anime

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: House of Five Leaves

March 29, 2011 by Cathy Yan 27 Comments

House of Five Leaves | by Natsume Ono | Manga: Shogakukan/Viz Media | Studio: Manglobe/Funimation

Regular readers of Manga Bookshelf will need no introduction to House of Five Leaves. MJlisted it as one of her best new seinen series of 2010, Kate has reviewed all three volumes, and David himself wrote a smart little ode to it recently when he reviewed volume two. For those of you still new to the series, House of Five Leaves is Natsume Ono’s seven volume samurai story. The main character, Akitsu Masanosuke, referred to in the series as Masa, is a masterless samurai determined to change himself while looking for work in Edo. One afternoon, Masa is hired by a suspicious man named Yaichi as a bodyguard. But all is not as it seems: Yaichi is actually the leader of a band of kidnappers who call themselves “Five Leaves”, and he doesn’t just want Masa to be his bodyguard — he wants Masa to join them as a comrade in crime. Masa, by nature a righteous and naïve man, resists Yaichi’s attempts to draw him in. However, he soon finds himself entangled in the fate of Five Leaves and, more importantly, in the mystery of Yaichi.

There are so many wonderful things about the anime adaptation of House of Five Leaves that it’s hard to know where to start. Thankfully, Natsume Ono’s distinct art style makes my job easier. Manglobe and the series director Tomomi Mochizuki transferred Ono’s art effortlessly into animation. The character designs are instantly recognizable, especially in Masa’s wide, childish eyes and Otake’s playful lipsticked smile. The sweatdrops, stray hairs, and blush lines of Ono’s characters are rendered in loving detail in every episode. There are even moments — the candy pieces of episode four, the pillars of the bridge in episode twelve — where the lines look like calligraphy, as if they were penned by Ono herself.

Often anime simplifies manga artwork. House of Five Leaves, the anime, does the opposite. While the manga tends to be very “white” on the page, full of negative space, the anime is full of textures: the unpolished wood of Goinkyo’s home, the tatami mat of the Katsuraya house, the smooth rice paper doors of Ume’s restaurant. Even more impressive is the interplay of light and shadow in the anime. Characters constantly move in and out of candlelight, open doors to let in sunlight, or sit with their backs to a window, hiding their faces in the dark. Ono is no slob herself when it comes to lighting in the manga, but the anime takes full advantage of its color palette — earthy browns and subdued gray-greens — to make Edo come alive.

The soundtrack features a combination of rumbling drums, wistful koto melodies, and reedy flute-like tunes that helps ground us in a historical Edo that, amazingly, never comes off as antiquated or forced. Likewise, the voice actor choices are almost flawless. Daisuke Namikawa as Masa is exactly the kind of guy who wears his heart on his sleeve and never says anything less than what he means. Veteran voice actor Takahiro Sakurai’s performance as Yaichi is by turns teasing, seductive, spiteful, and, at his best, all three at once. A shout out must be given to Masaya Takatsuka, who never misses a beat conveying Ume’s my-bark-is-worse-than-my-bite personality, especially in episode three when Ume makes a crack at Matsu. But the anime adaptation goes that extra mile: if you listen carefully, you can hear Edo in the background, in the soft drone of water boiling in a kettle, or the river streaming past, or the birds of Goinkyo’s backyard, or the shuffling of Yaichi’s wooden shoes. Ono’s manga might not think to comment on the “shaaa chhk” sound of a rice door sliding open or the faint crackle of straw as Ume unloads their latest hostage out of a basket, but it would be a pity to go through this anime without appreciating these little details.

At first glance, House of Five Leaves is about the journey Five Leaves takes from a ragtag group of misfits to a family who looks out for their own, even when there’s no money involved. For lack of a more nuanced, less cheesy word, the story is heart-warming. The more you uncover the crisscrossing ties of responsibility that connect the Five Leaves members, whether it be the reluctant life debts Matsu shoulders or the reason Ume remains in Five Leaves, the more you enjoy seeing them together at Ume’s restaurant, making fun of each other as they drink sake. Sadly, the anime does cut out one of my favorite scenes from the manga so far (Ume and Matsu bickering in volume one), and I imagine the later episodes similarly streamline forthcoming volumes. But the heart of the story comes through unscathed, which is a testament both to the strength of Ono’s writing and Manglobe’s talent at adaptation.

