlady.

None of this is a bash on any of the newer material, but it does point out just how influential Maison Ikkoku is.

Mirai Nikki (I carefully translate the title from the kanji as something like 'Future Diary' or 'Diary in the Future Tense') is a rather different kettle of fish. Shounen action-thriller. It's a slightly pedestrian storyline involving a modern-day schoolboy shounen who has to save the world (and his own life) and lots of badness and baddies trying to off him, along with the magical girl story trope of a special goodie given him by a super-powerful individual that gives him some special ability. The interesting spins are:

He's not the only guy with a special goodie
Everybody else I've seen who is special-goodie-equipped is mentally warped to some degree or other
The most warped one of all is his dere-dere classmate who has a really sick dere-dere stalker fixation on him.

I've only read through the first volume - but it's a pretty good ride so far. I'm curious to see how the mangaka hopes to keep it fresh in future volumes.

Anime-wise, I'm down to what the slow laptop I'm using can cope with. Mostly stuff like Azumanga Daioh...

Beginning Mangaka Syndrome

2007-06-26T17:50:00.000-04:00

If you've been reading manga for a while, you've probably noticed that many manga that aren't doujinshi or one-shots probably have a significant variation in art quality over their run. This is particularly true with a mangaka's first big hit - IE, the first manga that not only goes into tankoubon printings, but goes past four volumes and becomes an anchor story for its magazine.

Now some of this is intuitively obvious - a beginning mangaka is new at doing his job for his soba and tofu, and probably isn't as skilled an artist as he will be after a year or two of drawing a manga for a weekly. But there's more to it than that - the curve of improvement seems to reliably start about vol 2 and settles into pleasant and usually much better art (and often storyline) by vol 4 or so.

So I took a look into the process, and economics, of being a mangaka. Let's just say that after looking into it, it's obvious that people don't go into drawing manga for the money...

It works like this: Would-be mangaka draws up a proposal (with character list) and sample chapter or two for a manga to be published in one of the many weekly or (rarer) monthly manga magazines. The proposal will be targeted both to the nominal readership of the magazine, and often also toward any editorial biases the mangaka might have heard of/been told of/observed about that particular magazine.

Here's an example of what proposal pages can look like. The mangaka is Kojima Akira, who later went on to draw the successful (and fun) shounen comedy/romance Mahoraba.

Chichiwomoge at mangaforums posted about this, and I snarfed the image from where he found it.

So our aspiring mangaka (who is either in college, or, more likely, has a mundane day job of some kind) makes his pitch to the editors at a magazine and...they buy it (as didn't happen with Seiken Shoujo). Happy mangaka charges home and hits the drawing board. And draws. And draws some more, probably while trading in his full-time day job for a part-time job of some kind and drawing every other minute he can spare.

For all of this labor he is paid the princely sum of ¥3000-5000 per page for a weekly magazine, and maybe ¥10,000 per page in a monthly. A typical chapter is 20-25 pages. As of this writing, there are ¥124/$US. A little quick math has our beginning weekly mangaka making under $500/week, and he's probably living near his publishers in Tokyo, which is the most expensive place to live in the world. The monthly author is doing no better. So yes, you can make a living as a young mangaka writing for a manga magazine, if you:

Don't mind being poor
Are single, and don't mind being single (and unable to afford dates)
Don't mind living in (and spending all your time drawing in) a closet

Let's just say that you eat a lot of instant ramen, and your primary protein source is probably tofu, or natto if you can stomach it. You're living for your art, because you're probably not looking forward to your next meal very much.

Our aspiring mangaka gets published and...wonder of wonders! The manga is a hit. Circulation of the magazine goes up, the fan mail starts coming in, and there's talk of doing tankobons after there are eight or ten chapters done. The gravy train is rolling in right? Wrong.

The contract doesn't get renegotiated just because it's a popular entry in the manga magazine. Our mangaka is still doing the same work for the same money, and maybe will get a bonus, but now there's new pressure on him - If the manga really is a hit, the editors are going to start pushing for more content - color pages, character profile sketches, advertising copy, designs for toy licensing, etc. And no, they don't pay much/any more for it than they are already paying. So the workload has gone up, but the pay hasn't much, if at all.

Further, the mangaka is under a lot of pressure to keep doing whatever makes the story popular, all while still living in his closet, eating his instant ramen, and turning out the additional work on top of the weekly effort of getting the new chapter to press. He isn't getting much excercise, or good nutrition, and he's working millions of hours. The art quality is bound to suffer, and it does.

Eventually it becomes obvious to everybody that the manga is going to keep doing well. It also becomes obvious to the mangaka that he has to spread out the workload or he's going to get sick, burn out, or both. So he gets a small advance for the first tankobon and hires some assistants. but he can't afford a lot of help, and he can't afford experienced, talented assistants - they're probably chums from art school, or other aspiring starving mangakas. They are given jobs of doing things like backgrounds, color fill work for magazine covers, feature pages, and the upcoming tankoubon covers and extra pages. It's a welcome reduction in mangaka workload, but now the artist has to work on management and team-building skills...and he's still having to be creative on a weekly deadline.

The first chance of real income is tankobon sales. Mangakas generally get 10% of the gross of tank sales. Tankobons typically sell for less than ¥400, so a single tank sale nets our mangaka an astounding $0.32 US. A minimum run is 10,000 copies; a good first press run for a popular new manga is in the 30,000 range. Bingo - if the manga has good buzz, the tank is appealing and is properly publicized by the publishing house (including uncompensated interviews for the mangaka), our mangaka might make $10,000 US from the first printing of volume 1 of his hit manga...but he had to shell out quite a bit of that to the assistants who freshened the art, did the color work, and filled in the omakes from his sketches. Nonetheless, he's a happier mangaka who possibly gets some meat on his soba noodles once in a while instead of tofu.

If he keeps doing his job well, he'll finally hit a level of comfort around volume four. At that point, there's enough residual income from the prior volumes still selling (and presumably in later print runs) that he can afford to pay his art team decently, and they, in turn, can afford to put honest labor into fleshing out his creation. If the consumers are addicted to the manga, they run out and buy the prior tanks, and as word of mouth spreads, more readers come on board with each additional tankobon publication. Meanwhile, of course, everybody on the team is learning how to draw the manga better and faster, because they've been doing it for most of a year by now (assume 8 chapters/tank and four tanks - that's 32 weeks' run in a weekly).

So let's say that he makes the same $10,000 residual from the first printings of all of the first four tankobuns. That's $40,000. His base pay from the weekly is still $26,000/year as long as he keeps pumping out pages. So our hypothetical mangaka has more than doubled his projected annual income from tankobun sales in the first year. Life is suddenly a lot better. And as his assistants get more proficient, he can possibly take a little more time and money for things like personal hygiene and a social life. He can rent an office, maybe upgrade apartments.

But now comes the ugly truth: all good things must come to an end. Most mangas have a sweet spot plot length between six and 12 volumes. If it's a fast-running manga in a weekly, it may only have a run time of a year or so, and then our mangaka has to start the process all over again. He will probably get some more money per page now that he's a known quantity, but most mangakas don't get lucky with a second hit as big as the first, and publishers know this.

Suddenly, there's a mass of economic pressure to keep the manga going just a little bit longer. It's a proven seller. It's making everybody money. Milk the cow a little more. Many mangakas do exactly that - they slow the story down, or put in filler plot arcs. Probably the most egregious filler arc I can name offhand is the Tsubasa/stepbrother arc in Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou. It's pretty clear that the only purpose of this plot derail into the life of a pop band with a high schooler lead singer was to extend the manga's run length from 19 to 21 volumes. Likewise, it's pretty apparent that Akamatsu was willing to keep going indefinitely with Love Hina, and I would guess that falling ratings were the only thing that saved us from another lame digression like the trip to MolMol.

On the other side of the ledger is that drawing a manga, particularly for a weekly, is a grueling task. It takes a lot of genki to do this week after week. If the mangaka isn't of the starving artist variety, and if he has been thinking ahead and has already successfully pitched the next manga to a publishing house, he might well decide to wrap the plot up neatly, take the money, and go vacation in Okinawa or somewhere to recharge before starting the cycle again. These are the manga that end neatly and well, like Mahoraba, Midori no Hibi, Planetes, Chobits, etc. Of course, there are also mangas that go on indeterminately because they can and should. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is one such. Gunslinger Girl appears to be another. The common element in these seems to be that the mangakas really like the living as much as they hoped they would. Sure it's long hours, but it's long hours doing something they like. Combined with genuine artistic ability and ability as a storyteller, these are the manga that give us something nice to remember and come back to years later.

At the top of the heap are the rare few mangakas who make a nice living because pretty much anything they draw sells well, and they have name recognition. Publishing houses are willing to give people like this a lot of money to get their product. Takahashi Rumiko is probably the obvious example of today, but there are several others. I suspect, though, that Takahashi-sensee has suffered her share on the way to the top.

Gunslinger Girl: What it is, and what it isn't

2007-06-12T18:10:00.000-04:00

Something tells me that a lot of western manga and anime fans are put off by the name of Gunslinger Girl. It sounds like another fanservice-intensive lolis-with-guns effort.

Before you make that assumption, remember that English titles for manga are often a little mangled in their meaning to native English speakers. How else do you end up with oddities like Yakitate!! Japan or Stroke Material?

So, what is it? It's bloody, gentle, subtle, gross, beautiful, ugly, loving and abusing. The themes and characters are complex, the setting is beautiful, and there's nothing resembling fanservice.

It's like Simoun in exactly one way: the creator is mostly a mystery. We know the author is named 相田裕 (Aida Yutaka), and it's generally believed that said author is male, mostly because of a love of European cars and guns and great care taken in drawing them. There's a stated date of birth which would put him in his mid-20s. If so, I hope he keeps drawing manga for a long time to come...

Gunslinger Girl is also a little like Simoun and Ai Ren in that it's not hugely popular, but it has a base of enthusiastic fans who tirelessly promote it to anyone who'll listen. I'm one of those fans. If you're into Naruto or other shounen hack-and-slash, you probably won't like it. If you're ready for something more complex with simultaneous light and darkness and missing easy answers or simple problems, you might be interested in Gunslinger Girl.

Here's an art sample from the end of volume 5 (it's the mangaka helper credit page). Yes, that's typical of the art in the later volumes. These three people are all on the, uh, other side from the eponymous Gunslinger Girls (I won't call them 'bad guys' or 'villains' simply because, as is often the case in good stories, who is good and who is bad isn't always an easy question to answer). The car is a late-50s to mid-60s Alfa-Romeo Giulia Spider (the author identifies it as a Giulietta spyder, but the Giulietta series didn't come with the 1600 CC engine noted on the boot lid), and is carefully drawn, if mis-identified in text.

If you'd like to see just how good a job Aida-sensee has done, on this site may be found a photo of an almost-identical car identified as a 1965 Giulia Spider Veloce. Likewise, note the anatomy and posing of the people in the picture. It's typical of the art in the manga. Sometimes some characters (the two youngest Gunslinger Girls, Henrietta and Rico, in particular) are difficult to tell apart by their facial detail, but you're seldom left wondering who is who because Aida-sensee uses distinctive hairstyles, distinctive wardrobe (which sometimes is a plot point, as with Henrietta's overcoat) and good establishing shots to show you where something is happening.

Of course, if you know about guns, you'll seldom be confused about who is who if it's an action scene and weapons are drawn. Aida-sensee carefully pairs each character with a gun or three, and the guns are always meticulously drawn. Henrietta's SIG Sauer P239 Tu-Tone is so well drawn on the cover of volume one that you can make out the decocking lever and the logos on the grip and slide. There are a couple of loose rounds along with the ejected magazine beside her, so I can tell you that her pistol could be chambered for either 9 mm Parabellum (my guess, given that the story is set in Italy) or .40 Smith and Wesson, but it's definitely not .357 SIG (no bottleneck). Most of you could care less, I'm sure, but it's nice (and unfortunately rare) to see real technological objects drawn with accuracy and detail in manga. Likewise, the gun choices make sense. Henrietta may be a powerful cyborg assassin with amazing strength, agility, and reflexes, but her stature is still that of the 11 year-old girl she was before her upgrades. A small, lightweight, single-row semi-auto pistol like the P239 is a good choice for someone with small hands, especially if it must often be concealed on a small girl, as is the case here. So GSG wins on another point - the technology isn't just window dressing - it makes sense in context, and it propels the story.

And that brings us to the heart of Gunslinger Girl. Henrietta is introduced first in both manga and anime for a reason. She's the girliest of the girls, among the youngest, and sticks closest to the traditional Japanese school-girl roles (she wears a seifuku when not on assignment, for instance). Her 'handler' (Joze in the Japanese original, which is tweaked variously to Jose, Giuse (my favorite), or Giuseppe by translators) treats her as he would a little sister, buying her gifts and trying to educate her in the ways of a young lady of the world. He also orders her to kill people periodically, which she generally does very efficiently, be it with guns, knives, or her unaided body. She has been psychologically modified along with her cyborg modifications so that she has a creepily obsessive emotional attachment to Giuse and the same burning desire to protect him as a military or police dog has to protect its handler. Each of the girls is paired with such a handler (who usually has prior experience in police work, the military, or some intelligence service). Together, the handler-cyborg team is called a fratello (Italian for 'brother.' Why not fratelli (brothers)? Ask Aida-sensee). Your sample page here (remember, manga read right to left) illustrates Giuse's conundrum: Henrietta has just acted against orders in reaction to a perceived threat to Giuse. She very efficiently used the FN P90 submachine gun she's clutching in the bottom frame to protect him, and thereby made it harder for him to do his job. This is a good example of an early page from Gunslinger Girl. Comparing it to the other pages shows how far Aida-sensee has come as an artist during this manga's run. To be fair, this is also a pretty awful scan. I have no idea what the toning and detail looks like in the Japanese original.

The several fratellos are all part of the Italian Social Welfare Agency Section 2, which is a black-ops anti-terrorism unit primarily tasked with combating the extremist elements of the Northern Italian seperatist movement Padania Republic Faction, which seems to have many of the qualities of the Red Brigades of the 1980s.

If the handlers were all dimwitted, hardened killers and the girls mindless killing machines, then the story would be straightforward and not particularly interesting. They're not. They all are intelligent people with their own opinions, lives, motivations and misgivings about their work, and about their coworkers. The handlers vary in their approaches to their task, just as any group of real people would in the real world.

