Paprika, by Satoshi Kon

Paprika is a scifi film set in relatively contemporary Japan and directed by the inestimable Satoshi Kon, self-same director of the fantabulous Tokyo Grandfathers. An R&D member of an unnamed psychotherapy organization has invented a way for people to interact with and record others' dreams; but when the technology is stolen, the team is in a race to find the mastermind behind the nightmares as dreams and reality begin to collide.

The movie is full of the same gorgeous animation that's typical of Madhouse (the producer)'s work, but it has an extra 'umph' due to the surrealism of the dream scenes--and of all the scenes, once the aforementioned collision of the sleeping and waking worlds begins. The sound track is also lovely, though I don't think I'm going to be able to hear the parade music for a while without having a reaction like this:

Illustration by Sparrowbirdd on Tumblr

Paprika was released in 2006, and brought to the U.S. by Sony Pictures as a subtitles-only film. Unfortunately we don't have it here at Mooresville, but it is available just up the road at the Plainfield Public Library--and since they're an Evergreen Indiana library like us, you can check it out there with your card and return it here!

Black Butler (redux)

"Wait, didn't you already do a post about Black Butler?" Yes! Yes I did, way the heck back in April. But that was before I watched the anime, so I was unaware that the series took the plot and chucked it out the window after it wrapped up the Jack the Ripper arc. I haven't seen part two of the first series yet, but it looks like it got back on track there, with the arrival of Agni and Prince Soma.

"Alright, so is it better or worse than the manga?"

That...is a complicated question.

On the one hand, the anime introduced a demon dog who turns human during two episodes of what I would call some pretty bad filler, except I watched Naruto during that ghastly stretch of time after the anime completed the Valley of the End arc but before the timeskip and Shippuden began. And also, to be fair, you probably shouldn't call something filler if an effort is made to tie it in to the larger storyline.

That episode with the camera, though? Filler.

However! The anime has also done some really nice things with character development. Especially with Elizabeth and Aberline; I was really pleased with how Elizabeth's character was fleshed out, compared to (what I've read so far of) the manga. And the dub is really spot on with the voice acting and the accents. (Good voice acting is still always a wonderment to me, because my introduction to anime was Yu-Gi-Oh! and the less said about the first--and thankfully brief--voice actor for Tristan, the better.) Plus, there's more Grell. Can't really complain about that.

So I don't think there's really a way to judge "better or worse" when it comes to comparing the anime to the manga. Different, yes! It is definitely different. But this may be the case of another FMA situation, where you basically accept that there are two (or more) versions of the same story (especially with the second series rebooting itself some), and that's that. If you're a fanfic writer, it certainly ups the AU opportunities.

TokyoPop

I mentioned in my last post that TokyoPop restructured in 2008. What does that mean? Well, for one, they're not glutting the market any more.

All right, that was a little mean. I have a certain fondness for TokyoPop; my first introduction to manga was Sailor Moon, which they published (back when they were Mixx. Trivia! TokyoPop published their earliest manga series under the PocketMixx title. Tell your friends, they'll be amazed that you know something so obscure. Or not), and they've published other series that I've reread often despite owning them for years (Jing: King of Bandits, Pet Shop of Horrors). It's just that they've made an easy target of themselves due to the aforementioned glutting, and also due to the poor quality of their translations--which goes back to the glutting again, because when you push to get so many different titles out on a monthly basis, it overworks the translators/adapters who wind up doing "good enough" work. (Pet Shop of Horrors is a prime example of this; you can easily tell when the translation is sloppy or even straight-out altered, because the dialogue is laid out in a way that doesn't mesh up with the speech bubbles. Like I said, easy target.) Viz suffers from this too, to a lesser extent; their earlier, more adult work was very high quality, but when they got the rights to publish an English version of Shonen Jump, the monthly deadlines and increased output decreased the quality.

But all of that aside! TokyoPop's 2008 changes were the beginning of the shift toward digital delivery of manga that we're seeing more of in 2011. I'm going to leave aside all the complicated legal shenanigans that the restructuring meant (you can read about that on Wikipedia, if you're interested): basically, TokyoPop lost the licensing rights to several series, and has discontinued translation of others (again, see the last post re: the Kingdom Hearts 2 manga). Add in that TokyoPop is now closing its North American publishing company, and that the U.K. company will be closing soon as well since it imported so many titles from there, and what does that signify?