Underlying this story, though, is another tried and true theme: appearances are deceiving. Yaichi shows up in the first episode as a sage and benefactor to Masa, so naturally Masa, along with the viewer, looks upon Yaichi as a voice of authority. When we meet Yagi, the police chief who seems to know more about Yaichi than he lets on, we’re immediately suspicious of him because Yaichi tells us to be. But the more that’s uncovered about Yaichi, the more we realize Yaichi is the unreliable one. Just as Ume, Matsu, and Otake are more virtuous than the criminals we first meet them as, Yaichi is not at all the kind-hearted character we first encounter. In fact, he’s the most dangerous one of them all.

The anime has restructured the pacing of Ono’s series, favoring episodes that end on jarring cliffhangers and jumps in the timeline, often through flashbacks. Some might prefer the more measured pacing Ono shows in the manga; others might find the anime benefits from a more coherent focus, especially when it comes to Yaichi’s storyline. I for one felt like I could guess the events of episode twelve from the flashback sequence in episode one — a flashback sequence, I should add, that does not exist in the manga. But anime being the inherently action-based medium it is, I can’t fault Manglobe for wanting to ratchet up the tension just a little on what is, overall, a slow-moving story.

In the end House of Five Leaves is one of those series that I enjoy for reasons I can’t put into words. It’s not plot driven, and the characters never really change, even if they become more well-rounded. Certainly Masa never learns to get over his fear of being watched and remains the clumsy, shy samurai we first meet. But there is a marvelous je ne sais quoi to House of Five Leaves, an atmosphere of rambling down a countryside path on a late autumn afternoon, knowing that you’ll get to your destination eventually but not really knowing when. The anime luxuriates in that feeling. You could spend your time trying to piece together all the threads of the story, but you’d be missing the point. It’s meant to be savored, like a dango shared with a friend while hungry.

P.S. Next month’s anime adaptation will be Antique Bakery, just in case you haven’t had enough of stories about people making their own families. As always, if you have any anime you’d like taste-tested, drop me a line.

Don’t Fear the Adaptation: Maison Ikkoku

February 23, 2011 by Cathy Yan 19 Comments

Hello, this is Cathy! I’m so excited to be a part of Manga Bookshelf! To kick off the anime reviews, I thought I’d start with something long, old, and beloved.

Maison Ikkoku | by Rumiko Takahashi | Manga: Shogakukan/Viz Media | Anime: Studio Deen/Viz Media

Buy at Amazon

Anyone who’s ever read manga has probably read a Rumiko Takahashi story, whether it be Rumic Theater, Ranma 1/2, or Inuyasha. She is easily one of the most recognizable and popular mangaka, one of the few that all American readers can name with ease. But in 1980, Takahashi was 23 and her first major work, Urusei Yatsura, was only just beginning to pick up. Armed with her own experiences of living in a small apartment with her two assistants, she sat down to write what became my favorite of her long epics: Maison Ikkoku.

Maison Ikkoku is about the residents of Ikkoku-kan, a boarding house in Tokyo. The protagonist, Yusaku Godai, is a 20 year old ronin student deep into his second year of trying to pass college entrance exams, when the story opens on the arrival of Kyoko Otonashi, the young widow who’s Ikkoku’s new manager. Yusaku instantly falls in love with Kyoko, but like all Takahashi romances, there are plenty of obstacles. The other residents of Ikkoku do their utmost to create embarrassing situations for the uncertain couple. The local tennis coach Shun Mitaka, a rich and suave playboy, declares his own intentions towards Kyoko within hours of meeting her and spends the rest of the series wooing her. Yusaku’s cheery ex-coworker Kozue Nanao eventually becomes his cheery girlfriend, though, much to everyone’s chagrin, she never cottons onto Yusaku’s feelings for Kyoko. Then of course, there’s Kyoko herself, who worries that loving a new man would be betraying the memory of her dead husband. Throw in three interfering families, an engagement made and broken by a fear of dogs, and a high school girl determined to marry Yusaku, and it’s easy to see how the story spanned seven years, fifteen volumes of manga, and 96 episodes of anime before coming to a satisfactory end.