Similarly, none of the girls is particularly like the others in personality or temperament. Henrietta is more concerned with pleasing Giuse than anything else in the world. Here she is off duty in her trademark seifuku checking her hair in the side mirror of his ragtop Porsche 911 before meeting him upon his return from vacation.

By comparison, Triela is older, wiser, and more sure of herself and her place in the world. Because she's wiser, she's also more thoughtful about her strange dual life of being an adolescent schoolgirl and an assassin. She acts as 'wise older sister' to the younger members of her strange sorority. Also, among the cyborgs in Gunslinger Girl, Triela is unique in having some knowledge of the horrible near-death experience that resulted in her new, strange career. All the girls feel the strain of their unnatural occupation and their handlers try different techniques to help them cope, varying from a brusque all-business approach to brotherly affection.

The girls are, however, all aware to varying degrees that they would most likely be dead or bedridden if it were not for the Italian Government's desire for girl cyborg assassins. They understand that what they do isn't normal, and that they aren't normal. They also understand that, while there are distasteful aspects to their existence, it beats the alternatives.

About now, you're probably wondering if there's actually any action in this soap opera. Oh yes. Here's a two-page spread of Triela going mano-a-cyborg with one of the people from the PRF. She's just been thrown through a window from the second floor to the first, and while it doesn't seriously injure her, as it would a normal human, it definitely smarts. Unlike a lot of manga action work, Aida's is clear, concise, and gives a feel for the intensity of combat. And yes, that is, in fact, the SIG Sauer P230 SL of which she was disarmed the last time they met in Montalcino.

I won't go into the relative merits of Hillshire's choice of sidearm for Triela, other than to say that I think Giuse made a better choice. This is Triela dressed for battle. She carries a sharpened bayonet in a scabbard over her shoulder and an assortment of other dangerous things secreted about her person. The bayonet seems an odd choice until you remember that she can fling a man about as easily as one of her many teddy bears. With her strength of grip, the extra reach of a bayonet over a combat knife is a big advantage (she's about 13 years old, I think, so is a bit deficient in the reach department), and the leverage problem it would pose an un-augmented human isn't a problem.

The particular battle detailed above is the payoff at the end of volume 5, which points out the strength of Gunslinger Girl as a story: While violence is their job, it does not define the characters. It does, however, create complications for them when seeking self-definition. Triela has been training and hoping for this rematch for more than a volume of story, and she's perfectly willing to take a few hits if it means she can off this guy who shamed her last time. Since we the readers know her so well, we are definitely cheering for her.

...Except that her antagonist has a back story and quite a bit of ink behind him as well. I won't spoil anything except to repeat that this isn't mostly a story about good guys and bad guys. There are welcome (to the readers and the members of Section 2) exceptions, but most of the time what is good is determined by where you stand.

You're sold? You want to know where to get it? Well, I have good news, and bad news. The good news is that it's licensed and is partially available from ADV Manga. The bad news is that they licensed it, translated vol 1-3, then stopped for several years. Further, their translations, while OK, are not wonderful, and the graphic quality isn't what it might be - I'd classify it as MQ scanslation at best. This points to the old rule of fansubs versus commercial subs that I've covered elsewhere.

We went through an awful dry spell there for a while - fan scanslations disappeared after licensing, but ADV Manga dropped dead after three volumes and we were stuck in limbo for several years waiting for vol 4. Aria was left in the same lurch. Eventually, the fans got frustrated and started scanslating again. I have three different translations of volume 4 - none done by ADV, which finally released theirs this month. Of the three fan scanslations, I generally like Toukoubi's the best. I have compared it to the Japanese raws I found in an undisclosed location and found little to complain about.

ADV got an infusion of Cash from Japan, and now promise to mend their tardy ways by turning out a volume a month until they're caught up with complete Japanese volumes. As I pointed out, Vol 4 is out there, and I'll take a look at it when I get a chance. In the meantime, I have no compunction in recommending the Toukoubi translations of GSG. ADV blew it, and the burden of proof is on them to show that they can do a decent job scanslation and turnaround time before I'll recommend their product.

But Wait! There's More! That's right - there was a 13 episode anime done. And a very nice one it is, too. It's slice of life, with lovely art and backgrounds, and the story is canon to the manga. it goes through part of volume 2, so there's plenty more to read than there is to watch. Madhouse and Marvelous Entertainment did the anime for the winter 2003-2004 broadcast season in Japan, and it was licensed, subbed, and released by Funimation in the US in 2005. The Funimation subs are reasonably good (could use some culture notes and a little more care with politeness levels), and what little I've listened to of the dub track was OK. Funimation fluffed the stock with a box set released in late 2006 (possibly because they, too, were happy to hear about ADV manga coming back from the dead). Not a bad purchase, and worthy of your anime dollar.

The rumor mill has been humming with news of a second Gunslinger Girl series to be done by Marvelous again, (found on Moon Phase by way of Marvelous's financial report - line entry GUNSLINGER GIRL 続編) but it's still just a rumor. Well...we can hope.

The good news is that Aida-sensee is young, the story is going well, and interest keeps growing. It's all good. Enjoy.

Simoun - The Primer

2007-05-14T07:02:00.000-04:00

Well, we finally finished Simoun. Milady felt the end was a bit of a letdown, as did I initially, until I went back and thought over what had happened and why. And I realized that I had been wrong in my comprehension of what the show was really about.

So what is Simoun about, then? And should you want to watch it? I'm going to address that question here while avoiding spoilers as much as reasonably possible.

One warning: Stay away from the wikipedia article if you are planning on watching the show - it is comprehensively spoiling.

The technical stuff: It's a 26 episode half-hour show. There's a strict chronological plot order. It's not derived from a manga or light novel (although two manga series came out after it premiered). Frankly, I haven't had much luck finding out who actually came up with the idea, who wrote the scripts, etc. The anime production and mecha design stuff is pretty well documented, but I have yet to see lots of discussion about where the complex setting and plot came from.

When Simoun came out in early April 2006, it arrived along with several other anime that quickly developed huge followings in Japan and in the West: Suzumiya Haruhi, Ouran High School Host Club, and Nana. In Japan Simoun did pretty well, and got some buzz from bloggers who were sucked in by the yuri (girl-on-girl romantic/sexual) tones of the show, and others who stuck it out past the first two shows and realized they were looking at something complex, unique and special.

Here in the West, the Naruto and Batman fanboys completely ignored it. Somebody, looking at the pre-release press materials, christened it "Loli-Copters." It might never have been widely seen here, but for a few hardcore viewers watching the raws who talked the show up in their postings. It looks like the early fanbase here might also have been mostly Yuri fanatics (who were also, no doubt, also celebrating Strawberry Panic). The good news is that they had non-yuri-fan friends who liked anime and were curious to find out what the fuss was about.

So what is my take on the whole whole yuri thing? I'm very heterosexual, not a yuri or yaoi fan, don't have issues with what other people choose to do, and so had no problems with it at all. Further, it all makes sense in context - the story doesn't happen on earth, and the people involved aren't actually humans. They just look and act like humans. Simoun obviously falls in the (very popular) convergent evolution school of TV Science Fiction. Yes, I recognize that this is a handwave for dramatic purposes. So is most science fiction and fantasy set on other worlds. Your mileage may vary.

There's another issue for a few - if you're strongly religious, and have problems with willing suspension of disbelief where your faith is concerned, you might not be happy with Simoun. This different world has a different religion, and different results and expectations thereof.

At some point (about two episodes in), a critical mass was reached and people started to talk about fansubs. Doremi dug into an adequate job, then dropped the project about six shows in. The rabid fans got together and formed their own fansub group, logically enough named Simoun-Fans. Enter a great truth: The more the fansubbers love the show, the harder they will try to make the subs perfect. This is the reason why fansubs are always better than commercial subs. Simoun-Fans' subs are excellent - as good as Solar's subs of Honey and Clover, which are my benchmark of subtitle quality.

Their love, whether or not it dares speak its name, is not misplaced. Simoun is as interesting and worthwhile as any 600 minutes worth of TV anywhere. It shares a quality with other worthwhile literature in that it doesn't tell you what to think. It shows you happenings, and leaves it to you to figure out what you think.

So, should you watch Simoun? Maybe. You should not bother with Simoun if:

You like clear-cut villains, heroes, and predictable character stereotypes
You can't handle seeing girls and (on one occasion) guys kiss each other
You can't stand the idea of sexual indeterminacy (and no, I don't mean gender-bending, I mean neither one nor the other, as in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness)
You get bored if people in the show aren't shouting at each other or trying to kill each other
You think nonverbal symbolism is for sissies
You don't want to pay attention enough to learn to tell eighteen characters apart

You should watch Simoun if:

You like seeing characters develop
You like seeing people wrestle with problems of duty, identity, and self-determination
You enjoy Studio Ghibli-style scenery
You appreciate a soundtrack with musical complexity and subtlety
You enjoy being surprised by plot developments, and rarely are

Interested? Good. I'll give you a little primer on what's good to know before you start.

Good stuff to know:

Latin. Latin is hard to work with in Japanese, but they give it a good try. Place names, technical terms, some character names, and other miscellaneous words are often Latinate. This isn't a bad idea if you think of how alien Latin is to the average Japanese TV viewer. The few who recognize the derivation will also get that it's an ancient, dead language, which fits the milieu of the story as well. The fact that the phonetics are awkward makes figuring out what the Latin word actually is something of a challenge. Here (from Hashihime) is a pretty spoiler-free vocabulary list.
The shows come in pairs. If you've got time, I recommend watching an an odd number episode and its following even-numbered episode immediately afterward. I think this is because the scripts were written for an hour-long timeslot and then cut in half.
There's a big cast of characters. Print this (from Hashihime again) and keep it handy when you watch. It'll save your sanity during the first few shows. Just about everybody on this page advances the plot in some way, so it behooves you to get to know them all. Don't stand on your first impressions of any character - they're all deeper than the initial impression suggests (yes, including Floe).
The world's name is Daikuuriku, which translates as something like 'Land of Great Skies.' It is in a binary star system.
People on Daikuuriku are all born female. As teenagers they choose (or have chosen) a permanent sex. The process of becoming male, if necessary, takes some years to complete. If this sounds farfetched to you, I'll note that there are a number of vertibrate species on Earth that do exactly this.
Our principal characters are all citizens of the nation of Simulacrum, which is a theocracy.
Simulacrum is at war with all of its neighbors. We don't know how many neighbor states there are, but the two that matter are:
The Argentum Archipelago, (Latin: 'silver') which is in the midst of a coal- and oil- fired industrial revolution (think Edwardian Britain), and appears to be either centralized communist, a monarchy, or a dictatorship with limited personal rights
The Plumbum Highlands, (Latin: 'lead') which is an impoverished mountain nation
Simulacrum appears to be feudal and agrarian. It has no heavy industry and is not doing well fighting the artillery, tanks and aircraft of Argentum.
The Theocracy of Simulacrum worships the deity Tempus Spatium, (Latin: 'time' 'space') which is apparently responsible for setting people's permanent sex, among other things. There is no evidence presented of anybody in Simulacrum not worshiping Tempus Spatium, and no evidence of religious repression, either.
Along with services held in temples, in which wings and stained glass figure prominently, Tempus Spatium is worshipped by performing certain ritual aerobatic maneuvers called ri maajon with aircraft called simoun. When the simoun perform a ri maajon, they leave a sparkling silver trail in the sky.
different ri maajon have different functions. Some are diplomatic or ritual, some have a destructive effect. A number of ri maajon are documented in ancient writings, but only a few of them are fully understood.
Simoun are regarded as holy artifacts. They can only be operated by pairs of girls who have not yet chosen a permanent sex. These operators are addressed as miko-sama (translates as something like 'honored temple maiden') by ordinary citizens of Simulacrum, and as sybillae (singular: sybilla (Greek: 'prophetess')) by themselves and the theocracy.
Simoun do not use propellers, airfoils, or jet engines. They fly by virtue of two helical motors and are, apparently, moved by the direct blessing of Tempus Spatium.
Simoun are capable of performing maneuvres that would be impossible for any aircraft that can or forseeably could be built on earth. Quite a feat for a pre-industrial agrarian society.
There are also trainer aircraft called Simile Simoun (or just Simile) which are powered by one helical motor. They are not regarded as anything special, and can be flown by anyone with sufficient training.
There is a cadet system for training young women in the practical and theological ways of being a sybilla. It appears that many are called, but few are chosen. Cadets are easy to spot because they wear a distinctive white-and-blue uniform, are younger, and are often attending sybillae.
Because simoun are so maneuverable, and because they can perform destructive ri maajon, the Simulacrum government has been using them to fight the war with Argentum. Since simoun are holy items, and their pilots are preistesses, there are profoundly mixed feelings about this move in many quarters.
Sybillae are organized into a chor (latin: 'choir'). A chor at full strength has 12 members and six simoun, and is capable of performing the most complex ri maajon known. They are normally based at the Simulacrum Grand Temple, but have been relocated onto various helical motor powered airships acting as aircraft carriers.
The sybillae who are most of the show's characters are all members of Chor Tempest (Latin: Choir of the Storm). Chor Tempest is based with two other chors on the former luxury liner Arcus Prima (Latin: 'first ship') at the start of the show.

One last thing - as I said, I sort of got the show wrong on initial viewing. I won't spoil it with excessive detail, but will point out that you should pay attention to what the populace expects of the sybillae, and what are the effects of having them around. You won't learn much about either of these until about halfway through the series, but they figure prominently in understanding what the show is really about.

That's it. Anything more would spoil the fun. Enjoy.

Fansubs vs. Commercial Subs, and Common Errors of Fansubbers and Scanslators

2007-05-11T07:55:00.000-04:00

...and why commercial distro companies are doing a bad job of competing. To be fair, it's always hard to compete with people who do something for free out of love of the product, which is why Microsoft is so terrified by Linux (frankly, having produced a crapoplex like Vista, they should be terrified). It's also probably a lot of why fansubs/fan scanslations keep circulating long after the commercial subs/scans are out there, even if the commercial ones have been ripped off as well.

