Manga Notes: On From Anime
Jul. 25th, 2014 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI concluded around the beginning of the year that having bought both the anime and the manga of particular titles, I would have to at last devote the time to get through the anime first and only then move on to the manga on the chance it would "have more character to its character art" or "feel less toned down" even before they might continue beyond where the anime had had to leave off. That I would be "returning to something I'd seen before" hadn't really registered on me, perhaps, until I was actually doing it.
Picking up on the interest shown by other people, I got the Highschool of the Dead anime on DVD (long enough ago that I only had a DVD player then); with the thought it would go only so far in telling a story continued in other media, I wound up also getting the two big hardcovers printing the manga in colour. After at last opening up the anime, though, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling its story wasn't agreeing with me. This seemed to have little to do with its conventional kind of "fanservice," much more with the simultaneous impressions that while things were dire and getting direr for the world as a whole through the arbitrary complications of a zombie apocalypse, the increasingly well-armed protagonists would continue to hack, slash, and blast their way past opponents thoroughly "safe" to dispose of that way. All the same, though, I did push on to the manga. Reading it in colour and in a large format didn't seem to make me think too much of North American comics in the actual event, in any case.
Beyond some chapters near the end of the first omnibus relocated in the anime to increase the scale of its "to be continued" final episode, things seemed pretty familiar to start with. Once I'd made it to the new material, I suppose I didn't find any major new things to dwell on; there was even the suggestion that, while the characters were continuing to pick up even better guns that before, firing them off all the time did have some disadvantages against opponents that respond to sound. However, the female characters did seem to be getting more and more overstuffed and top-heavy in the last chapters; on seeing, in the artbook that added to the second omnibus, that the DVD covers had been drawn by the manga artist, I did suppose that was where I'd been getting the impression of the for-me unappealing "cylindro-conical look" that had dogged me into the anime. Things left off seeming to set up a situation similar to the end of the anime; whether that had something to do with how things don't seem to have continued from there, I don't know.
It sort of surprised and impressed me together, watching the first Mardock Scramble movie, to be reminded of the slick, stylish, once seemingly transgressive, perhaps a little opaque, but definitely action-heavy "ambiguous dystopias" science fiction OVAs anime fandom over here was built on into the mid-1990s. (There, though, I suppose I might even have been lucky to have not heard too much about the movie beforehand: all too often I seem to find an edge of unpleasantness to the promotion of "throwback" or just plain old works when it seems intent on putting down recent anime.) I was impressed enough that when I noticed there was a manga of the work, I started buying it too. The thought of only learning how the story ended by "finishing the anime," though, kept me waiting for the other two movies to be released, and by that point I had seven volumes of manga and was wondering just from their cover art if this would be for once a case where the manga seemed "toned down" compared to the anime.
In the first volume of the manga, however, there were enough incidents in the familiar story that were simply different from the anime that I found myself interested in it. As I got further into the volumes, the stories did seem to converge on each other again, but I then found myself thinking the extended casino showdown that had stretched between the second and third movies was easier to understand and follow in the manga. Around there, though, the thought did begin to occur to me at last that something seemed sort of familiar about the style. I finally double-checked and realised the artist Yoshitoki Oima was also working on A Silent Voice, a manga I'm now reading through Crunchyroll. It can seem easy to dismiss manga merely based on something else, but it was nice to know the artist had moved on to another project. Eventually, of course, I'll also have to get around to reading my copy of the translated original novel I also bought a while ago.
When Yen Press released the manga adaptation of the movie Wolf Children in an omnibus hardcover, the volume looked handsome enough on the store shelf I saw it on that I went and bought it. For all that I'd liked the movie when I saw it, though, I suppose I did get to wondering whether the manga would just seem extraneous. As I got started into it, I did notice some of the montage sequences of the movie were missing in the manga; by the time I'd got to the back half of the volume, though, I was inclined to feel positive about the character art. Whether this emphasis on the characters brought me from an interest in the scenery and the homesteading in the middle of the movie back to a feeling I'd had before that it could be a bit too easy to play the amateur cultural analyst and start sighing "those unfortunate Japanese people--things are different for them than for us" was a question that opened up again, though.
