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This blog is a storage space for various thoughts, observations and musings centering on shōjo manga (少女漫画, Japanese comics for girls), josei-oriented manga (Japanese comics for women) and manga created by women (in the widest sense). Topics from other fields of relevance, such as music, art, literature and film may be discussed here as well.

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For the most part, Japanese names appear in their original order - surname first, followed by the given name.

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Viewing all posts with tag: manga



Learning Japanese in the year 2000

Now that I’m more or less free to do what I want until classes start again, I decided to look through some old stuff that’s accumulated in my room in my parents’ house to throw away the things I don’t need to keep and make room for new things. I found a huge stack of Italian manga which I bought when I was, well, in Italy. They already had all the cool stuff back in 1999 or something, when the manga market here wasn’t really as massive as it is now. I bought lots of random stuff, basically anything I could get my hands on, mostly shounen and seinen titles like Macross 7 Trash, Gundam and Cat’s Eye – sadly no shoujo manga, though. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any manga for girls even though they were said to be already quite popular in Italy at that time. (We only had Sailor Moon back then.)

I also found old manga scripts that I’d printed out to read Japanese manga. Ah, the good old days as a manga reader! Yes, we actually bought Japanese manga and tried to read them in Japanese with the help of scripts kind souls with admirable Japanese skills had provided for us on the internet. This is how I learnt Japanese! I taught myself hiragana and katakana, got myself a good dictionary and started reading manga with the help of English scripts. I found scripts for Tenshikinryouku/Angel Sanctuary and other old Yuki Kaori titles, CLAMP stuff like X, Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda and Clover and more light-hearted shoujo series like Emura’s W Juliet. This way, I acquired quite an impressive range of vocabulary which I’d probably never been able to use in every-day life in Japan, including words like “organic angel” (yuukitenshi)…

I might not be doing what I’m doing now if I’d gotten into manga just three or four years later when the scanlation business took off and people became lazy and didn’t buy manga anymore but downloaded it and read it in English. Back in the days, you just had to learn Japanese if you wanted access to all the good titles…

(Does anyone remember fansub tape trading? So last century! ^_~)

3 Comments

Categories: Manga, Personal, Various.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
Posted on Oct 8, 2008 (Wed, 1:06 pm). .

Shoujo anime overload

This is such a great season for shoujo anime fans! The TV anime adaptation of Ouran Koukou Host-bu is excellent, I like it a lot more than the manga (which I thought was rather boring when I was still reading LaLa) because it’s so explosively fast-paced and funny. And colourful and heart-warming. Aww. I’m usually not that fond of comedy but this I like, yes.

And Bokura ga ita! One of the few Betsucomi manga I like. So far I’ve only seen the first episode of the anime adaptation but it seemed pretty well done.

There’s NANA, of course, which I’m still following, of course, because the anime doesn’t disappoint at all, of course. The runner-up for this year’s most hyped shoujo title must be Nakahara Aya’s Lovely Complex because of its movie adaptation. I hope I’ll get to see the film soon (most definitely when the DVD comes out), for now I’ll have to be content with the cool furoku in Betsuma *_*
(And then there’s also the HachiKuro TV anime II and the HachiKuro movie. Great year for Shueisha, ha.)

I’ve also been watching Jyuohsei, the adaptation of the same-titled manga by one of my personal mangaka goddesses Itsuki Natsumi (♥).

And then from autumn on, there’ll be TV anime adaptations of Kin’iro no Corda (another bishounen title running in LaLa, I’ll only get to see it if I survive the cuteness and sheer silliness of Ouran Koukou!!) and Yamada Nadeshiko Shichi Henge (which I, admittedly, don’t like all that much as a manga).

Speaking of the latter: one of my favourite Betsufure series, Life by Suenobu Keiko, received the Kodansha Manga Award. So happy!! I felt even more glad when I read some of the members of the jury’s notes explaining they’d voted for Kawahara Kazune’s Koukou Debut and that it was a tight decision between those two titles in the shoujo category. I was a huge fan of Kawahara’s Sensei! but Koukou Debut turned out to be such a huge disappointment to me that I’m sort of twice as glad Life got the award ^^; But no really, Life‘s such a brilliant series. It embodies so much of ‘classic’ shoujo, the drama, the emotions, the style, I’m glad it’s been getting all this recognition!

1 Comment

Categories: Anime, Manga, Various.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
Posted on Aug 3, 2006 (Thu, 5:01 pm). .

2×7 – NANA TV anime

The new anime season started off for me with NANA, which was also my personal most anticipated new series for spring ’06. This being the adaptation of one of my favourite shoujo manga, my expectations were extremely high.

The animation is being done be Studio MADHOUSE, who did a great job at Paradise Kiss, another adaptation of a Yazawa Ai manga, in the second half of last year.

And they did not disappoint me with NANA. Luckily, the first episode proved that the TV anime is not a pannel to frame adaptation but takes a bit of artistic freedom here and there by leaving things out, adding short scenes and showing scenes from a different angle than in the manga, so it doesn’t give the avid NANA manga reader the feeling they’ve “seen” it all before.
(Which is what happened to me with the NANA movie last year where some scenes seemed all too familiar, especially the scene on the train, the two Nanas’ first meeting, because it used the same angles as the manga and seemed to follow it pannel by pannel.)

The character design of the anime is good, but by no means as cute or beautiful as in the manga. Especially the profiles tend towards the ugly side of things, and a lot of times the full body proportions seem too stretched, even for a shoujo series.

The animation itself is quite decent, including the CG sequences which blend in rather well with the traditionally created scenes.

The music fits pretty well; the opening theme by Tsuchiya Anna and the ending theme by Olivia set the mood for the respective bands and these two vocalists symbolize the fact that NANA (like the original manga itself) is not about authentic (indie) rock or punk but just their mainstream versions (or how the mainstream perceives these genres).

What I’ve noticed after the first 5 minutes already, is that the TV adaptation relies heavily on comedy scenes, more than the manga. The background music (which sometimes reminded me of BGM to be heard during a circus show) emphasized that effect. There were more melancholic and quieter scenes but they definitely were fewer (and shorter) than those slapstick comedy scenes.

I am satisfied with the way they condensed the story, though Hachi/Nana doesn’t quite come off as the bad girl she really is as they left out a lot of her past (her affair with the married man etc.) but this was only the first episode and they might fit in bits of the background story at some later point.

The first episode aired late this past Wednesday so naturally, there aren’t any fansubs out yet. However, if your knowledge of (modern, everyday) Japanese is at a medium degree, you’ll be able to follow the dialogue pretty well. And if you’ve read the manga in Japanese (like me), you won’t face any difficulties at all because all the lines have been used in the manga and you won’t hear anything new.

Ah, I almost forgot: the voice acting! I love Oosaki Nana’s voice *_* Last year, I took really long to get used to Nakashima Mika’s voice who played Nana in the movie adaptation. Her voice sometimes seemed a bit too weak. Not with Paku Romi, the voice actress of the animated Nana :) She has this ultra deep, manly voice which is how I imagine it when reading the manga. And it’s when she speaks softlier that she sounds irresistibly sexy! So far, I really really like her. Hachi’s voice is alright and there’s nothing to be said about the rest of the cast because besides Shouji and Junko, no other main characters have appeared yet. Can’t wait for next week’s episode~

Here are some screencaps:



















2 Comments

Categories: Anime, Various.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , .
Posted on Apr 7, 2006 (Fri, 1:34 am). .




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