Maison Ikkoku is ultimately a slice-of-life romantic comedy, but unlike Takahashi’s other series, it’s set firmly in the real world. The recurring characters, while exaggerated, are perfectly ordinary people with perfectly ordinary problems. Families get into screaming arguments, marriage is complicated by monetary concerns and societal approval, young men and women worry about their future careers. The path leading up to Ikkoku, the persimmon trees, the kotatsu, the fear of the economic downturn, Kyoko’s habit of sweeping the sidewalk free of leaves– all these are still elements of everyday Japanese life.

Yet the more humorous plot devices of Maison Ikkoku could have only existed in the Internet-less, cellphone-less world of the eighties. If gimmicks like mistaking the French restaurant “Ma Maison” for the local pub “Mamezou,” or Yusaku’s female friends pranking Kyoko so badly she ends up installing a public phone for the rest of the boarding home seem ridiculous at first glance, they’re enjoyable for nostalgia’s sake. In 2011, hijinks like that just don’t happen anymore– people just text each other!

The relationship between Yusaku and Kyoko is the highlight of the entire series. The anime does a wonderful job of showing how it changes from obsession (on Yusaku’s part) and annoyance (on Kyoko’s part) to a mutual affection. Surrounded by secondary characters who are more or less caricatures, the main romantic players come across as surprisingly real. Yusaku might appear at first to be simply a lecherous loser just barely out of his teenage years, but with time, he emerges as a man who, if nothing else, will always do the right thing, even if it’s to his disadvantage. And Kyoko is never just a pretty face. While Mitaka and Yusaku are both guilty of idealizing her, they also embrace her faults: her tendency towards jealousy, her bad temper, her indecisiveness. In an adorable moment in episode 43, they even spend a night drunkenly swapping notes and consoling each other. Kyoko is secretive to a fault with her feelings, so it’s no surprise that most of the series consists of both men learning to reconcile their idea of Kyoko with the person she actually is. An admirably realistic portrayal of love, for sure, but gosh if the story isn’t repetitive! If you don’t find yourself tempted to throw your TV out the window by episode 58, you’re doing it wrong.

Despite the addition of numerous sidestories, Maison Ikkoku the anime feels more streamlined than its manga counterpart, simply because the anime has the benefit of hindsight. While the manga hesitates over how to resolve Kyoko’s and Yusaku’s relationship, the anime already knows how the story ends and stresses their romantic tension early on, most notably in episode 14 and and 22. Readers of the manga might actually wonder if Kyoko ends up with Yusaku; the anime, on the other hand, is emphatically a story about Kyoko and Yusaku, just with detours.

However, the anime never strays far from the manga’s wacky sitcom nature. Don’t expect Ichinose to be much more than a busy body with a fondness for alcohol, or for Yotsuya to stop being an infuriatingly mysterious leech. Just the opposite, as the Ichinose-Yotsuya-Akemi trio get far more screen time in the anime. On the other hand, Nikaido, an accidental resident introduced late in the manga, is absent from the anime, and his lines are given away to the other Ikkoku residents. Anime-only fans thus never experience the epic prank war that erupts between Nikaido and Yotsuya, but Nikaido’s absence is glossed over so well in the anime that it made me question Takahashi’s choice to introduce him at all in the manga.

With five opening and six ending songs, including a Japanese pop hit by Anzen Chitai and two songs by Gilbert O’Sullivan that never made it to the American release, the soundtrack is a perfect representative of the music from that time period. Likewise, the animation is classically eighties but holds up well despite its age. Among other things, the characters frequently change outfits — a rare feat even nowadays for an anime series! Despite its simplicity, the animation does an excellent job conveying the characters’ every emotion, no matter how nuanced, and manages to stay true to Rumiko Takahashi’s original art. Paired with an all around impressive performance from the entire Japanese voice acting cast, the characters of Maison Ikkoku have never been more alive as they are in the anime.