Put simply, fansubs are usually better. Here are my comments about it when psygremlin at Mangaforums asked about mangled fansubs. I honestly couldn't think of any I'd seen in recent memory that really butchered the dialog. Scanslations, yes, but not fansubs.

I know a little Japanese. I try to learn a little more every day. One easy way to do this is by osmosis from subbed anime. Here's what I've decided about subs:

1) Commercial subs are, at best, as good as average fansubs. Most of the time, they're worse. If you're really unlucky, they used the dub script for the subs, and so you have mangled meaning both from translation errors and from the dub director's edits to retime to mouth motion. If you're doubleplus-unlucky, you get something like the Disney sub track for Kiki's Delivery Service, which includes lots of annoying patter that doesn't even exist on the Japanese voice track and whose only purpose seems to be to distract from the beautiful pictures on the screen. (insert generic I-hate-Michael-Eisner rant here).

2) Fansubs (and manga scanslations) sometimes suffer because the source material for translation isn't a Japanese soundtrack, but a commercial or pirate Chinese or Korean dub or sub track. Nothing like two layers of translation to ruin your day. The problem, simply put, is that there are a lot more people who can, and choose to, translate Chinese or Korean into English than can translate Japanese.

3) Fansubs, most of the time, are labors of love, and fansubbers take them seriously. This may result in slow release schedules, but usually means good product. Generally speaking, the more widely popular the content, (consider Welcome to the NHK versus Slayers), the more care is taken in translation. Likewise, standards have gone up over the years. I have yet to find good subs of the Captain Harlock series, and the subs of Devil Hunter Yohko are pretty weak as well, but the average sub of last season's stuff is generally pretty good. I'm grateful there are groups out there like Central Anime who are currently doing a great job subbing stuff from my childhood like the Yamato series. (You guys rock!).

Likewise, there's talk now (mostly due to the strong underground fan support) of releasing a licensed R1 DVD set of Simoun. English-speaking Simoun fans are of two minds on this: On the upside, we'd get direct-to-DVD video quality. On the downside, it's unlikely at best that the subs that shipped on the DVD would be as careful, nuanced, and generally good as the ones done by Simoun-Fans (you guys rock, too!). So I guess I'd end up ripping the R1 DVDs to computer, building subs in from the Simoun-Fans subs, and then burning new viewing copies. Please, Simoun DVD people - if you're reading this - just use the Simoun-Fans subs - they'd license them for free I'm certain.

4) Fansubs, at their best are so full of otaku goodness that there's no way that a business would dare release shrink-wrapped DVDs with their content. Consider the detail in the Solar subs of Honey and Clover, where literally any piece of readable text in the frame is translated in a matching font. Sure, it takes three rewinds to read it all, but who cares? It's great, and adds a lot of meaning and depth to the scene. Oh, and yes, I did catch them in one translation error in all 41 (I think?) episodes of H&C they subbed, but it was minor. Careful sub work like this or Oyasumi's work on Welcome to the NHK (which translates the ads on the trains in Tokyo) just doesn't happen if somebody has to make a living from it. (You guys rock, too!)

Frankly, I've read a lot more creaky manga scanslations that creaky anime subs. Some of the chapters of Fruits Basket I have require considerable mental editing before a coherent English sentence emerges. Chobits was another one that I feel like deserves a best-possible scanslation and hasn't had one.

Originally Posted by psygremlin

I agree with the comments above. My intention wasn't to disparage the translators (who do a sterling effort!) but more to see if there are any classic examples of Engrish that crop up from time to time. Funnily enough, I've found the translations in scanlations to be better in some cases than in the licenced mangas - the latter often seem to suffer from mild censorship (*grumble*) that does then lose something in translation.

More often than not, I would say it's not Engrish you get as much as hybrid grammar. For instance, the Japanese equivalent of an indefinite third-person pronoun is "ano hito." This translates literally as "that person." Sure enough, you see "that person" a lot in scanslated manga, and it's often used as an indefinite, rather than a reference to a particular person. English, of course, has a perfectly good indefinite third-person pronoun as well - "one." Example: "One should be neither a debtor nor a lender." It's sexless (remember, words have gender, people have sex, and personal pronouns refer to people), and is therefore a perfect synonym.

Most of the time when 'ano hito' is used in an indefinite sense, 'one' is the only grammatically correct and logically consistent translation. But nobody ever seems to use it.

A lot of times I'll see someone's sentence stretch across two bubbles, and the grammar won't make good sense in English, because predicate phrases and verbs usually need to be switched around. This is a case of translating the bubbles correctly, but not the sentence.

And then there are sound effects. Some, like the 'gacha' a sliding door makes opening or closing are great and should be left alone or just rendered in the roman alphabet. I've actually gotten used to doki doki and dokun for heartbeats (in either katakana or romaji), and never have liked translations to 'ba-dum' or 'thump' because neither is specifically an onomatopoeia that only a heart makes like 'doki doki' is, and it can sometimes confuse the reader instead of explaining something.

Another area of complaint: Japanese uses a number of ritual set phrases. These are always the same, and carry a certain formality simply because they're rituals. Accordingly, they logically should be translated the same, and in a way that makes sense. 'Hajimemashite' generally does OK ('nice to/pleased to meet you'), but 'yoroshiku onegai shimasu' is frankly difficult to literally translate into English, because we don't use such formalisms in English any more. Perhaps the closest real English phrase would be something like "Hail and well met," or "May the sun shine upon the hour of our meeting." but they're both medieval. It'd be nice to see these used in a sword-and-sandals manga, though, since they're usually set in Japan's feudal period - using feudal English would be a good fit. Perhaps something like 'I hope we'll be friends' might not be out of place most of the time.

A common mistake is with 'onegai shimasu' and its variants. This phrase is usually translated as 'please.' But a bunch of different words and phrases can be translated into 'please,' and don't mean the same thing. 'Onegai shimasu' has overtones of humbly beseeching (it's what you say at the shrine when praying for something from a god). Just translating it as 'please' often isn't strong enough.

A lot of times its these ritual phrases that trip up translators who aren't native speakers of Japanese. They get mistakenly literally translated, so unless the reader knows that it's a ritual phrase, he don't understand that there's probably more gravity and formality to the situation than the literal meaning of the words suggests. The phrases used for "lets go steady/let's get engaged" are frequent victims.

A last example is poor modeling of degrees of completeness and politeness. You've probably noticed that girls generally say 'gomen nasai' when they are making heartfelt apologies. Guys, being in a more dominant position in society, generally get by with a bowed head and 'gomen...' A 'gomen...' from a girl means she either is not as worried about appeasing the recipient of the apology or she doesn't take the offense all that seriously. Frequently, the translators will miss one or the other case. A guy actually saying all of 'gomen nasai' while bowing is really profoundly apologizing (sometimes in a comic over-the-top way). A female needing the same degree of apology would probably have to raise her voice, repeat it several times, or abase herself to get the same level of intensity. Insults work the same way...

So that's the sort of thing I see most often wrong with fan translations. All of this said, they're still generally drastically better than some of the evil things that commercial firms have done to manga and anime to supposedly dumb down/broaden appeal to the western market. You know, if you take all the seasoning out of something, it becomes bland, and nobody likes bland. Tokyopop's earlier efforts on Fruits Basket (de-pervifying Shigure, among other things) as pointed out by Sephiroth's Samurai Girl (hard working translator) are a great example why I won't be buying the Tokyopop tanks of Furuba ever.

May 07 - What's On My Mind Right Now

2007-05-07T18:26:00.000-04:00

Just a quick update because I'm in the middle of a big post on character archetypes and I don't know when it'll be done. Anime and Manga reading has contracted some as the weather has improved and Real Life (tm) has intervened.

Anime first:

We're four shows into the most recent adaptation (13 episode series) of Takahashi's Mermaid Saga (titled Mermaid Forest). It's quite faithful to the manga, and to the earlier OVAs, and milady generally likes it. I've always liked this story best of Takahashi's work (but haven't yet read Maison Ikkoku, so it's possible my opinion will change). My one complaint so far is that while there's gore and violence as there should be, I'm distinctly missing Yuta's melancholy. Likewise, Mana's character seems to have lost some genki somewhere along the way. The OVAs had a genki (and younger-looking) Mana playing against a melancholy (but cheered by Mana) Yuta, and it worked pretty well. We'll see.

Hataraki Man has been on hiatus because milady has been requesting Simoun every night. I must admit that this development pleases me. The last Hataraki Man we saw featured Hiro's masseuse and dealt with themes of compromise with corporate goals while still managing to have a sense of worth and accomplishment. I rather liked it. As I've said before, I think we in the west suffer from not getting more workaday anime and manga here. The Japanese spend a lot of their lives at work, and their fiction that touches on this is usually worth attending. That said, Simoun is just plain deeper and more complex.

Before e-chan goes to bed we often give him some anime for a half-hour or so. Since we haven't started Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2 yet, he's been getting Binchou-tan. He loves it. I like it. Even milady, who is a hardened cynic where kawaii is concerned is affected. This show may just be the ultimate weapon of chibi-kawaii. Drop it on an al-qaeda hideout and listen to the simultaneous 'awwwww!' (or whatever they say in Arabic).

And that leads us to the meat and drink of evening anime lately: Simoun. I'm probably going to burn some more electrons on this later, but we're over halfway through the show now, and I have to say that I'm siding with the rabid fans on this one. That said, it's like a shinkansen - the pace gets fast and furious, but it needs a few kilometers of straight track to really get moving.

One thing that milady noticed that hurts the momentum early on is the show length. She commented that the shows seem to come in pairs. I agree. We started watching two a night, and it flows a lot better. The plotting suggests that this was meant to be 13 one-hour shows instead of 26 half-hour shows. If you watch the first two hours of Simoun in two sittings instead of four, everything makes sense a lot faster, less forgetting happens, you learn the cast faster, and you get into the real meat of the plot faster. All good. It also makes Neviril seem like a lot less of a whiner.

By this metric, the plot really starts doing stuff during hour three, and you probably are going to be surprised by your first plot development around hour four.

Oh well, if the only slot they could get was a season of 1/2 hour showtimes, I'm still profoundly glad they made it.

Another thing that hurts the early shows: it has a Fruits Basket problem. By which I mean that there's a large cast of characters, they all have distinct personalities (good character design - they're all visually distinct, and are credible as people), and they all advance the plot in their own ways, so it behooves you to pay attention to them all. Yes, the guys in the hats, too. This means you're going to be confusing people for a while. Don't worry too much about it - as long as you pay attention, you'll have everybody straight in your head by the time it becomes really important to understand who's motivated by what. I'll warn you of this, though: Download and print this spoiler-free character list (from Hashime's blog) for reference in the first few eps. It'll make your life better. Also: stay away from the wikipedia article which is pure spoilers, and will reduce your viewing pleasure. Once you're about six eps in, you can check out this amusing Simoun Relationship Chart, from Kurogane's Blog. I may be sounding fanboyish here, but I think I'm in good company...

Good thing: They don't waste recap time. There's a little recap when they jump right back into the plot, but it usually contains a little new dialog along with the old, and maybe a reverse-angle shot (often with useful information in it) of the conversation you saw at the end of the last show. It's a great idea, and it works well at keeping you glued to the screen even though you just saw that conversation.

Another good thing: The soundtrack. I like the OP song OK, (but wish they'd kept the mournful a-capella sound instead of going with the drum-machine overlay), and like the ED song a little better (milady likes it less). The actual soundtrack music (all composed specifically for the show) is a wonderfully eclectic mix of orchestral music, dance music (including a very tasty tango), some synth work, and even a couple of pretty 'traditional' tunes (one a hymn, one a lullaby sung by Rodoreamon). It's just all so good. Sahashi's work is as good as any I've heard in anime for any sized screen (and that's high praise from a music snob like me).

We watched the, um, 'trip to the ruins' show (ep 17 and 18) last night (he said, carefully avoiding spoilers), and I'm here to tell you that I was honestly surprised by two plot developments in that 46 minutes of TV. I don't remember the last time that anything on TV really surprised me - thought I'd seen every 'creative' plot twist that had been tried. Heh. Y'all can keep Lost. I'll stick with Simoun, thanks.

It's going so fast and furious right now that I think the wheels are about to come off. But then I thought the wheels were going to come off at ep 10, and again at ep 14, and the train just kept going faster. It's masterful plotting. Now I'm wondering how they're going to wrap it all up neatly in the remaining four hours (which are actually about 46 minutes each).

My greatest sadness is that it's only 26 episodes. My greatest fear is that they'll try to do a sequel and ruin it. I think it's like Serial Experiments Lain in (only) one way - it is about something, and when it finishes talking about that something, it will be done and will exist as a perfect thing in itself.

Manga:

Pretty short list right now - I've been reading Ai Kora/Love Collage (by Inoue, who did Midori no Hibi, which remains my all-time-favorite shounen romance). Ai Kora isn't as good, frankly, but it's not terrible, either, and I'm hoping that he has an idea how to wrap it up neatly when the time comes. Right now (I've just finished vol 4) we're kind of stuck in character non-development limbo, but there are signs that this might change. I'll say this - Inoue-sensee is willing to do anything to get a laugh, and I still like his page design, plotting, and character design as much as ever.

His and hers bedtime reading is still Fruits Basket. Now that we've (finally) introduced all the juunishi, the plot is (finally) pleasantly humming along. We're into Tooru's second year in HS, and this is when all the fun starts to happen. Probably the last big plot hurdle is developing the student council characters, but these are vital to Yuki's plot arc, so I'm trying to keep milady from getting too annoyed at having yet more characters show up to be distinguished from each other. I've done a great job concealing the crucial spoiler about Akito from milady, so I hope it'll bop her right between the eyes just like it did me when I read the manga. She has developed an appropriate loathing for him, so all's going well so far. I have not yet read the last chapter (Sephie published it) but I have a pretty good idea where it is going, since I read through about chapter 128. Oh, and BTW, it appears that Tokyopop rethought their butchery of the US release and hired new translation staff for the manga. So the last few volumes should be good - just all the earlier ones will suck. Sadly another case where fan scanslation is better than commercial scanslation.

