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.
Showing posts with label Ai-Ren. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ai-Ren. Show all posts
Monday, May 7, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Manga Markets and Genres defined, or how not to confuse Seinen and Sword-and-Sandals
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.
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.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Chobits, Video Girl Ai, and Ai-Ren: Four views of artificial people
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
Friday, April 13, 2007
What Makes a Good Manga?
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)?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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