For those who have never read the original manga, Maison Ikkoku the anime is an excellent substitute or introduction. For those who are already fans of the manga, watching the anime is just like revisiting an old friend. Personally, three episodes — 27, 84, and 92 — make the anime adaptation for me. Episode 27’s masterful use of silence, a blinking light, and silhouettes elevate the anime treatment of Souchirou-san’s disappearance into something far more cinematic. I could write whole essays on how wonderfully episode 84 encapsulates repeating issues of trust, family, and determination, not to mention the little animation details — the classical music soundtrack, the Joan Miro in the hotel lobby — that build a world richer than the one in the manga. And Episode 92, split into three acts, each dedicated to one woman, is a great argument for why Takahashi writes some of the best women in anime.

Viz Media distributed both the manga and anime, and both are available through most major online retailers. As the series is pretty old now, it’s unlikely to be found in bookstores, but chances are good that if your local library is like mine and only stocks outdated anime or manga, the old Viz volumes (complete with cheesy titles like “The Hounds of War” or “Good Housekeeping”) will still be there.

Anime Feature: Natsu no Arashi

June 2, 2009 by MJ 4 Comments

I rarely post about anime here, but there is one new series I’m enjoying so much, I really can’t help myself. So here goes!

Based on the manga by Jin Kobayashi (School Rumble) and available for streaming at Crunchyroll, Natsu no Arashi is about a middle-school student named Hajime Yasaka who moves from the country into a new town where he will live with a relative. Exhausted by the summer heat, he stops in a small cafe to cool off where he meets Sayaka, the owner of the shop who is actually a notorious con artist, Jun, another middle school boy with a secret I will not give away here, and Arashi, a beautiful young waitress with whom Hajime is immediately enamored. When a strange man bursts into the shop and demands to take Arashi back to her “family,” Hajime surprises himself by stepping in to defend her (though it isn’t long before he needs defending himself), but it is when his hand touches Arashi’s that his whole world gets turned upside down.

As it turns out, Arashi is the ghost of a sixteen-year-old girl who died during the US bombings of Japanese cities in WWII. It is unknown exactly why she has remained in this world, but when she meets the right kind of boy, she can “connect” with him and travel backwards in time. After discovering that she connects with Hajime, she pretty much takes over his life (not that he minds in the slightest). She moves into his uncle’s house, and repeatedly takes Hajime back to her own time where she seeks out those she know will die in the bombings to try to save them from their fate. Just a a few episodes in, a second ghost, Kaya, is also introduced. She was Arashi’s school chum during the war and though she is far more aware of the dangers and potential implications of changing the past, her resolve not to do so is broken when she discovers she can connect with Jun.

The anime series starts off a bit confusingly, jumping right into a later point in the story with no explanation, and though I liked it immediately, it took several episodes for me to feel about it the way I do now. I usually give any anime series five episodes before I make up my mind about it, and I’d recommend anyone interested in this series to do the same. The series is definitely a slow burn. Straddling the line between a gag series and a supernatural drama, Natsu no Arashi delivers surprisingly well on both counts. Though it is the time-traveling ghost story that most draws me to the series, I can’t deny the success of the humor, and there is an early episode in which Hajime and Arashi encounter a claw machine at an arcade that had me laughing until I was in pain. Even the standard put-the-boys-in-girls’-clothing and body-switching episodes have an unusual twist in this series, rendering them funny once again, regardless of their overuse. The series starts off showcasing its humor and though I probably would have continued to watch it casually even if that’s all it ever was, the ghost story makes it into something I cannot do without.

Though Kaya is sensitive to the potential disasters of time travel from the start, it is only Hajime’s heavy scientific interest that is able to affect Arashi’s carefree attitude, something which has only really begun with the most recently aired episode (episode nine). Faced a second time with Sayaka’s insistence that they take spoiled food back in time to a point before its expiration date so that she can eat it before it has gone bad (logic that only makes sense in her own head and, interestingly, Arashi’s) Hajime attempts to explain the concept of a paradox to her, which leads to a question of whether or not he and Arashi have been creating multiple parallel worlds every time they change the past. He points out that, because of them, people have lived, been born, and possibly died who otherwise would not have, something that shakes Arashi to the core, though she tries to hide it. What’s most interesting about this, however, is not the plot or the scientific questions themselves (though these things are interesting), but the characters, and even more so their relationships with each other.