I did read the last two chapters of Kare Kano. Ha! the gag in the last chapter got an actual laugh out of me. Completely in character and exactly the sort of puckish humor a mature Yukinon would pull on Arima. I still found myself completely unmoved by the whole pop band story arc, and regarded it as being sillier and more marginal at +16 years than it was originally. Oh, and does this mean that love is fated, or just that Asaba was always a latent lolicon? Oh well, after the whole Maho-and-her-dentist plot, we know that Tsuda-sensee doesn't have problems with playing ball if there's any grass on the field at all. I can't say that anything surprised me, but it was a pleasant ride. Overall, Kare Kano gets a B+, which ain't bad for a shoujo romance manga that runs over 100 chapters. I'd give Furuba a B by comparison, mostly because the art and page layout aren't as good, but also because the character development isn't as detailed as in Kare Kano.

Other stuff in the can: Got hold of the Japanese raws for Chobits finally, so can at last check out some translation questions I had. Re-read Ai-Ren. Got teary-eyed again. I have some one-shots in the can suggested by smart people over at mangaforums. Maybe this weekend.

[post-weekend update]

I read up through the currently-translated chapter of Ai Kora (no big changes, except that we now know how many parts Hachibe can obsess over thanks to a diagram of his brain) and we watched up through ep 22 of Simoun, which finally had its first schmaltzy moment, but was bearable. I think I see where the big arc is going now, and I suspect that the plotting-ignorant fanboys/fangirls generally don't like it at this point, but it's necessary to slow the train down before it pulls into the station. Of course, there may be another huge plot twist yet (I'd write one in, and I see a couple of possible ones). I think Checkov's gun is still hanging on the wall from about ep 6 (in the form of something that used to belong to Aaeru's Oji-chan), and I suspect that it's about to be taken off the wall.

The bulk of Sunday's post-yard-work TV watching was the Elsa arc in Gunslinger Girl. I admired the job they did with it. That manga chapter brought tears to my eyes and I was both dreading and looking forward to seeing it in the anime. Apparently I wasn't the only one so affected - the Anime production staff did a beautiful job on it and stretched it into a three-episode arc. Milady kept justifiably admiring the scenery. Among other things, the anime is a fine tourism advertisement for Italy both urban and rural. Certainly Sicily never appealed to me as strongly as a destination before Giuseppe and Henrietta visited it, even with the purse-snatching scooter bandit. I'm sad to say I was completely oblivious to the "Roman Holiday" references in the earlier Henrietta episode, and only twigged to them when I read it in a blog entry somewhere.

I felt like the plotting and pacing on the whole arc was pretty close to perfect. Certainly the payoff scene (which I was dreading, and stone-facedly refused to spoil in spite of all of Milady's questions and conjectures) had all the emotional freight of the manga. It sparked an interesting conversation between milady and me about Giuse's burden because of the the metric ton of emotional anvils that 'Etta dropped on his shoulders when she smilingly uttered her "but I wouldn't do that because you treat me so well!" line.

I twitched and shuddered at the thought of being Giuseppe. He's simply never allowed to have a bad day around Henrietta - he's the totality of her universe, and her happy little applecart stays upright every day only because he's nice to her. Rico is happy to be alive and whole, Triela wants a supportive friend more than an obsessive onii-chan. Henrietta, however, is incapable of being happy unless she thinks Giuse is pleased with her. And we see just what are the consequences of an unhappy Henrietta in Elsa's story. The episode works even better because they immediately preceded this scene with the conversation between 'Etta and the female section 1 agent about how being a little girl cyborg assassin just isn't 'normal.'

Milady had a...less cheerful childhood than mine. She simply can't imagine why anybody would sign up for Giuse's job with its inevitable painful emotional freight. My response was obvious (to me) both because I'd read the manga (which includes Giuse's back-story) and because I think I'm more than a little like his character: "Because you know that somebody's going to do it, and probably wouldn't do it as well (as compassionately, in this case) as you could. These girls have such a terrible, brief existence that there's a moral imperative to palliate it as much as one can." She completed my sentence for me (some days, I think she really does understand me). And then said that she just doesn't emotionally understand noblesse oblige, which is how she defined my reaction.

Behold the power of good anime made from good manga. It causes people whose brains have not yet been rotted by US network TV pablum to have interesting conversations about relevant topics. How different might the current Battlestar Galactica have turned out if the writing staff had been forced to sit down and watch Gunslinger Girl instead of Desperate Housewives, or whatever dreck caused them to come up with season 3.

Manga Markets and Genres defined, or how not to confuse Seinen and Sword-and-Sandals

2007-05-02T02:22:00.000-04:00

I've found myself answering this question repeatedly in different places, so that must mean it needs a proper treatment.

Here are the four major (and two minor) markets of readers for which manga are written:

Shounen
Shoujo
Seinen
Josei
Yaoi
Yuri

And here are some of the genres:

Magical Girlfriend
Magical Girl
Harem Comedy
Historical Adventure
Slice of Life
Romance
Comedy
Sports
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Giant Mecha
Sword and Sandals (my term, from hollywood movie genres. Maybe it should be 'katana and geta?')

Note that these two groups don't look anything alike. It behooves you not to confuse them.

OK, so I've thrown out these words, now I'll define them. First some background: The manga market in Japan is huge. Everybody in Japan reads manga of some kind or other, even if it's only Azumanga Daioh (vaguely analogous to Peanuts in its heyday) or Tonari no Yamada-kun (which is kind of the Japanese Blondie). Because there's so much money to be made in manga, there are a lot of manga out there, and it's a big business. Manga are published in all kinds of magazines, from newspapery rags all the way up to slick, fat monthlies like Kodansha's Afternoon.

Because so many manga are published, categories (based upon the demographics that read a particular magazine - their markets, if you will) have arisen. There are four big markets defined (five if we count small children):

Shounen Means "young men," refers to male readers between about 10 and 17 years old.
Shoujo Means "young women," refers to girls the same age as shounen above
Seinen Means "mature men," refers to readers 18+.
Josei Means "mature women," as above.

There are also some marginalized markets that nonetheless get magazines and (lots of) doujinshi printings:

Shounen-ai is male-male romance stories (think shoujo romance with all guys)
Yaoi = male homosexual stories
Yuri = female homosexual stories

Differences: If it's meant for underage readers, it'll be short on nudity, short on adult themes, and (if you're looking at the Japanese original) there will be teeny-tiny 'helper hiragana' beside the kanji (Chinese characters) that much of Japanese writing uses, because school kids haven't really learned all the standard kanji until they hit age 15 or so.

I include shounen-ai, yaoi and yuri under markets and not genres because they seem to be in their own 'mauve ghetto' just as in the west, are written for distinct readerships, and don't much cross over into the mainstream, although the lines are definitely starting to blur, especially with more anime being derived from (more thematically complex) light novels instead of manga. Simoun and Strawberry Panic are two examples of non-marginal anime that definitely have some yuri going on in them. Shounen-ai and Yaoi, by comparison, still seem to be relatively marginalized except as a source of humor.

How to tell what it is if you don't already know:

Shounen: usually has adolescent male hero, friendly, possibly romantic but not sexual opposite-sex relationships, mild fan-service, action but not gore, and plots that would appeal to a boy in junior high - lots of aliens, espers, time travelers, strange monsters, and saving the world, or at least winning the big game and getting noticed by the desired girl because of it. Girls (and usually adult women) will be unusually busty for their age and (these days) beyond the realm of anatomical possibility. There are also often female character archetypes like meganekko (glasses girl), klutzy girl, brash girl (uses boku), etc. Bishounen (pretty-boy) character designs never occur in shounen or seinen manga except as a source of humor (cf the "Seiji in Kouta-Vision" scene in Midori no Hibi).

Examples: Naruto, Midori no Hibi, Great Teacher Onizuka, Eyeshield 21, Ruroni Kenshin.

Shoujo: Hearts and flowers. Adolescent female heroine. Heroine often chibi (unusually small even for a Japanese schoolgirl) Real, hardcore shoujo usually involves lots of romantic yearning and melodramatic situations (dead/absent parents, etc.) Nothing even vaguely resembling fanservice; girls are drawn as flat-chested as real Japanese girls are. If you see a girl in a swimsuit, it's arranged like a fashion show, rather than eye candy. Males are often drawn unrealistically 'pretty' (bishounen, as in Fruits Basket). Heroine is usually striving for some unattainable standard of goodness/moral perfection often in hopes that if she tries just a little harder Mr. Right will notice her/want to be romantically involved with her, or she'll fix everybody's emotional problems, or some combination of the two. Often spends ink on the relationships between heroine and her posse of female friends. Even when Shoujo wanders into more adult themes, lots has to happen offstage to keep things G rated, so we tend to hear about violence and sex rather than see them.

Examples: Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou, Fruits Basket, Bokura ga Ita, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Alice 19th, Fushigi Yuugi, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Jigoku Shoujo

Seinen: Hard to define because so broad a classification. Some seinen manga are basically shounen manga with more violence/blood and gore/heavy fanservice/sex. These are meant to appeal to high-school and older males who want more of that Drifting Classroom feeling in an R-rated package.

Other seinen manga are basically adult light novels with pictures. The most thematically complex seinen manga fall into this category: things like Ai-Ren. Still others are simple escapism (usually in the slice-of-life or school life genres), because being a salaryman in Japan is hard and exhausting, and there's a steady market for simple, comforting stories that soothe. Most of the genres available in shounen are also done in seinen manga, although some are much rarer - sports manga, for instance.

By comparison, comedy romance and romance manga seem to be commoner as seinen manga than shounen manga (though I suspect they draw a certain amount of older nominally-shounen readers). Likewise, the slice-of-life category doesn't much exist as shounen (with the exception of general-interest manga like Today in Class 5-2 and Azumanga Daioh).

Real hardcore slice-of-life like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou seems to be a uniquely seinen thing. Harem romance comedies tend to have a different spin, with the male lead having sexual relationships with more than one of his female companions, as in Honeymoon Salad. Generally, if it's R rated for sex, or sex forms a significant plot element, or there's gory violence, or lots of bare busts, it's probably seinen. If it is strangely plot-free and is slice-of-life, it's probably seinen.

The last seinen category that comes to mind is wistful nostalgia. You have something like a magical girl story but with deliberate anachronistic touches which is designed to appeal to older family men who want a simple story with happy endings that reminds them of the notionally simpler and happier days of their youth. Things like Kamichu! and Binchou-tan fall in this category.

Examples of seinen: Honeymoon Salad, Futari Ecchi, Vagabond, Ghost in the Shell, Kamichu!, Onegai Teacher, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

Josei: Shoujo aged up for women. Most often grown-up shoujo stories (romances like Honey and Clover) along with workaday stories like Hataraki Man. You can spot a josei story pretty easily - there'll usually be at least one flat-chested chibi adult female in the female posse, and these never occur in seinen or shounen stories. Likewise, the shoujo drawing convention of creepy-big round eyes seems to show up in Josei as well. Again, the material looks superficially like what you find in shoujo, but with more adult plot elements and themes. If it's older-themed material, but the women are mostly flat-chested with big round eyes, it's josei. As in shoujo, the focus is on interpersonal dynamics and relationships rather than saving the world, blowing stuff up, or winning the big game.

Examples: Hataraki Man, Honey and Clover, Nodame Cantabile, Gokusen

That said, there is obviously a lot of crossover between josei and seinen. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou could easily be called josei, except that it's published in the largest seinen monthly, and the character designs don't quite fit the standard shoujo/josei model. I think it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of female readership of Afternoon, so the mangaka deliberately avoided alienating the woman reader with a more male-oriented set of character designs. Likewise Hataraki Man, which has a busty female lead. It's josei, but there's supposed to be some crossover appeal to the seinen reader as well. Similarly, Ayu in Honey and Clover has more eye-candy value than she needs to in the shoujo/josei mold. Bishounen designs seem not to occur as often in josei, probably because of the desired market crossover.

Shounen-ai: boys love boys, but don't actually do much about it. Tends to use a lot of bishounen character designs, and has its own iconography involving guys lying on beds of roses, etc.

Yaoi: boys (and men) love boys (and men). See above about shounen-ai, but add in more (ahem) mature content. My understanding is that the biggest consumers (and producers) of shounen-ai and yaoi material in Japan are women.

Yuri: girls/women loving girls/women. Tends to look like shoujo romances, but with all females.

Examples: I don't read this stuff, so know it more by joking mention in mainstream material than anything else. I could go to mangaupdates and look stuff up, but then so can you, and I'm not interested.

I won't spend a lot of time on genres - these should be pretty self-explanatory once you've actually read a few manga. One note worth mentioning: A magical girl story is about a girl (typically under age 15) who has some supernatural power and uses it do to good. A magical girlfriend story is a romance about a guy who gets a girlfriend via some unlikely/impossible/magical means. The girlfriend frequently has magical qualities or abilities. Probably the perfect example is Aa Megama-sami/Ah! My Goddess.

Genres mix and match - you can have a science fiction magical girlfriend romance (Chobits), or a fantasy magical girlfriend romance (Ah My Goddess). Likewise, nearly anything can be highly plotted or not. If it's not highly plotted, it probably qualfies as slice-of-life regardless of its other attributes. So yes, you could have a slice-of-life historical adventure romance-comedy. I can't name one like that, but there are some that need that many compounds to be adequately explained.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Chobits, Video Girl Ai, and Ai-Ren: Four views of artificial people

2007-04-26T00:16:00.000-04:00

This is sort of a random-salad post about several manga that have a lot in common, even though they sometimes deal with very different themes: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Chobits, Ai-Ren, and Video Girl Ai. Three of the four could be classified as "magical girlfriend" stories, but both Ai-Ren and Video Girl Ai don't endow the 'girlfriend' with any actual magical/technological supernatural powers. Therefore, I'd have to say that neither really falls in the same category as, say, Ah My Goddess, for example.

No, what they really have in common is artificial people, to use a nice catchall Heinlein term (almost all females in this case - YKK has one artificial male). While exploring the psychology of why androids, etc in manga and anime are so often female might make a good post, I'm not going to do that one today. We'll lay some groundwork first.

