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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Anime Adaptation

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, Vols. 1-3

June 18, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

The Count of Monte Cristo, arguably Alexander Dumas’ best novel, is a big, sprawling beast, stuffed to the gills with characters, subplots, secret identities, suicides, and dramatic confrontations; small wonder that GONZO felt it would provide a solid foundation for a twenty-four episode anime. The series debuted to critical acclaim in 2004, thanks largely to its arresting visuals (designer Anna Sui had a hand in creating the characters’ elaborate costumes) and its dramatic soundtrack, which employed key musical themes from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (the gold standard for operatic madness scenes) and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony (a piece of program music inspired by Byron’s poem of the same name).

The three-volume manga offers a darker, more focused presentation of the anime’s main plot while taking greater liberties with the source material. Like the anime, the manga follows the basic contours of Dumas’ novel: Edmond Dantes, an honest, hardworking sailor, is falsely imprisoned for treason, serving nearly fourteen years at the remote Chateau d’If before escaping and reinventing himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, a dashing aristocrat who uses his social standing, good looks, and vast fortune to exact revenge on the three friends who betrayed him. Though Dumas tells the story in a chronological fashion, Mahiro Maeda begins Gankutsuou at the novel’s midpoint, relating the circumstances of Dantes’ trial and punishment in several extensive flashbacks. Maeda adds a few ruffles and flourishes of his own, moving the action to the year 5053, transforming the Count into a space vampire — hard time will do that to a man, I’m told — and adding a faintly homoerotic element to the relationship between the Count and Albert de Morcerf, the son of Edmond’s former fiancee Mercedes.

As anime-to-manga adaptations go, Gankutsuou is better than average. Maeda wins points for employing a visual style that evokes the look of the anime without slavishly copying it, and for wisely limiting the scope of the story to the Count’s take-down of Gerard de Villefort, the ambitious prosecutor responsible for framing him. Volume one follows the anime closely, depicting the first meeting between the Count and Albert, and documenting how the Count insinuates himself into Parisian society. From there, however, the manga follows a somewhat different track, revealing both the full extent of Villefort’s duplicity and the true nature of Gankutsuou, the demon who possessed Edmon Dantes’ body while he was still imprisoned at the Chateau d’If (here played by a remote, unmanned space station).

The flashbacks to Dantes’ imprisonment are rendered in sensual, swirling lines suggestive of a Van Gogh painting; many panels verge on the abstract, taking the story out of the realm of the literal into a feverish dream world that effectively dramatizes Dantes’ emotional anguish without resorting to cliche imagery. Though these scenes are an inspired addition to the story (nothing like them appears in the anime), the manga’s big denouement is not. Maeda greatly simplifies the Count’s elaborate revenge on Villefort, trimming several key players from the drama and contriving a ludicrous love scene between Villefort’s second wife and his daughter Valentine that has as much to do with real Sapphic desire as a Budweiser commercial starring blond twins. It’s a shame that Maeda diverged so greatly from the original, as the Count’s revenge on Villefort is one of the novel’s most gripping subplots, filled with double-crosses, estrangements, murders (by poison, no less), and a secret love child who plays an instrumental role in destroying the trust between Villefort and Danglars, another key player in the original conspiracy against Dantes.

Folks who haven’t seen the anime or read The Count of Monte Cristo are probably the best audience for this series, as they won’t be encumbered with expectations about how events should unfold. Anyone with a strong investment in the anime or the novel, however, is likely to find this chamber piece an unsatisfying effort to represent the full complexity and drama of Dumas’ seminal work.

GANKUTSUOU, VOLS. 1-3 • BY MAHIRO MAEDA AND YURI ARIWARA • DEL REY • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Alexander Dumas, Anime Adaptation, del rey, Gankutsuou, Sci-Fi

Samurai 7, Vol. 1

April 29, 2009 by Katherine Dacey

Remake or retread? That’s the question facing critics whenever someone updates a classic novel or favorite film, be it Pride and Prejudice or The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. A remake brings new urgency or wit to the original story, new clarity to its structure, or new life to a premise that, by virtue of social or technological change, seems dated—think of Philip Kaufman’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which infused a 1950s it-came-from-outer-space story with a healthy dose of seventies paranoia, or Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which featured a leaner, meaner script than his 1934 original. Retreads, on the other hand, evoke the letter but not the spirit of the originals, embellishing their plots with fussy details, slangy dialogue, or new characters without adding anything of value—think of Ethan and Joel Coens’ deep-fried version of The Ladykillers, which was louder, cruder, and longer than the 1955 film, yet decidedly less funny.

Samurai 7, a mangafication of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, falls somewhere between these poles, treating the source material respectfully without adding anything particularly new or interesting to the mix. The basic plot remains the same: a poor rural village hires seven samurai to protect them from a band of thugs who steal their rice and enslave their womenfolk. Though the manga takes minor liberties with the main characters—one is a headless cyborg, one is a bishonen who always seems to be falling out of his yukata—the samurai bear a strong resemblance to Kurosawa’s original crew, both in terms of their personalities and functions within the group. The manga also preserves the war-ravaged atmosphere of the original, substituting a robot-fueled world war for the carnage caused by sixteenth-century daimyo.

Such fidelity to the source material proves Samurai 7’s undoing, however, as it underscores just how lackluster this adaptation really is. The story unfolds in fits and starts, bogging down in lame comedy and windy speeches that stall the samurai’s inevitable posse formation. Though the fight scenes are competently executed, the artwork has a sterile, perfunctory quality, as if the layouts and character designs were traced from four or five different sources. The mecha elements seem especially incongruous when juxtaposed with the story’s sixteenth-century costumes, buildings, and weaponry; there’s never any compelling rationale for their inclusion, save a desire to surpass the original film’s “wow” factor.

I offer these criticisms not because I view Kurosawa’s original as a sacred text, but because Samurai 7’s creators made such a calculated, unimaginative effort to sex up the material for a new generation of fans. Alas, no amount of bitchin’ gadgetry can compensate for poor pacing, generic artwork, or flat characterizations, even if later volumes promise more samurai-on-robot action. My suggestion: skip the manga and rent the original film. Toshiro Mifune is much fiercer than anything in this samurai-lite adaptation.

SAMURAI 7, VOL. 1• BY MIZUTAKA SUHOU • DEL REY • 224 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Action/Adventure, Akira Kurosawa, Anime Adaptation, del rey, Samurai, Sci-Fi, Seven Samurai

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