Picking up on the interest shown by other people, I got the Highschool of the Dead anime on DVD (long enough ago that I only had a DVD player then); with the thought it would go only so far in telling a story continued in other media, I wound up also getting the two big hardcovers printing the manga in colour. After at last opening up the anime, though, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling its story wasn't agreeing with me. This seemed to have little to do with its conventional kind of "fanservice," much more with the simultaneous impressions that while things were dire and getting direr for the world as a whole through the arbitrary complications of a zombie apocalypse, the increasingly well-armed protagonists would continue to hack, slash, and blast their way past opponents thoroughly "safe" to dispose of that way. All the same, though, I did push on to the manga. Reading it in colour and in a large format didn't seem to make me think too much of North American comics in the actual event, in any case.
Beyond some chapters near the end of the first omnibus relocated in the anime to increase the scale of its "to be continued" final episode, things seemed pretty familiar to start with. Once I'd made it to the new material, I suppose I didn't find any major new things to dwell on; there was even the suggestion that, while the characters were continuing to pick up even better guns that before, firing them off all the time did have some disadvantages against opponents that respond to sound. However, the female characters did seem to be getting more and more overstuffed and top-heavy in the last chapters; on seeing, in the artbook that added to the second omnibus, that the DVD covers had been drawn by the manga artist, I did suppose that was where I'd been getting the impression of the for-me unappealing "cylindro-conical look" that had dogged me into the anime. Things left off seeming to set up a situation similar to the end of the anime; whether that had something to do with how things don't seem to have continued from there, I don't know.
It sort of surprised and impressed me together, watching the first Mardock Scramble movie, to be reminded of the slick, stylish, once seemingly transgressive, perhaps a little opaque, but definitely action-heavy "ambiguous dystopias" science fiction OVAs anime fandom over here was built on into the mid-1990s. (There, though, I suppose I might even have been lucky to have not heard too much about the movie beforehand: all too often I seem to find an edge of unpleasantness to the promotion of "throwback" or just plain old works when it seems intent on putting down recent anime.) I was impressed enough that when I noticed there was a manga of the work, I started buying it too. The thought of only learning how the story ended by "finishing the anime," though, kept me waiting for the other two movies to be released, and by that point I had seven volumes of manga and was wondering just from their cover art if this would be for once a case where the manga seemed "toned down" compared to the anime.
In the first volume of the manga, however, there were enough incidents in the familiar story that were simply different from the anime that I found myself interested in it. As I got further into the volumes, the stories did seem to converge on each other again, but I then found myself thinking the extended casino showdown that had stretched between the second and third movies was easier to understand and follow in the manga. Around there, though, the thought did begin to occur to me at last that something seemed sort of familiar about the style. I finally double-checked and realised the artist Yoshitoki Oima was also working on A Silent Voice, a manga I'm now reading through Crunchyroll. It can seem easy to dismiss manga merely based on something else, but it was nice to know the artist had moved on to another project. Eventually, of course, I'll also have to get around to reading my copy of the translated original novel I also bought a while ago.
When Yen Press released the manga adaptation of the movie Wolf Children in an omnibus hardcover, the volume looked handsome enough on the store shelf I saw it on that I went and bought it. For all that I'd liked the movie when I saw it, though, I suppose I did get to wondering whether the manga would just seem extraneous. As I got started into it, I did notice some of the montage sequences of the movie were missing in the manga; by the time I'd got to the back half of the volume, though, I was inclined to feel positive about the character art. Whether this emphasis on the characters brought me from an interest in the scenery and the homesteading in the middle of the movie back to a feeling I'd had before that it could be a bit too easy to play the amateur cultural analyst and start sighing "those unfortunate Japanese people--things are different for them than for us" was a question that opened up again, though.