Let's start with Video Girl Ai, by Katsura Masakazu which is probably the least complex of the four thematically. VGAi would normally be classified as a magical girlfriend story, but for the minor issue that the only really magical thing about female lead Amano Ai is that she was created in an alternate dimension to be an entertaining and confidence-building short-term romantic/sexual partner for inexperienced males. She's supposed to be relationship training wheels, if you will. But, in the usual nature of these plots, she ends up stuck in the real world, and with more real-world (and exasperating/inconvenient) attributes than the notional yamato nadeshiko (difficult to define in English - the traditional perfect Japanese woman/wife). This pic is from the OVA anime series, which is very well done. Whew: late update. I see that Justin Sevakis over at ANN has just named the OVA a "buried treasure." Boy do I feel old. There was a DVD release, but I've never seen one - I saw it in the fuzzy VHS days. Never heard the dub, although he says it's not bad. As usual, I like my whiskey straight, my coffee and tea black and my anime subbed, thanks.

Katsura's art starts off a little shaky, but improves rapidly through the volumes. I'd say that by the end of VGAi, Katsura is as good as anybody drawing manga today. He went on to do I''s, which looks better but is pretty tepid and not (in my opinion) worth reading. Since it's a shounen romance, there's lots of fanservice. This is from 1989, before character design became standardized with huge amounts of moe, random fan service, stereotypes (meganekko), etc, so the female character designs are within the realm of anatomical possibility, which is something I like. Overall, I give the art a good solid B+, which is way better than it needed to be to get the job done.

It does dip into deeper thematic waters once the obvious love-triangle stuff has been explored. Male lead Yuta has to come to terms with Ai both not being his notional perfect girlfriend and with her being an artificial creation not meant to make a permanent companion. Ai's makers try to 'take her home' on two separate occasions (because she's a 'defective product'), and Yuta has to appeal with logic, emotion, and lots of good old bloody, painful suffering to get her back. All of that said, it's easily the lightest of the four manga I'm discussing today, and makes a good introduction to shounen romances and magical girlfriend stories. Here's my conclusion from a discussion on mangaforums.org about good romance manga:

Video Girl Ai will always have a special place in my manga affections. It was the first manga I ever read with my then-new girlfriend (who is now my wife). She had been exposed to a little anime, but knew nothing of manga. Evening cuddle-and-read-manga sessions quickly became a staple and VGAi was a perfect introduction. If Midori no Hibi had existed then, we would probably have read that instead; as it was, Ai did the job nicely. Katsura is sometimes wantonly cruel to his characters (see Zetman for a harsher example) but I don't think he dared to mess with VGAi too much.

It does end happily, but you might want to stop reading before Katsura trots out his brand extensions. He tries to extend the franchise of the (highly successful) manga by trotting out new lead characters after the Ai/Yuta arc wraps up. It doesn't work. The good news is that Ai and Yuta are left undisturbed, and their plot completes well.

On to Ai-Ren (愛人), which is the one I discovered most recently. Set in the medium-distant, post-apocalyptic future, Ai Ren is definitely not a shounen romance (even though the male lead is a shounen), and I'd have to say it fails qualification as a magical girlfriend story as well. Ai (the female lead) is a genetically engineered human meant for some unknown (probably military) purpose back in the bad old days, and now repurposed before activation to be a source of solace and hospice care giver for a terminally ill patient. Yes, the male lead (Ikuru) is the terminally ill patient. Ai seems to have no special powers (hence my claim that this isn't really a magical girlfriend story), and is doomed to a short lifespan once activated.

Definitely not a light shounen romance, despite the superficial similarities to Video Girl Ai. It originally ran 1999-2002 in Hakusensha's Young Animal, which is Seinen (and also serializes Futari Ecchi and Chocotto Sister). It's sad, of course. It's not, however, depressing. At least I didn't think so. In fact, it's one of the most life-affirming things I've ever read. The real themes are the universality and transcendent nature of love and that life, hope, and renewal spring eternally if only we're smart enough to get out of the way of them.

Character designs are simple but expressive, anatomy is adequately drawn, and the scenery is almost as good as Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (more of this below). It's seinen, so it's pretty casual about nudity, but the casualness is always appropriate in context (the male lead is a teenager, and there's comic intent to his wild takes). The art meets my 'What Makes a Good Manga' requirement of being good enough to not get in the way of telling the story, and more than that we need not ask.

So if you're looking for a sad but life-affirming read that will make you want to hug your loved ones, look no further than Ai-Ren. Available completely scanslated from Solaris-SVU. At least one reader (Eureka, who put me onto the manga) claims it changed his life. Maybe it won't change yours, but it might just help you appreciate it more.

Here's some discussion between Eureka and me at mangaforums.org about Ai-Ren and its comparability to some other mangas involving artificial people:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eureka

And Ai-ren is an amazing romance Seinen. I'm glad you're going to read it. Very tragic though...as I'm sure I've already said...it's the only manga to bring me to tears...but it's still THE greatest story of all time, and is mainly romance themed, but with alot of darker stuff in there as well.

I read most of Ai-Ren yesterday. Went home and hugged the wife and offspring more than usual. Finished it up today.

Evening manga reading last night was hurrying toward the conclusion of Chobits (which I'd read years ago but milady hadn't. She'd never seen CLAMP's work, and this struck me as their most-accessible and possibly least-annoying offering. There were some odd resonances for me between Ai-Ren and the themes of devotion and self-sacrifice in more-or-less humans in Chobits.

It may seem strange to say it, but Ai-Ren really felt like the personal side of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou to me. The drawing style isn't dissimilar (that's pretty high praise in itself), and the themes (end of humanity, plot happens by the sea at the end of a disused road), and slice-of-life quality were very reminiscent for me. It wouldn't have seemed strange to me if Director Alpha had been working with the Sensee at the institute.

Meet Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Translates as "Log of a Yokohama Shopping Trip"). Very seinen - originally published in Kodansha's Afternoon monthly. And, unlike Ai-Ren, completely and utterly devoid of anything you could call fanservice. Here I am singing its praises further along in the compare-and-contrast-with Ai-Ren conversation:

I'll admit it - I'm a YKK fan. I completely understand the huge following the manga had in Japan among exhausted salarymen on their way home after a week of 12 hour workdays.

It's a sort of slice-of-life, plot-less, zen, post-apocalyptic episodic manga starring Hatsuseno Alpha, a type A7M2 robot (actually an android) who lives by herself and runs a cafe at the end of a disused road on a spit of land not terribly far from the mostly-submerged remains of current-day Yokohama. Alpha is an endearing and amusing character, and a bit of an innocent. Her relationships with humans and other robots are the glue that hold the manga together. Above is a screen shot from one of the OVAs done verbatim from the manga. It gets the feel better than anything else I could quickly find.

If you like lush scenery and just looking at pretty pictures, this is a manga for you. There are developments of both situation and character, and at times plot arcs go on for as long as a volume at a time in a loose sort of way, but don't expect to find out lots more detail next week on what happened last week. Chances are, however, that you will learn more about it at some point, but it might be two volumes from now.

Zen and the circle of life form primary themes. In this, it's rather like Ai-Ren. As a person, Alpha is more like the Sensee character in Ai-Ren, both in her position of being much longer-lived than the humans around her, and also in being a child of humanity, but not human. She has her own life and her own path, and while she walks with humans, their path is not really hers.

I think that on one level it can be read as a response to Asimov's "Bicentennial Man." (cf also the painfully bad Robin Williams movie) in which Alpha shows that a robot need not desire to become human to have a happy life, and need not shun humanity to that end either.

If you like the journey more than the arrival, you'll like YKK. If you're always in a hurry to see what happens next chapter, you probably won't like YKK.

It ended last year and is completely scanslated, best by ykk.misago.org and cafealpha.org. There's a torrent floating around of the whole thing, I think. You can read individual chapters at http://ykk.misago.org/. Never licensed in the US - the comic-book fanboys can't stand something with no fanservice, no plot, and no violence. For the rest of us, it's like a quiet cup of tea, and as welcome on busy days. Yes, I'm a fan. I've re-read the whole series twice, and have read some chapters at least five times, just because I picked up at some point and started reading again. It's like that. Enjoy.

And that brings us to Chobits, which I've extensively covered in another blog entry (spoiler at link). Described briefly, it's a seinen magical girlfriend story with an android as the female lead. In this, it sounds a lot like Boku no Marie, but it has a couple of huge differences: First, it was done by CLAMP, which is an all-women manga author collective, so you can rest assured that no female role will be thin-as-cardboard here (they do a fine job with all the male characters as well). Likewise, if you expect that a bunch of women doing a seinen/shounen magical girlfriend comic romance are going to tweak the reader's expectations of the genre, you're right. Second, it jumps straight into the ethics and philosophy of having an android as a loved one. I think it makes an excellent book-end for Asimov's Robot Stories and, in some ways, I think it paints a much more realistic portrait of what existence for a sufficiently heuristic android might entail in some possible futures.

The art is...almost too good in some places. The sample page is male lead Hideki explaining practical capitalism to Chii (she's holding her first paycheck). Yes, Chii generally looks like that. Yes, you should go brush your teeth now before they fall out from the cuteness. Note how easily the narrative flows, how there are no unnecessary words (isn't Hideki's wordless surprise take great?), and how just-plain-good the panel and page design are. This is a typical page which I chose mostly because it has Chii in some detail along with Hideki and no real spoilers. The mechanics are uniformly excellent. Page design and panel design always work well. We're told late in the story that 'Chobi' (plural Chobits) is a word coined by the androids' creator to describe something impossibly cute. Chii pretty much defined the chibi-moe heroine when she appeared in 2001, and I don't think she's been outdone since. There's some fanservice, but it's both contextually appropriate and plot developing. If I were assigning letter grades, for art, I'd give Chobits an honest A - maybe even an A+. This is one of a small list of manga I'd love to see printed on larger paper in an art-book format with marginal annotations, like what Christopher Tolkien has done with the drafts of his father's books.

The more I look at this manga, the more I admire how deliberately it is plotted. Every event that occurs has some specific place in the larger plot, and everything in the plot relates back to the themes of the story. With Chobits, it's best to assume that you're seeing something for a specific reason - even if it seems unrelated to the plot at the moment. Don't worry, it'll all make sense later on, and finding out how and why is part of the fun.

The anime is also well done. Skip the English Dub - Crispin Freeman is totally unconvincing as Hideki the Hokkaido farmboy. The Seyuu who did the part originally is the same guy who did Kyon in Haruhi and Yuuichi in Kanon 2006, and he's a good fit for the part. Tanaka Rie does her usual amazing job with Chii (even after having heard both, it's still hard to believe she plays Hiro in Hataraki Man). It's not exactly the same story as the manga, and discards some of the subtler themes, but overall it does a good job of treating the complexity found in the story given the limitations of family viewing and 26 1/2 hour episodes. I'd recommend reading the manga first, if you want to watch the anime. Your preconceptions from the anime might prevent you from seeing some of the subtexts in the manga, but you won't miss any of the fun in the anime if you've read the manga first.

So there you have it, four stories involving artificial people in four very different situations. They're all worth your time. Enjoy.

Fruits basket: "Really All That?"

2007-04-24T14:42:00.000-04:00

Well, on the upside, it's on the hairy edge of being too bishonen pretty, but stays on the "I can stand to look at this" side of that edge. Panel and page composition is pretty good, the supporting characters are adequately interesting, and Tohru, while not exactly as 3d as some shoujo manga leads is a lot more believable than, say a Watase Yuu character.

And there are plenty of characters! If you don't like one, you're sure to like two or three others...

On the downside is that there is a big cast of characters (the whole Sohma family) and they're all drawn pretty much alike. And Tohru (to look at) is the same almost-generic pale-chibi-heroine character we see all over in shoujo lately (Tsubasa in Kare Kano, Hagu in Honey and Clover). And, because there's so much ink spent on the Sohmas arguing over what biscuits they'll have with tea today, we never learn all that much about Tohru's friends.

Then there's place: the whole story happens in three locations...well, maybe five, but there's a very definite ukiyo-e (floating world) feeling about it because nobody ever goes to a noodle shop, gets a bag of taiyaki, or watches a movie. Compare to KKNJ, where they go to Kyoto on a class trip and visit the temples, or Mahoraba, where several shop owners have recurring roles in the manga.

Oh, and can we have establishing shots when we switch scenes between these three places, please? The inside of Shigure's house looks a whole lot like the inside of the Sohmas' house...

I've got to say that I like the character development in Kare Kano better, for all that I was bored by the Tsubasa/stepbrother arc in the middle. Both of the leads in KKNJ seem to be reasonably close to fully human. I'm not sure I could say the same of anybody in Furuba but maybe Shigure and Yuki. I don't think it's possible for a real human to be as happy about housework as Tohru seems to be through all 23 volumes...

And, while it's early in the scanslation process, I'd have to say that, unless the animators invented the depth we see in Honey and Clover, it's got to be significantly better than either KKNJ or Furuba. Of course, it's josei, so it'd likely be more complex anyway.

All that said, I put Furuba on the cuddle-with-milady and read manga list instead of KKNJ because it's a more interesting plot than yet-another-teen-romance and we'd just finished up Midori no Hibi and are working our way through Chobits.

Is J-Pop the last real pop music on earth?

2007-04-22T16:02:00.000-04:00

Here's one place my being old and crufty isn't part of a persona: I pretty much loathe about 90% of the assorted noises that people choose to listen to and call 'music' these days. I live in North America, and Clear Channel and its competitors have done a fine job of taking all of the music out of the broadcast music business.

To be fair, I think that only most of it is the 'music industry's' fault. It's true that they have elected to forget about little things like discovering and nurturing new talent for the studio stable because it reduces 'shareholder value.' And it's also true that the radio conglomerates with their standardized playlists have destroyed any possibility of serendipitously discovering a new song or band by listening to most radio stations in the US.

However, the musical micro-focus of most younger people and their unwillingness to be around music they didn't personally pick out seems part of the problem as well. If you're going to be exposed to a lot of different music, you'll like some of it, and you definitely won't like some of it. You have to suffer the bad to get the good, and there seems to be reluctance to do that. Gangsta fans can't stand metal, metalheads can't stand country, country fans can't stand lyrical or tonal complexity (oops, did I say that?) and so there's no such thing as fusion music anywhere except on a few college radio stations. Likewise, if somebody gets creative, and makes something wonderful, nobody except the niche listeners of that micro-genre ever hear it.