I think it’s clear that compatibility is the main component determining whom the ghosts can connect with, and it’s obvious that Hajime and Arashi make a great pair. Whether they can ever be romantically involved as Hajime would wish is certainly in question (what with one of them being a sixtysomething ghost) but they both have good (if impulsive) hearts and a fine adventurous spirit. Something that’s particularly refreshing is that Hajime’s crush on Arashi, while being unavoidably based on lust–he’s a teenaged boy after all–actually manifests itself for the most part in very sweet ways, and at no time is this more evident than in episode nine. Though he requires Sayaka (in an unusual moment of true insight) to let him know that he’s shaken Arashi with his excited scientific musings on time-travel, he actually figures out what to do about it on his own and the result is seriously touching. Kaya and Jun are quite wonderfully compatible as well and though it’s hard to go into that too deeply without giving away some early spoilers, I can say that though their relationship is very different from Hajime and Arashi’s, it is no less touching.

While maintaining its frequent gags, this series continues to become deeper and more interesting as it goes along with its poignant characters and observations on war, which do not shy away from being very specific to WWII and the United States’ firebombing of Japanese civilian areas. Arashi returns to the cafe every summer because it is the only place that escaped the bombings and is therefore unchanged since the time when she was alive, and the effects of the bombings are seen frequently in both Arashi and Kaya’s travels back. The question of how harmful it is for Arashi to indiscriminately raise people from the dead who were indiscriminately killed in the first place is obviously something the series is not going to let go, and it goes a long way towards forming the characters that make the series so intriguing. There is obviously something sinister coming, which has begun to take shape in the most recent episode, and I can’t help but wonder if it is something caused unintentionally by Arashi. Time will tell!

The animated series’ success I think is due to a great extent by the fact that it is produced by Shaft (Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Ef: A Tale of Memories), a studio known for its gag series but also for its unmistakable style. The series’ ever-shifting opening sequence, its mysterious bookends featuring characters that are finally beginning to be introduced, its stylish handling of both gags and dramatic beauty–these things are all extremely characteristic of the studio and really give the series a consistent, cohesive feel. Though the series does not shy away from being sexy, there is limited fan service, which is definitely refreshing as well, and what is there is handled with good humor and great style.

Though it may not be for everyone, Natsu no Arashi provides a terrific blend of gag humor, drama, romance, and even suspense–a combination I find completely intoxicating. Now if someone would just license the manga!

Report on ConBust 2009!

April 10, 2009 by MJ 10 Comments

Happy Friday, everyone, Good or otherwise. I was hoping to manage a review for this blog last night, but other than a few minutes spent watching the new Fullmetal Alchemist anime (I look forward to it getting through its setup and on to the manga plot), I ending up using the entire night finishing my coverage of ConBust at Smith College, which is up now at Manga Recon!

I enjoyed the convention immensely, and I can’t emphasize enough how gratifying I found its focus on female fans and creators. Those of you who follow me on Twitter probably recall some frustrated tweets about some (fairly infuriating) comments made about manga during the con, and I do address that at the end of the article, but I really hope that will not overshadow the essential awesomeness of the con and the Smith students who put it together every year.

Follow this link to read my report, and if you’re in the Pioneer Valley or thereabouts (and especially if you’re a sci-fi and/or fantasy fan) I hope you’ll consider attending ConBust in 2010!

Personal musing on La Corda d’Oro

April 7, 2009 by MJ 22 Comments

One of the anime series currently available for viewing on Crunchyroll is La Corda d’Oro, based on the manga series licensed in the US by Viz (which is, I understand, based on a video game). My husband brought it up to me recently as a series he’d be interested in watching and when he told me the name, my ears perked up as I reached excitedly into my pile of review copies where I have volume ten of the manga waiting to be reviewed for Manga Recon’s “On The Shojo Beat” column next month. Seeing this as a great opportunity for me to study up for my review (I don’t own or have access to the first nine volumes of the manga), we plunged right in.

