The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi Movie

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obtaining the Drug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consuming the Drug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting CDisplay

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

Configuring CDisplay for Manga Viewing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ha ha only serious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At left: View of Onomichi from mountaintop Raifuku shrine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Left: Tatsumi and Ureshiko.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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