This is not to say that there is no good music being done today in North America, just that it's not well publicised or well distributed. And a lot of musical forms seem to be endlessly recycled. It surprises me that punk and new wave are still around - music that sounds like I could have pogoed around to it in my college days is currently cool. Trust me folks, if it sounds like the Violent Femmes, Suicidal Tendencies, The Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Burning Sensations, Fear, The Dead Kennedys, Millions of Dead Cops, etc, it's not new music. It's just recycled old music from when I had fewer wrinkles and more hair on my head. I didn't/don't like grunge very much, but at least it's distinctly a product of the 1990s. And if you don't know what any of those bands sound like, take a listen. You might be surprised at who's ripping off whose sound these days.

And then there's the whole hiphop thing. Most of it isn't worth having around. Some is funny. Now and again, somebody in that market gets creative, but it's rare. If you're a white suburbanite and you're listening to this stuff, it's because you're a wannabe, not because the message transcends boundaries, unless you think that smoking dope, busting caps into people, and talking about the difficulties of dealing with your string of ho's counts as a universal message...

(wow, this really is a rant, today, isn't it?)

OK, so on to the actual subject of the post. If you can't get pop here (except for the embalmed and stuffed kind), where do you go to find bands turning out all kinds of random wild musical combinations that might even have a good beat and decent musicianship? Japan of all places.

I don't know why, but there's an abundance of creative people doing all kinds of styles. Some are distinctly western, some definitely aren't. Some are strange mutations. And no matter what your taste, somebody in Japan is turning it out. The amazing thing is that this stuff is inevitably perfectly matched to some anime or other and becomes a memorable OP (opening), Insert, or ED (end credits) tune.

If you're old like me, a lot of it sounds like a trip down memory lane. The OP song for Hataraki Man sounds like the GoGos before they lost their punk edge: "A girl wants a man who can work. So then he puts his heart into it and works and slaves and and gets boring." The end credits to Serial Experiments Lain have a distinctly '90s whiny guitar player sound. Want thrash metal? How about the end credits to NHK ni Yookoso? A vulnerable girl ballad about teenage love? Look no further than the OP to Bokura Ga Ita. Something with a heavy dance beat and lyrics about painting the sky blood red with our love? Karin OP. Need a smooth girl R&B Love ballad? The OP to Chobits is just what you want.

Sometimes, though, you have to wonder about the musical choices. Some stuff doesn't seem so perfectly matched. E-chan currently gets occasional episodes of Nurse Angel Ririka SOS as an evening reward for good behavior (hey- it beats Disney!) The OP tune is straight-out-of-the-club at 1:oo AM Euro dance club music, and the lyrics are about somebody crying in town and it's all my fault. What this has to do with a Magical Girl show about a 10 year old saving the world with an enchanted nurse uniform is anybody's guess... I must admit that the club music is infectious and reminds me of more of my misspent youth, but 10 year old schoolgirls?

Likewise the second ED song to Honey and Clover, which was about a girl who can't escape from the bad outcome of a drunken one-night stand. Huh? Has minimal relevance to the show at best - all the girls are 'good' girls, and while they're the usual Japanese lightweights where alcohol is concerned, none of them ever gets into a compromising position under the influence.

Likewise, soundtrack music is often of a very high quality. While both the OP and ED songs for Suzumiya Haruhi season 1 left me indifferent (I generally prefer pop songs that happen to fit the show over pop songs that were obviously written for the show), I thought the different mood-setting musics for the soundtrack were very effective (Gregorian chant for the 'organization' of Espers got a laugh-out-loud from me, as did a couple of other choices).

Anime movies and OVAs generally benefit from good soundtracks and themes as well. My all-time favorite theme to a spy movie that never was is the OP tune for the Read or Die OVA, done by Taku Iwasaki. The tune and the opening credits animation set such a high standard that it's amazing that there's not a letdown when the show starts. Joe Hisaishi, likewise, has done sterling work on a lot of Ghibli releases, generally with superb results. I must admit, though, that the video-game-like electronic score used for the aerial combat scenes in Nausicaa has not aged well. Oh well, the minuet he composed for Nausicaa's requiem is so perfect that it demands we forgive any such momentary lapses.

All of this is yet another side effect of the Japanese taking Anime seriously as a story-telling form, and investing time and money to make a better product because they know that the market will preferentially buy a better product over an inferior one. To use the economics term, there's a strong 'quality signal' because all the otakus talk to each other about what was good and what sucked. And because everybody in Japan watches at least some anime, the music has to have universality for the audience -- it has to be popular. And, because the Japanese are a culture of consensus, popular is easy to define.

Is all J-pop wonderful? of course not. Some of it is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, was produced by a studio as a manufactured band, or whatever (yes, I'm talking about Morning Musume here, among others). But there's a lot of wonderful stuff out there too, and it's worthy of your attentions.

Anime off the Beaten Path

2007-04-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

If you've been watching anime for a while and you're not an otaku (fanboy), you are probably aware that lots of anime seems to be designed to appeal to people that aren't you.

That's certainly true in my case. I haven't been a shounen for several decades now. I have a chibi-me running around the house, a wife, a job...all that stuff. So yet another schoolboy doing derring deeds saving the universe while looking longingly at the fanservice-intensive female lead probably isn't going to get me very interested most of the time.

So I'm always looking out on the margins. What's new and sounds strange? What are older seinen like me in Japan watching? What can I watch that I won't automatically compare to the last five things I saw just like it?

Here's some fun stuff that has come out of this search:

1. Old stuff. Yes, there's more great old stuff around now than there was five years ago. Central Anime in Kansas is doing a great job of fansubbing on the Uchuu Senkan Yamato cycle (see my capsule review of S1 here). They're using the cleaned-up R2 DVDs released to vintage otaku types there. I've run across some of the Harlock series as well, but the subs haven't been very good. I also ran across a nice dual-audio copy of Vampire Hunter D, and a good fansub of Macross from the restored R2 DVDs (I'd never seen the original Macross before - wow is that OP song bad).

I think I ran across Legends of the Galactic Heroes somewhere, and there's likewise the entire Gundam franchise which I've never watched. I should be set for vintage space warfare for quite some time. My one big regret so far is that nobody seems to have English subs on Heidi, girl of the Alps, which apparently never ran in the US. No, I haven't lost my mind - I have a rug rat to entertain, and he digs Yamato and Nurse Angel Ririka SOS down to the ground. What's not to like about a Shoujo show made by Miyazaki and Takahata?

The above points out that not all obscure old stuff is from people you've never heard of. Studio Ghibli, for instance, has an extensive back catalog. You probably haven't seen everything in it. I haven't, yet, and I'm making an effort. Mimi wo Sumaseba (called Whisper of the Heart in the US, but more accurately titled as If you Listen Closely), for instance, is a fine example of a perfectly nice teenage romance you've never seen with all the characteristic Ghibli pretty views and (generally) good soundtrack. I'll warn you, though, that a John Denver song figures prominently in the plot, although the heroine (to my amusement) says the lyrics are trite after translating them literally.

My favorite seldom-seen Ghibli movie is Omohide Poro Poro, which translates as something like "Memories Falling Like Raindrops." It's a more adult story than most Ghibli offerings, and is set in (mostly rural) Japan of the recent past. If you ever wondered what a slice-of-life Ghibli movie would be like, you need wonder no more. So check out the back catalogs of big names you know - you might find a gem or two.

2. Stuff meant for older viewers. The first HD series I downloaded right when I got back into anime after the decade hiatus was Kamichu! It sounded fun and quirky, and I wanted to see how good it looked. Right on all counts. It's set in Onomichi of the 1980s, so has a distinct nostalgic feel for anybody who lived through that time, even if on a different continent. Turns out it's designed to micro-target men my age...

Milady, who is the same age I am less a few months, is an avowed fan of Hataraki Man. The Go-Gos-like OP tune sets the mood perfectly, and it definitely speaks to her. I find it amusing as well, even though several of the characters fall into shoujo/josei stereotypes. I'll say this: the workaday world of Japan doesn't often make it across the pond to be fansubbed, and it's our loss. All of the few work-life comedy anime and manga I've seen were enjoyed, and some are favorites.

I haven't really got it figured out yet, but I think Binchou-tan might fall into this category as well. It's so purposefully sparse verbally (less than 150 words spoken in the first ep), so pretty to look at. So pathetic. In its own way it evokes the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou manga for me more than the two OVAs did. It's too slow for kids, so I think it's actually seinen as well...

3. Odd fish. The manga/anime industry in Japan is so big that they semi-randomly create wonderful mutations. Somebody takes a silly idea (say tactical cyborg loli-assasins) seriously and creates something sad and wonderful like Gunslinger Girl.

Or a couple of guys get together and do a what-if show about breaking down the barriers between the internet and the physical world which, amazingly enough, is really good, like Serial Experiments Lain.

Or somebody sells Bandai Visual on this great novel idea they've got involving aerial warfare, lolitas, ancient priesthoods, forgotten wisdom of the ancients, teen-age sex changes, and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting. Something like Simoun results.

Or somebody decides to do Thelma and Louise, except with Thelma being kickass at kung-fu, and Louise being deadly with a katana walking around Edo era Japan with lots of slapstick comedy, like Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran.

These mutations are such prizes. And they inevitably have a long shelf life, and are usually well made. I always hope the next thing I discover will be another one.

Sad Manga Good and Bad

2007-04-16T14:48:00.000-04:00

There was a discussion at Mangaupdates about sad manga and anime. One of the things I really like about manga/anime versus most American stuff is the willingness to create an honestly sad story. You can't have apparent brightness without contrast.

There were a number of citations, some of which were shounen action manga with a sad plot development somewhere, some of which were various flavors of sad-ending shoujo romance, and some of which were actually pathetic in the model of Russian fiction. Here is my take:

I think the reason people's responses are all over the map here is that there's more than one kind of "sad" and different people respond to different things:

The commoner kind is the "unhappy plot development" variant. If you've read Video Girl Ai, you've seen the part where Ai gets taken back by her maker as defective. Not pretty stuff to read, since you already know Ai well, and you (if you've been reading this long) are quite attached to her as a character. Of course, since it's a happy-ending shonen romance, the situation is used as an opportunity for Yuta (the male lead) to grow a pair, as is often the case with these plots. Usually the mangaka will throw in something like this in a shonen manga with a romance sub/primary plot about 2/3 the way through the story arc. A slower (shoujo) example of the same thing is the stuff that goes on in Arima's head through the last third of Kare Kano.

A rarer, but recently more common sad setup is the "pathetic" variant. Pathetic, here, is used in the Greek drama sense, meaning "inspiring pathos in the reader." Even Ghost in the Shell has a little pathos about it, but if you really want to wade neck-deep into the pathetic, you can't beat material like Gunslinger Girl or Eden. Takahashi's Mermaid series (which I like best of all her work) is more upbeat, but still definitely pathetic in tone. To make a pathetic plot work, you have to set up likable characters in a continuing horrible situation. This is easy. The hard part is to be a good enough story teller that anybody actually wants to read it. One story I thought that bit off way too much but somehow managed to chew most of it was Kirara. It manages to be funny while still having a pathetic undertone...at least until the confused, hurried ending.

What keeps people coming back to stories like Crying Freeman, the Mermaid Saga, Video Girl Ai, Eden, or Gunslinger Girl (to use a more recent example) is not that the readers are gluttons for punishment, but that the author has done a good job of creating characters you like and situations you wish they weren't in.

Speaking of Gunslinger Girl specifically, I think it hits you a lot harder if you are somebody's parent. Likewise, I grew up around military working dogs, and recognize most of the conditioning and resultant behavior (accurately portrayed by the mangaka), which just makes it creepier.

Quote from corallein

Random thought: where would this put Grave of the Fireflies? I know a fair number of people that absolutely refuse to watch it because it's too sad.

Well, I'd file it in the same category as All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque, and a goodly body of Russian fiction (like The Little Match Girl for a short and typical example).

Yes, it's really sad. That's pretty much its purpose as a movie. William Tecumseh Sherman said it best: "War is hell." Takahata designed the film to set up a pathetic and empathetic situation and used the framework to make a simple statement about war, its effect on civilian populations, and the consequences of putting pride and principles above pragmatism. I would argue that when Seita dies at the end of the film, it's a release from suffering and thus better than his alternatives at that point. It's very much like Russian fiction in that way.

Yes it's definitely pathetic. And what I've observed of different people's reactions to the film suggests that their opinion of the film is shaped almost entirely by their opinion of Seita and his actions. If the viewer empathizes strongly, he will be moved emotionally. If he regards Seita as a pompous callow youth, a less profound reaction results.

I think that one reason the movie is so generally effective is because Hollywood (and much of the Anime industry as well) have conditioned us to expect an 11th hour reprieve and happy ending. Movies (and books, and manga) that have the cojones necessary to deny us the happy ending are often better, but seldom big box-office hits. Consider the lawsuit over the ending of Blade Runner to be a good lesson in why really sad movies aren't often made. Ridley Scott finally got his happy/unhappy ending in Thelma and Louise, and I'd have to say it worked pretty well. Likewise, Ai-Ren isn't anybody's idea of a happy-cuddly story, but it nonetheless manages to say some profound (and hopeful) things about love and humanity even as both of the lead characters die. Sometimes you have to risk big to win big in literature, just as in other forms of gambling.

The great pity, of course, is that a movie by Isao Takahata (cofounder of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miazaki's favorite producer) is only available at all in the USA at all because Central Park Media managed to get rights to it. Practically nobody in the USA outside of anime fandom has seen the movie. Pathetic, isn't it?

Manga for the Canon?

2007-04-15T16:30:00.000-04:00

Teck-Loh at Mangaforums started a thread asking for nominations of manga for a hypothetical literary canon of manga worthy of study. I'd been thinking along these lines as well - American Comic books and pulp novels get (probably more than) their share of scholarship these days, and are the subject of a number of term papers, dissertations, and thesises. Frankly, if Spiderman or HP Lovecraft is worthy of academic study, a number of manga are far more so. One manga that leapt immediately to mind because I'd re-read it recently was Chobits by CLAMP. Here, revised and expanded as usual, is my attempt at an argument for including Chobits in such a canon:

Chobits definitely qualifies. Features in common with other great literature:

1. Can be read on multiple levels: Magical girlfriend story, Polemic on the nature of being and personhood, story about the different forms love can take between two people.

1a. That Chobits is, in its first aspect, a magical girlfriend story isn't really likely to be an issue of contention. It meets all the criteria in any definition I can name and is, in fact, cited as an example in the Wikipedia article.