Well, for one, that my above comment was really pretty mean.

All hope's not lost, though--at least yet. A lot of manga publishers are moving to counter scanlations with cheaply-priced digital manga--not only English publishers, but Japanese ones as well. Yen Press and Viz, as well as TokyoPop, have digital versions of many of their titles; and there's another company called JManga, which is a consortium of 39 Japanese publishers! (I'd link to it, but it's still in beta mode. This site tells more about it, though!)

As someone who grew up relying on scanlations and fansubs for manga and anime that wasn't available in English yet, I think the publishers have their work cut out for them. Here's hoping they succeed, though; I've seen manga series that I loved get canceled mid-translation because it wasn't selling (Bride of Deimos, From Eroica with Love, Category: Freaks, Kingdom Hearts 2!) and companies go under (CMX, Dr. Masters), so here's hoping that with publishers offering a cheap, digital alternative to scanlations (hopefully with better translations!), the companies that're still around will stay that way.

(Don't worry if you don't have an ereader or personal computer, though--we'll still be buying print copies of manga here at the library!)

Kingdom Hearts, Shiro Amano

"Wait," I hear you saying, "isn't Kingdom Hearts a video game?" Yes, yes it is. It is a video game series spawning just about every game system out there, from the PS2 to the GBA to the PSP and DS and--when Dream Drop Distance (a.k.a 3D) comes out--the 3DS, not to mention mobile phones, if you for some reason played Coded in Japan and not Recoded on the DS like a normal American, because Nomura is clearly in the pay of Nintendo and Sony.

But that aside, Kingdom Hearts is also a manga series!

Overall the manga follows the same linear story line of the games, though it adds some things and presents other events from different angles. It also takes a more light-hearted and comedic approach--for example, Naminé wearing a hard-hat when Sora and Riku are running around tearing up Castle Oblivion. For those of you who've played any of the games, you probably know who I'm talking about. For those of you who haven't, well, let's see if I can encapsulate the continuous plot of six games into a relatively reasonable-sized post.

...Okay, I can't. For real, guys, this entry has been sitting on my computer for a month waiting to be posted while I try to figure how to cram the storyline of KH into a paragraph or two. It's about the forces of light battling the forces of darkness! Except when it isn't. It's also about monsters that have names that make no sense--Heartless are made solely of hearts, Nobodies are bodies without hearts, the Unversed...well, that's a spoiler (if you haven't played BBS), but they still don't make much sense.

So far there are translated versions of Kingdom Hearts 1 (4 volumes), Chain of Memories (2 volumes), and Kingdom Hearts 2 (3 volumes, technically. Volume 3 of the KH2 manga exists, and believe me we here at Mooresville Public Library are trying to get it; but the print run on it was much smaller compared to the ones on all the others that it is, shall we say, an extended [and extensive] process. It's not even for sale on Amazon at wallet-gouging prices! That's pretty bad. I'm not discounting the possibility of simply trying to buy the blasted thing at a con and donating it to the library, but currently that is plan Z.) Volumes 4 and 5 are not available in English, and the translation was cancelled when TokyoPop restructured in 2008, so those are only available via scanlations.

There are several light novels adaptations of the games, but only Kingdom Hearts 1 and the first volume for 358/2 Days have been published in the U.S. The other novels (for CoM and KH2) are not officially available in English, though there are fan translations.

There is no anime version of Kingdom Hearts, which is kind of a shame.

Noir

Last time I said I would get to Noir soon, and now I come through!

Noir is an action/thriller set (mainly) in France (the title is French for “black”). It focuses mainly on Mireille, a Corsican-born assassin, and Kirika, a Japanese girl with amnesia. When Mireille meets Kirika, she discovers that the girl has also been trained as an assassin (despite the amnesia, the training shows through), and they team up to form Noir. Kirika is looking to discover her past; Mireille is seeking the people who murdered her family.

Although Mireille names their team on a whim—“Noir” is the only thing that Kirika remembers, beyond her assassin skills—the decision quickly plunges her and Kirika into the world of a secret society called the Soldats and the power struggles going on within it. They also soon find themselves being tailed by Chloe, another young assassin who was raised and trained by Altena, a high-ranking Soldat who believes the group has lost its way and is orchestrating a takeover to return it to its mythological roots—a takeover that hinges on the return of Kirika to the fold, and a series of increasingly deadly tasks to test whether Mireille is worthy to carry the mantle of “Noir.”