Now I’ll say right off, I am really enjoying this anime series. Sure, the musical selections are straight out of someone’s supermarket CD of “Your Favorite Classical Music Hits,” but honestly this is what I expect to see in popular fiction, and even when the arrangements of these overused standards are utterly ridiculous (I looked it up–there actually is an existing arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon for just violin and piano, as ill-advised as that may seem) the characters are so sincere about playing them it’s hard to remain snobbish about it, even for a stodgy old music geek like me. Recently, however, there has been a bit of a plot twist that has seriously thrown me for a loop. I found my own reaction to it surprising, revealing, and actually a little bit hilarious so I thought I’d talk about it here. Major spoilers after the jump. …

Claymore 14, All Hail Crunchyroll

April 6, 2009 by MJ 6 Comments

Morning! Just a quick update before I run out to an early morning meeting (ugh). First of all, I have a short review in this week’s Manga Minis, for volume fourteen of Claymore, a series I like a lot and one of the few shonen series I have reviewed at MR. If you missed my review of volume thirteen back in December, here it is! It was actually my very first review for Manga Recon. Oh, the nostalgia.

Secondly, I just want to take a moment and appreciate Crunchyroll. We originally bought a membership in order to watch new episodes of Shugo Chara!! Doki as they came out, but yesterday we started watching three new series (we’ll probably keep going with two of them) which were being simulcast here at pretty much the same time as in Japan. It was exciting, seriously. I mean, this is what we’ve all hoped for, right? That someone would start to provide legally what was previously only offered by fansubbers–subbed anime available here at the same time (or shortly after) its release in Japan. Hell, I’d have gone for episodes aired even a month or so afterward–that’s still a huge improvement over the years-long wait for dubs I’m not going to watch anyway–but I admit there was something kind of thrilling about knowing we were watching at approximately the same time these episodes were airing for the very first time. Thank you, Crunchyroll, thank you. You are awesome. It’ll be interesting to see how Funimation’s Fullmetal Alchemist streams stack up!

100% Perfect Girl & FMA Squee

April 3, 2009 by MJ 8 Comments

First off, I have a review up this morning at Manga Recon, for volume nine of NETCOMICS’ manhwa soap opera 100% Perfect Girl. I’ve had a rough time with this series as its heroine is repeatedly dragged through hell by the men who supposedly love her, but if you love a soap opera this may be the series for you.

In other news, I was thrilled to see this morning (thanks to ANN) that Funimation is going to be streaming the new Fullmetal Alchemist anime series within days of its airing in Japan! Now that the manga is so far along, I have real hope that the new adaptation may be able to approach Arakawa’s genius. There are few stories I love as much as this one, and to be able to watch the new anime series legally as it airs is more than I’d expected.

I hope this means that all this new streaming going on is working out just as the studios hoped, and that this will become the new model (or at least a new model) for anime distribution. We’ve already got a membership at Crunchyroll so that we can stream Shugo Chara! in high quality each week (and we’re excited about trying some other series as well), and aside from a few technical glitches here and there, it’s been a fantastic deal.

Free time? What?

February 24, 2009 by MJ 17 Comments

With my review schedule finally under control, I actually have some time to read some things to talk about here, but I’m having a hard time deciding what to start with. I have volume 1 of Two Flowers for the Dragon sitting here looking at me, as well as a number of other things. It’s been so long since I had time to read something just for pleasure, I hardly know what to do! :)

In the meantime, I’ve been looking around online, and I have a couple of links to share. First of all, Ed Sizemore posted a review today of the most recent Mechadamia journal, and I though it sounded really interesting. His review is good reading on its own, so I recommend checking it out.

Also, Gia reported at Anime Vice about Crunchyroll’s participation in the upcoming Global Shinkai Day, including the fact that they’ll be streaming (among several of his films) 5 Centimeters Per Second which is a film I love very, very much. It is the kind of fiction that makes me long to create something that could affect other people the way it affects me. If you’ve never had a chance to see it, do yourself a favor and go watch for free at Crunchyroll on February 28th!