1b. The polemical nature of Chobits is subtle, but I think the case can be made that it has one. Chii's existence as an android (referred to as a 'persocon,' a portmanteau of 'Personal Computer,' in the story) is accepted as fact, as are the rights of self expression that humans enjoy in Chobits' Tokyo. However Chii's right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of hapiness' is an issue of constant questioning, discussion, and dramatic importance. In the world of Chobits, persocons legally are chattel property of their masters. Having been built and programmed with the specific purpose of serving humanity in mind, they generally seem to be content with this arrangement, like the self-aware robots encountered in Asimov's robot stories. It is apparent that there will be no "rise of the machines" in this world. They are, however, at the mercy of their masters in every aspect of their existence including its continuation and the continuity and violability of their memory.

As in the Asimov stories, different types of persocons have varying levels of self-awareness and complexity of intellect. The reader is presented with examples of this variation: Dita, Zima and Chii are very heuristic and self-aware, capable of abstract philosophical reasoning, and display emotional responses stated to be different, but apparently indistinguishable from human ones. Yuzuki and Kotoko are likewise self-aware, and exhibit some apparent emotional responses, but are not shown to display the ability to radically alter their own behaviors (programming) in response to environmental changes in the way that Dita, Zima and Chii do. Sumomo and Yumi (through Ueda's recollections) have much more limited abilities of reasoning and abstraction and apparently no behaviors not explicitly programmed.

The ability of a persocon to exercise apparent free will varies with its complexity; all the persocons except Sumomo and Yumi are shown doing so, sometimes to the surprise and/or dismay of their human owners. In one notable example, Kotoko publicly exposes her owner's theft of Chii, indicating Kotoko's displeasure with his actions. While it is made clear in the story that she is incapable of lying because of her programming, she volunteers the damaging information unasked, which certainly is in excess of the requirements of any such truthfulness-enforcement algorithm. The stated existence of such an algorithm is interesting in itself: Persocons as complex as Yuzuki and Kotoko are apparently normally capable of lying independently as they determine the occasion warrants. That Kotoko's owner felt it necessary to install such a program is suggestive.

So, having created robots that can modify their own programming in response to their environment, feel emotions, and lie, we're presented with the simple reality of cybernetic personhood. The question, then, is do these cybernetic people have the right, or even the ability to be happy in this world created by and for humans? The most complex persocons demonstrate the ability to feel romantic love for humans or other persocons. Why they might do this is not explored; it is presented as a fait accompli.

The question central to Chobits' plot is: are humans capable of accepting this love for what it is and is not and reciprocate it in kind, or are all human-loving persocons doomed to suffer unrequited love? An elaborate back-story of the creation of Chii and her twin sister as surrogate children by the inventor of android persocons is presented. The unhappy ending of Chii/Elda's sister Freya's story illustrates the nature of the problem: A persocon capable of feeling intense emotion can, in the Chobits universe, have its 'heart' broken, just as can happen to a human. Having loved unwisely and too well, Freya pines away and eventually dies, and Chii carries a download of Freya's consciousness within her as an internal protector and mentor.

Here's where we get to the polemic. Asimov's robot stories present us with robots that are only happy as long as they do not too closely approximate humanity in appearance and cognitive power. In Asimov's world, Humans don't want lifelike androids, and robots are happiest, safest, and most useful when they are strongly distinct from and more limited than humanity. Probably the best example of this is in the story, "The Bicentennial Man" (an acknowledged part of the SF canon), in which the protagonist yearns to be ever more human, changing his appearance and mannerisms over a more than a century of existence to more closely approximate humanity. Eventually he petitions the human government for recognition as a human and is denied, because of his immortality. His solution is to poison himself slowly to death, and thus he completes his metamorphosis into the desired human state at the expense of his continued existence.

In Chobits, however, Chii and her fellow persocons don't want to be human, and neither state nor exhibit any indication of yearning for greater humanity. They just want to be loved for what they are and are not by those whom they love. They are also not assumed to be immortal - accidents, component failures, and planned obsolescence all limit their runtime. This difference is crucial: in a very real sense, CLAMP is asking why an android would be unhappy with its existence as Asimov did, but proposes a completely different answer (and a much happier outcome) than Asimov's.

1c. If read casually, Chobits seems to spend a lot of ink wandering around the point. Many peripheral characters are introduced, a number of side and back stories are developed, and, in many cases, these side stories and characters marginally advance the principal Chii-Hideki plot if at all. There's always a common thread, though: All the side stories illustrate different ways humans and persocons can love each other in all the possible permutations. CLAMP carefully presents us with a spectrum of love relationships and their consequences: Hideki's classmate and friend Shinbo elopes with their married cram school teacher, who is a 'persocon widow,' having been completely displaced in her husband's affections by a persocon. Ueda the baker married his persocon assistant and was bereaved when she ceased to be after a hard disk failure. He later falls in love with Hideki's coworker, and after much misunderstanding between them, eventually forms a second love relationship. The love between Hibiya and Chii's creator was so great that Hibiya does not even consider another romantic relationship after his death. Minoru, after observing Hideki's honest affection for Chii and being surprised by his own emotional reaction to Yuzuki nearly being destroyed when she tried too hard to fulfill his wishes unasked, re-evaluates his desire and ability to love her and decides he does and should. Zima and Dita (both persocons) have their own relationship which Zima acknowledges to be only definable by the word love. Kotoko and her owner have a dysfunctional relationship: she, like the cram school teacher, is also a 'persocon widow' in spite of being a persocon herself. Her owner discovers that while she may not be a woman scorned, she is quite capable of expressing her displeasure in ways that cause him discomfort.

The reader is presented with these different relationship models so that he, and presumably Hideki, can see that humans just love, and if persocons are built able to love then they will as well. Sometimes humans love each other, sometimes humans love persocons, sometimes persocons love other persocons. It's all presented as a set of attainable possible outcomes, along with the cautionary tales of Ueda dealing with planned obsolescence in the case of his persocon wife and Kotoko finding that being owned by your person is not a good thing if his affections are fickle (perhaps this is a cautionary tale more for Chii than Hideki).

Underpinning and reinforcing the 'real world' examples of relationships is the story-within-a-story comic book written for Chii's benefit by Hibiya, later revealed to be her mother in a very real sense. It explores the abstract philosophy of romantic love between humans and androids, and keeps the theme of love being what it is and unboundable by societal convention in the reader's mind through the entire story.

2. Since it's manga, we should care if the art is up to the story. Chobits' art definitely qualifies. CLAMP tried very hard to get a particular look into the manga, and did a good job with page layout and panel design as well. Initially, I thought the uber-moe foofy-dress-and panty shots character designs for Chii were the usual gratuitious fanservice, until I realized that they're a necessary part of the plot. If Chii weren't desirable as a romantic/sexual partner, then there wouldn't be any conflict for Hideki to deal with in just keeping her around as an appliance. Chii must be romantically appealing or there is no problem for the story, and CLAMP go well past the minimum requirement on this score. All the characters are drawn distinctly, the backgrounds are clear and distinct as well, an page and frame design are exemplary. The reader always knows where something is happening, who is speaking, and what is happening.

3. It avoids the common conventions (and pitfalls) of the genre.

3a. Chii is constantly trying hard (and generally succeeding) in understanding this new world she's living in. Like Midori in Midori no Hibi, she's not a doll, but a person, and her personhood is never a question to the reader, because we see her internal dialogs with her dead sister. It is, however, very much a question to Hideki. She's definitely not just a foil for Hideki to gaze at longingly - she has her own life to live, her own questions to answer, and woe betide the persocon owners of the world if she doesn't like the answer to one of them.

3b. Hideki, for his part, also avoids the conventions of the genre. He's not plain-looking, an irredeemably bad student, clumsy, helpless, effeminate , or wearing ugly glasses (like Keitaro in Love Hina). He's not a loser. Presumably he can get dates as well as most guys. He's from the countryside, so isn't quite up to speed on life in the big city, but this give him a fresh perspective on life with persocons as much as it makes him a bit of an innocent yokel in other matters. He's got farmboy good looks, and has a definite potential love interest in a (very human, very female) coworker in the early chapters. This is important, too. It points out, as with the parallel stories of the Ueda the baker and Hideki's friend Minoru, that Hideki doesn't choose Chii because she's the only romantic option he has.

3c. The supporting characters are all sufficiently well-developed. Even the bookshop owner seems to be credible for his few panels of exposure.

Conclusion:

I think that, in a lot of ways, Chobits is a response to the arguments put forward in Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man" (a recognized classic of science fiction holding its own place in the SF canon). In "The Bicentennial Man," Andrew, the robot protagonist, ultimately can only find meaning and self-definition by denying his robotic nature completely and choosing to look, live, and die like a human. Note: The horrible Robin Williams movie is not an adequate substitute for the Asimov story.

Chobits takes a very similar premise and goes the opposite direction. Chii is decidedly a person, but she's not a human, and doesn't want to be one. Much of the story is about the right and wrong of deciding just what is the place of a person who isn't a human in a human society.

Chobits's message is universalistic: Love is what it is, and it can not be defined or limited by societal convention (CF William Shakespeare, among others). Ultimately, it takes Alan Turing's side in the debate of man-vs-machine: If a machine is substantially indistinguishable from a person you must treat it as one, and you (and your society's conventions and laws) must accept that it may well want to do what people do.

And that is why I say Chobits belongs in any canon of manga.

Dubs Gone Bad (with special mention for Eisner's Disneycorp)

2007-04-13T10:51:00.000-04:00

Well, I wasn't planning on posting this so early, but I found myself ranting about Disney dubs sooner than I thought. This from mangaforums.org, home of Hiyoko no Gao - my favorite scanslation group.

Quote:

Certainly the newer releases have improved in quality, possibly because of the growing demand for anime / manga in the west. Another probem with the dubs is there seem to be a limited number of voice actors out there, with distinctive voices (Crispin Freeman, Carrie Savage for eg) so a character speaks for the first time, and all you have is an image of te last character they played...

Yeah, that's part of it, and most of the rest of it is that so often the VAs don't have any range. Most seyuu can usually manage two or three distinct voices that don't sound anything like each other except for the sex of the speaker. Crispin Freeman always sounds like Crispin Freeman, which frankly ruins the dubbed Chobits, for example, because he sounds, um, rather expressive/foofy to be a farmboy from Hokkaido (which is kind of the Japanese analog to Michigan). The original Seyuu, Sugita Tomokazu, by comparison, does a good gruff-but-earnest farmboy - it comes through even if you don't know any Japanese. Even though he's the same seyuu who does Kyon in Suzumiya Haruhi and Yuuichi in Kanon (2006), he manages to not sound exactly the same in all three parts. If only...

Even if the VA has range, the dub directors never seem to bother to use it. Somebody has to actually really watch the anime with subs and listen to the Japanese voice track. Whoever does that should write character voice bios (say a paragraph each) for each character. Dubbing can be done well, but it seldom really is.

Probably the very best dub I've ever heard is (oddly enough) the French language Disney dub for Tonari no Totoro. The inflections match well, and the French is very good. The English dub, by comparison, uses Disney stable 'star' talent with no range. The guy who plays the father is OK, but nearly everybody else is too generic sounding. Using sisters to play sisters sounds like a good idea, but the problem is that the Fanning sisters sound too much alike, which really adds a dissonance to the parts where both are speaking. The Japanese had no such illusions and cast two excellent and different-sounding seyuu to play Satsuki and Mei.

The latest make-me-grit-my-teeth dub moment for me was another Disney gift. The Disney dub of Nausicaa has Patrick Stewart as Lord Yupa, who is OK, but misses the venerable strength of the part, and Olmos's Mito is OK, I guess. The one that pissed me off was Kurotawa, who is done by Chris Sarandon (momma's little boy?), and sounds like an effeminate English pouffe. Specifically, he reminded me of Errol Flynn or Cary Elwes in fruity mode. (note - I'm not a homophobe - I don't care if people affect particular (non-sociopathic) speech or behavior patterns, I just think that dub tracks should reflect the character accurately, which is profoundly not so in this case).

Guys, The character is an experienced warrior and commander who was responsible for the successful reduction of Pejite, which, we later see, was an imposing and well-defended walled city. Just because the he has the usual warrior's philosophy about the changing fortunes of a soldier's life doesn't mean he catches instead of pitching. Watch a Kurosawa movie or two, sheesh! Or just look into history - Patton wrote (bad) poetry, but was about as far from effeminate as they come. Macarthur, however, was in fact a momma's boy. But then he looked and acted like one, too.

It really undercuts the deadliness of the situation when Kurotawa is having his soldiers hold the valley dwellers at gunpoint and gives some pouffy command. The sad part is that this is nowhere near the worst they've done to Ghibli movies. I guess they just can't stand being out of the running for best animation studio, or maybe they just think everybody's products are as hacked-together and undeserving of respect (at least since 1992) as theirs are.

My second-least-favorite Disney treatment of a Ghibli movie (haven't seen them all, yet, so there's room to move) is the dub track for Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyuubin - better translated as something like "Broom Express," or "Witches' Airmail Express." They added lots of dialogue. Everywhere. Any place there was a beautiful Ghibli vista and some flying footage, they had Jiji and Kiki chattering at each other where there was little or no such dialog in the original. It wouldn't be so bad if the lovely as usual soundtrack weren't being walked on as well. I'm sure they focus-grouped it on sugar-crazed four year olds and found that the attention spans weren't long enough for ten seconds of movie without dialog... Earth to Disney: Four year olds don't buy Ghibli movies. Mommy and Daddy do. They do it because they can stand to hear and see them played over and over again, unlike most of the crap you guys make. Mess up the Ghibli goodness and you will hurt sales.

But that's not the worst thing Disney ever did to a Ghibli movie. That unique award goes to two excellent films that Isao Takahata directed: Omohide Poroporo (usually rather weakly called "Only Yesterday" in English), and Grave of the Fireflies. In "Only Yesterday's" case, they couldn't bring themselves to release it in the US, even after they bought the rights to do so. It's a hard movie to find in the US as a result, which is sad, because it's both pleasant and, in some ways, more adult than most Ghibli films. Apparently families bathing together and talk about menarch in middle school girls scared them off. Strange - the family bathing scene in Totoro doesn't bother them. Fireflies, at least, got a sufficiently cold shoulder from the mouse that Central Park Media was allowed to pick it up, so you can at least get it here - if you know what it is. Normally, I'd say that Disney didn't want to sully their reputation for "quality family entertainment" in passing it over, but, frankly, there's just as much violence in Nausicaa as there is in Fireflies.

The problem is one of perception. Somebody (or a lot of somebodys) in the management hierarchy at Disney can't see animation as anything other than "kids stuff" not worthy of serious attention by adults. Guys - it's just a way to make a movie! If any movie can be worthy of serious attention by adults, then an animated movie can. Certainly the ideas treated in Nausicaa and Howls Moving Castle, in particular, are as serious as anything that has won at Cannes in recent decades. Most of Ghibli's work is art, and deserves more respect than Disney grants it. It doesn't hurt Miyazaki, Takahata, or Ghibli when you do a bad job on a US release - it only hurts you. And the American fans.

Putting more effort into the dubs for these movies woudn't hurt their salability as kids stuff. Releasing Omohide Poroporo wouldn't hurt anybody, and it would certainly make more money than it cost to dub and dupe. Likewise, getting the rights to and releasing Grave of the Fireflies with a proper publicity push would be just fine as long as you put a PG-13 rating on it. You might actually get some adult cred for the first time since Beauty and the Beast. I'll remind you that adults earn the money and buy things - shares of stock in particular...

What Makes a Good Manga?

2007-04-13T07:42:00.000-04:00

Somebody over at mangaupdates asked the title question. There were a number of good and some silly replies. I thought seriously about it and replied thusly:

A manga tells a story. It tells it with both pictures and text. So what makes a great manga?

1) a good story. There's no way around this one. What makes a story good (interesting to readers)?

Characters who seem real to the reader (people are interested in people). examples: KareKano, Appleseed, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Karin
in an interesting situation (show me something I can't see at home) examples: Mahoraba, Planetes, Midori no Hibi, Gunslinger Girl, Fruits Basket
doing interesting things (because interesting people doing interesting things is interesting) examples: Ghost in the Shell, Yakitate!! Japan , Alice 19th, Crying Freeman
changing as a result (this follows from a) - real people change in response to experience) examples: Chobits, Ai-Ren, Ghost in the Shell
goes on just long enough to tell the story, then ends neatly. Examples: Midori no Hibi, Mahoraba, Ai-Ren, Ghost in the Shell, Alice 19th.

2) good art. Great art is not required, but is a bonus. But the art has to be good enough to help tell the story. What's good?

good page design. If I have to hunt to figure out which panel comes next I'm not going to be as involved in the story. Chobits and Midori no Hibi are good examples.
character designs that convey emotion well. In a novel you do this with text, in manga you do it with portraiture. Examples: Kare Kano, Midori no Hibi, and Karin.
distinguishable characters. Do something so I don't confuse the male lead and somebody's uncle. don't be like: Love Hina, Fruits Basket
consistent backgrounds - you have to give a feeling of place, and if the place is the same it should look the same every time. Chobits and Mahoraba for the win here.
good frame composition. Avoid clutter. Whitespace is the greater part of art. Don't be like: Love Hina, Fruits Basket (sometimes).

3) good text. Yes, even though it's pictures, the words tell a lot of the story. Reading manga in translation is hazardous because the scanslators may butcher good text. I scanslate Futari Ecchi and believe me - translations move meanings all over the map. What's good?

words that fit the character. If the character wouldn't say it that way, don't write it that way. Would he even say it at all? Should it just be a picture? Some of the most powerful moments in manga have little or no text. Examples: Midori no Hibi, Kare Kano, Planetes, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
Words that get to the point. Unless the character is supposed to be chatty, less is more. Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell are both bad examples.
extra points for a good turn of phrase, but remember - you're not writing a novel here.

Note that I'm not pointing out perfect examples of anything. There are better drawn mangas than the ones I mentioned, and there are better written ones as well. I think the big deal is that if the story and characters are good enough, the drawing and text need to not get in the way. That's all. So the art in Mahoraba, Midori no Hibi, and Ai-Ren for example, is good enough that it enables a good story to come through. Chobits actually tries a little too hard at art sometimes and hurts the story (I think, anyway). Love Hina, contrariwise, is hurt by sometimes-lame art and bad page layouts.

But if you get the art right and have story defects, you end up with something listless like Aishiteruze Baby or I''s. Ai Baby's premise is perfect, and the plot is OK, but the big problem is that the characterizations are too generic. Nobody has personality quirks, so the characters don't leap off the page. To be fair, I don't like Ai Baby's art either but it is a popular style. Compare to Hotman, which has a notably similar plot in some ways, but has much more credible characters.

In I''s case, Katsura had just come off an excellent magical girlfriend manga (Video Girl Ai) which had gone on a little too long, and then jumped straight into I''s, which is the most lukewarm harem manga I've ever read. The art is beautiful (Katsura had really matured during Video Girl Ai), but it's all teenage angst, and it's not even particularly gripping teenage angst (Frankly, Bokura ga Ita does this much better). Most of the time, it's not even really a harem manga, because the other girls aren't really rivals for the (wishy-washy and undistinguished) lead's affections. It's too fanservicey to be shoujo, too handwringing to be shounen. However, if you want pretty pictures of pinup Japanese-ish high school girls in various states of dress and undress and a completely popcorn plot, Katsura has you covered.

Senile Seinen episode 00 Start!

2007-04-12T15:44:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm the cranky old man from the future come to fight evil (or at least boring TV) with my Purostaato-beemu. No, I will not do a "shooting the beam" pose in front of any camera ever for any reason (at least not until you buy me a lot of tasty ethanol-enhanced beverages first).

My apologies if you have not yet experienced the amusement of Suzumiya Haruhi yet. The anime is funny, if a little talky. It's good if you have a limited imagination and need to see the pretty pictures. If you can read faster than most NBA athletes, you might try the hilarious translations of the light novels available over at http://www.baka-tsuki.net/. They're much funnier than the anime, in my opinion, though that may be because the narrator Kyon is probably more like me than any other fictional character I've ever read/seen, with the possible exception of Randy Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon.

So, why am I spreading my egoism around the web, he asked rhetorically? Mostly because I get into interesting conversations involving anime and manga in different places around the web and kept thinking I should centralize the content somewhere. If I'm going to do that, I might as well also publish it, which starts to sound suspiciously like a blog. So I, the crufty old web curmudgeon (when I was your age, we did our HTML in a text editor in a shell on the server and we were grateful for it!) have finally bowed to this whole blogosphere thing. Ugh.

Well, let's get rolling. Here's some of the content of an email I sent today to a guy who used to be a coworker and is still a good friend, and manages to have geek cred and a life just like I try to have. He was asking if I'd bothered to catch up on the end of BSG S3. Here was my reply:

No, my holiday was not especially nice. I came down with something communicable from "my little disease vector," as I so often call him. Also found myself dismantling and cleaning the burner on the furnace on Easter morning. 25 degrees, snow, and no heat was not a popular combination. While I smelled like home heating oil for the rest of the day, we had a cozy warm house, and milady had the warm glow of affection she gets when I do something manly and resolve a household predicament.

E-chan and I finished up Space Battleship Yamato last night. I'd forgotten how sketchy the last ep is. I have the feeling they were going to do an hour-long show and cut the script in half (Yamato actually had pretty disappointing ratings in its first run in Japan, as I understand it - not unlike Star Trek TOS here). It was really fun pointing out to milady how much descends from this show - it was the first significant (1974) ship-based SF series to run anywhere after Star Trek finished in 1969. Apparently it got wide distribution via videotapes: Star Wars (1976) borrows from it freely (if you've ever seen the Wave Motion Gun, you know where the Death Star's main weapon came from, and R2D2 bears more than a passing resemblance to Analyzer), Glen Larson rips it off almost completely for Battlestar Galactica (1977). Several Star Trek movies and Star Trek Voyager have more than a little of that Yamato aroma as well.

I've got to say the show mostly hangs together pretty well - not bad for a "kids show" from 1974. All the Leiji Matsumoto themes are there - individual nobility, striving against unconquerable odds, personal loyalties cementing the group, etc, and there's a level of character development that shames nearly anything SF (current BSG excepted) done in the US before or since. Example: Sanada - the second officer and ship's engineer (the degreed kind, not the holds a wrench kind - they have one of those with a back-story too) and science officer gets his own back-story show and saves the ship with a surprise (but logically defensible) deus ex machina in the last ep.

Other stuff we watched over the weekend since the weather was so lame:

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (love the Joe Hisashi score, hated the Disney dub job, was grateful for a good subtitle track, added "ohmu" to e-chan's vocabulary).

a couple of showings of Kiki's Delivery Service for e-chan's benefit (added "airship" to his vocabulary)

Several episodes of Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, which is a magical girl show from the early 90s downloaded specifically for toddler entertainment and to explain what magical girl shows are to milady (if you have to watch one of the blasted things, this is one of the better ones). Now she gets the cosplay jokes, otaku jokes, and various fake magical girl characters in Welcome to NHK, Densha Otoko, Midori no Hibi, and Suzumiya Haruhi, among others. Notable item: The bad guy in this show actually took advantage of the long time required by the protagonist's power-up-and-change-clothes sequence as shown by intercuts of him chanting and gesticulating while she did her turn from fourth-grader to Nurse Angel thing.

Two episodes of Jigoku Shoujo (Hell Girl). Wow is this beautiful. Wow is this dark. I'd watch lots more horror movies if they were this pretty. Milady doesn't like it - too cruel and gruesome. I'll be watching the rest because I can't stand not to--it's just too pretty. The Shinto references are thick in this one - glad I watched Kamichu! first.

Two episodes of Simoun. I'm trying to define this one and I just can't really. Take Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, stir in some...Powerpuff Girls, maybe? until the colors go Studio Ghibli bright, add a heaping cup of Black Sheep Squadron/Baa Baa Black Sheep (or Band of Brothers if you don't know that one), but stop before the powerpuff girls start chain smoking, add some essence of the setting from either The Name of the Rose or the Brother Cadfael mysteries (believe it or not - there's even a bunch of Latin), put in a half-cup of Steamboy, dump it all in a pressure cooker, put an anvil on top of the vent hole, turn the stove on high, and walk quickly away. Yes, it's that hard to define. And more amazingly, it seems to have come from nowhere - there's no preceding manga or novel, just the anime. It's interesting, and a number of reviewers have gone drooling-nutso about it. I'm only up to ep 4, so I can't say I'm riveted yet, but i'm certainly interested in seeing how it turns out.

Two episodes of Hataraki Man (translates roughly as something like hard-working man). Slice of life show about the life of a woman (mid 20s) who is an editor and star reporter at a weekly magazine not dissimilar from "People." Definitely more adult in tone than most anime we get on this continent. Amusing note: the giant publishing company where she works is a verbal pun on Kodansha, which is Japan's largest publishing house, and which publishes the real-world Hataraki Man manga in Weekly Morning, which is its leading seinen manga magazine. Milady digs this one down to the ground because the lead is so much like her at that age. I've got to say that j-pop again works perfectly - the opening credit music couldn't set the tone of the show any better. It's a girl band doing kind of a punk/go-gos style with lyrics about working life.

Two episodes of Welcome to the NHK. We're well into the plot now with this one, and Milady is really enjoying it. I carefully waited to show her this until I knew she had enough understanding of the otaku stereotype in Japan thanks to watching Maid in Akihabara and Densha Otoko. Studio Gonzo has truly elevated my opinion of themselves with this one. It's thankfully a little lighter in tone than the (frankly often bleak) manga, but still is pretty true to the setting, characters, and themes. The fansub is spectacularly good - and another great example of why fansubs are better than commercial subs.

Two episodes of Gokusen (live action. Title translates roughly as "Mob Teach"). If you know what Great Teacher Onizuka is, you know what Gokusen is. If you don't, I'll describe Gokusen as Welcome Back Kotter mixed with The Sopranos except everything is Japanese. Good acting, a cast and scriptwriters who obviously read and liked the manga, and Japanese not-overpolished production values make a fun show.

One episode of Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran. This was actually run as an antidote to the showing of ep 2 of Jigoku Shoujo, but backfired - we got the only really sad-toned show in the series so far, where Meow meets her childhood friend who has gone down a bad path in life. Ended up reading three chapters of Fruits Basket to get everybody calmed down for bedtime.

And The Yakuza (1975 Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, dir: Sydney Pollack). This was because the lead (yakuza princess) in Gokusen made the comment that Takakura Ken was necessary for a good yakuza movie. I see why. Others have called him the Japanese Clint Eastwood, but that's not fair to him - for one thing he's incredibly buff, for another, he obviously really worked out at kendo every day, and for a third, his acting isn't all of the strong-silent-type mold. Not a bad movie for a '70s organized crime drama. Mitchum makes a surprisingly acceptable effort at the little Japanese he speaks, there aren't any glaring cultural gaffes, and the soundtrack isn't painfully '70s bad, just a little too soupy-strings for my taste. The only miscast was the supposedly-Japanese 20-something daughter, whose actress was a Nisei (American of Japanese family), and spoke English like a Californian and Japanese like one, too.

Oh, and no - I feel no urgency to watch the BSG shows I've not yet seen. I've got the first six shows of Space Battleship Yamato season 2 ready to go, and I remember even less about that one than I did about the first season.

So there you go. A typical sample of my "light-informal" style. Only the names have been removed to protect the innocent and guilty. Vocabulary: E-chan is my offspring currently age two. Milady is my significant other. I deliberately did a lot of series name-dropping here because my correspondent isn't as up on this stuff as I am, and I wanted to help him out. I posted this specifically because the effort required to come up with a good description of Simoun got me thinking that this wasn't bad reading. I was really nice here and tried to link everything out to a relevant wikipedia entry (because they're more stable links than ANN Encyclopedia entries, Nausicaa.net entries, or IMDB entries).

I'll also be posting stuff I've written for various forums around the web. It'll generally be on the subject of anime and manga. Likewise, I'll probably put some original content here as well (I feel a rant coming on about Disney dub tracks and general treatment of Ghibli movies, for instance). I am certainly not unwilling to review stuff, but don't expect to get a review every time, and I definitely don't plan on doing show-by-show blogging like some people do. More than that? You tell me. That's what the comments section is for.