Lastly, I think I mentioned somewhere around the New Year that I decided to let my Shonen Jump subscription expire and pick up Shojo Beat instead. I got my first issue a little while back and… I’m so glad! Not only am I enjoying more of the comics, but I also really appreciated some of the other features in the magazine. So, Bakuman aside, it seems my early shonen manga obsession really is over! I guess I really am a girl after all! ;D

Watch for a review from me in the upcoming Otaku Bookshelf column at Manga Recon. Until then, goodnight!

Random lunchtime notes

January 5, 2009 by MJ 4 Comments

It’s always disorienting to return to work after a long vacation, and today I’m finding myself yawning much more than usual and having to think too much about routine tasks. I spent most of my vacation enjoying family time, eating too much, reading manga, and writing reviews! The reviews will be turning up at Manga Recon over the next couple of weeks, beginning with today’s Manga Minis, where I review the unremarkable Make Love & Peace from Aurora/LuvLuv, and Yen Press’ whimsical 11th Cat Special.

Vacation also gave us time to binge on Shugo Chara! anime, which just becoming more and more charming. I definitely need to give the manga another chance.

Speaking of manga, I should have a number of volumes of Basara waiting for me when I get home today. I can’t believe I’ve proceeded so slowly with this series, but now that I have some new volumes on the way, I can’t wait to dig in! On one hand, it’s intimidating to think about how many classics I need to catch up on, but on the other hand, it’s wonderful to think about how much great reading I have ahead of me.

And speaking of manga I have to catch up on, Deb Aoki has a poll going on at about.com to determine readers’ favorite new shojo manga for 2008! I haven’t read enough to vote, but I’ll be keeping tabs on the results to help me decide what to catch up on first!

Bye-bee!

December 29, 2008 by MJ 8 Comments

So, Matt Blind just posted news that the first two volumes of the Lucky Star manga from Bandai have been spotted on Amazon (for May and August of this coming year). I’m a fan of the anime, so this is good news for me!

In his post, he brought up the whole high-school-students-drawn-like-little-kids thing, and I admit that was weird for me at first (though I’ve gotten used to it), but I was thinking about that recently, as we’ve just started watching Shugo Chara! which features fifth graders who (in my opinion) look like high school students, and wondering what does it all mean? I know that the high school students who look like eleven-year-olds are supposed to appeal to twenty-something men who are into cuteness, but who are the eleven-year-olds who look like high school students supposed to appeal to? Shugo Chara! is a shojo series, so I suppose the answer is young girls. Is it because (as one friend suggested) young girls wish they looked like teenagers? Or do the kids in Shugo Chara! really look authentic to their age, and my perspective has just been warped from too much moe?

I’d love to know people’s opinions on this. I like both series, so I find it all pretty interesting. Also, speaking of Shugo Chara!, I had purchased the first volume of the manga a while back, read it, decided it was too “young” for me to really get into as a series, and passed it on to the daughter of a co-worker. Now that we’re watching the anime, however, I’m finding it really charming, and I wonder about that decision. Can anyone tell me how different the anime is from the manga? Is it that I really do just enjoy the anime more (rare for me), or have my tastes broadened since I originally read the manga, which means I should probably start picking it up again? Thoughts?

Manga and anime briefs

December 3, 2008 by MJ Leave a Comment

Since everything else here requires spoiler warnings, I’ll start with the one item I can place before the jump and go from there!

I just wanted to make brief mention of an anime series we’ve been enjoying, not just for its terrific story and animation, but also for its method of delivery! Eve no Jikan (Time of Eve) from writer/director Yasuhiro Yoshiura (whose Pale Cocoon we also enjoyed), is being provided with English subtitles as free streaming video at Crunchyroll, shortly after each episode’s release in Japan. Episodes can also be downloaded for a small fee.

Eve no Jikan‘s premise is nothing extremely new. We’ve seen plenty of fiction involving the ethics and complications of a world in which human-like androids are employed to serve humans, and what it really means to be human, etc. What I’m enjoying about this series especially, is that the story revolves around an underground cafe where discrimination between human and android is prohibited. The cafe setting, with its set of fixed characters, helps make the story feel more intimate than what I’m used to in fiction with these themes, assisted also by the youthful POV of its protagonist. I’m impressed, too, with its effectiveness, considering that it is being fed to us only in 15-minute increments.

This is probably old news to most people who read here, but just in case I’m not the last person to talk about this, I wanted to pass it along! :) Watch the first episode here!

Now on to the rest. SPOILERS for new chapters of Bakuman, xxxHolic, and NANA, as well as recent episodes of Ef: A Tale of Melodies after the jump! …

Five things I’m thankful for today

November 25, 2008 by MJ 6 Comments

It’s a little early for Thanksgiving, but having finished my workweek after only two days, I can’t help but feel a bit thankful for some of the people and things around me. I’ll leave major items for later in the week, but for the moment, I’d like to link to a few things that have made me feel happy (and thankful) today: …

Raspberry Heaven, I’m coming back to you

November 22, 2008 by MJ 4 Comments

Arrived home late last night, and it’s very nice to be here. I’m still on Mountain time, so my body feels a bit off, but I had a nice, lazy day at home, which was the perfect thing.

Pop music geek moment: My husband started watching Azumanga Daioh while I was gone, so we watched the first six episodes together last night (I said I was still on Mountain time) and today. At one point while the opening theme was playing, I said, “This sounds like something Andy Partridge would write.” Later I looked it up, and found out the opening and closing themes are both written and performed by a Japanese duo who call themselves “Oranges & Lemons.” Geekiness for the win! :D For the non-pop music geeks, Oranges and Lemons is the name of an album by XTC, Andy Partridge’s band.

Speaking of Azumanga Daioh, I am completely hooked. Now I need to track down the comics. I think I mentioned that I’d picked up the first volume of Yotsuba&! in Utah, so it looks like I’m going to be on a little Kiyohiko Azuma kick for a while. Random Azumanga Daioh question: Does anyone else think that Sakaki looks a lot like Hanajima from Fruits Basket, or is it just me?

Speaking of random questions, is anyone else cursed with getting the opening theme of Lucky Star stuck in their head? *sigh* Anyone else doubly-cursed with the closing theme of Mahoromatic as well? Oh, Japan, you will do me in.

I did read some manga on the plane, including some new releases like NANA volume 13 and Fruits Basket volume 21. On the flight back, I also read the first volume of an older series that I picked up used at a bookstore in Salt Lake City.

Spoilers for ES (Eternal Sabbath) after the jump.…

NYAF in brief

September 29, 2008 by MJ 15 Comments

I’m finally home from NYAF! I had a very nice time, both visiting with old friends and at the con. Everyone else has already reported on the manga industry news and so on, so I’ll just talk about my personal experiences.

Many thanks to dear friends, Laura, Gavin, & James for making time to catch up with me at early hours of the morning, and to my dearest EA, little (or not so little!) Moo, and Malcolm, for putting up with me all weekend. I was also lucky enough to meet a couple of people I’ve become acquainted with through this blog. Here is my report (in order of appearance):

Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane: Friendly, fun, professional. I was very happy to spend time with her at a number of panels over the weekend!

Ed Sizemore: Kind, generous, BEST SHOES EVER. I wish I’d had the opportunity to chat with him more!

Overall, I really enjoyed this con. It was smallish, and with the exception of Saturday, felt actually kind of intimate, which is maybe not profitable if you’re running a con, I don’t know, but certainly enjoyable as an attendee.

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Miscellaneous jumble

September 16, 2008 by MJ 17 Comments

I don’t ever seem to have time enough for anything lately, so just a few brief items today.

I’m having a lot of frustration while trying to write these days, and I expect it’s a bit of anxiety over the self-imposed deadline I have coming up which I don’t think I’m going to make. For the most part, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not always going to make the deadlines I set for myself, and that it is still good to set them, because I’ll still get further along than if I did not, but I think in this case I may have paralyzed myself a little bit with the urgency of it, and how much important I’ve placed on it. I guess we’ll see.

In any case, time to move on to my topics of the day, Bleach, Bakuman, and Princess Tutu!

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