Noir is an older title; it ran in 2001, and was published by Bee Train before being licensed by Madmen and Funimation. Like El Cazador de la Bruja, Noir is an example of high quality dubbing; the action ranges over a sizeable chunk of Europe, and characters’ accents reflect where they are from or located. There is no manga or light novel version of Noir; it is an anime only.

El Cazador de la Bruja

El Cazador de la Bruja is Japan’s take on the Western, but with witches. Because that’s how Japan rolls! If you know Spanish you may not be surprised by this revelation—Google Translate tells me the title means “Witch Hunter.”

It’s a comedy/drama (I just can’t type the word “dramedy”) set in a semi-contemporary Mexico. Nadie is a bounty hunter who runs into Ellis, an amnesiac fugitive who is suspected of a murder. She initially begins traveling with Ellis in order to bring her in and get the bounty on her head, but as more clues to the suspicious murder—as well as Ellis’s own genetically engineered ‘witch powers’—arise, Nadie starts to suspect that the real bad guy in this story is the agency that’s striving to reacquire Ellis, even going so far as to hire another bounty hunter to track the two of them and unleashing another witch, L.A., who pretty much has a straight up stalkerish obsession with Ellis, he and her being the only survivors of the DNA experimentation that gave them their powers. L.A. has much better control over his powers than Ellis, who mainly only activates them subconsciously in times of dire need; that, combined with his hatred of human beings, makes him pretty much the biggest threat to Nadie of the lot sent after her and Ellis.

If this sounds a little familiar, you should know that Bee Train, the company that produced El Cazador de la Bruja, also created Noir. Much is explained! (If it’s still not explained for you, just wait, I’ll get to Noir soon.)

The anime series ran in 2007, and was licensed and dubbed by Funimation. It’s one of their better dub works; like Noir, serious effort was put into hiring voice actors who could give various characters location- and background-appropriate accents. There is also a manga series which ostensibly is still ongoing, but since only one volume’s been published since 2007, you probably shouldn’t get your hopes up. The manga has not been translated into English.

Sunshine Sketch, by Ume Aoki

I’ve been posting a lot of four panel comic series lately. I blame it on this past winter: when you have a record snowfall from December on, it makes you want to read something that’ll make you laugh.

Sunshine Sketch is a slice-of-life comedy set in modern Japan. It’s about six girls who live in the Hidamari (Sunshine) apartment complex and go to Yamabuki High School across the street. The main characters are Yuno and Miyako, their upperclassmates Hiro and Sae, and their underclassmates Nazuna and Nori; but the central character is Yuno.

Yuno moves into Hidamari apartments when she’s accepted to the art department of Yamabuki H.S. In fact, the majority of the people in the apartments are artists: Miyako, Hiro, and Nori all are, and Sae is a writer attending the art department in order to learn how to draw her own illustrations. Only Nazuna attends the "normal" department--a Hidamari first!

The story mainly follows Yuno’s life as she interacts with her friends in the apartments and improves her art--unlike some of the other characters (like Miyako, who despite being a flighty sort of girl is a super impressive artist), Yuno’s drawing skills are a little below par. But she works hard to make up for it, and improves over the course of the series.

Sunshine Sketch is another Yen Press translation. (Can you tell I have a favorite company? Okay, not really, but their wide genre range means there’s a lot to like.) It’s currently ongoing with 5 collected volumes, 4 of which are currently available (volume 5 will be out this month!). There’s also a two volume light novel, and three anime series: the original Sunshine Sketch that ran for 12 episodes in 2007, x365 that went for 14 episodes in 2008, and xHoshimittsu that had 12 episodes in 2010; and there’s also a two episode OAV for each series! Only the original series and x365 are currently available; they’re both licensed by Sendai Filmworks and are English subtitles only--no dubs. The light novels, as usual, have not been translated.

Tokyo Godfathers, by Satoshi Kon

Tokyo Godfathers is a 2003 anime movie written by the late Satoshi Kon and Keiko Nobumoto. It's a dramatic comedy (I just can’t bring myself to write "dramedy") about three homeless people who discover an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve, and the convoluted process they go through to return her to her birth parents.

The main characters of Tokyo Godfathers are Gin, Hana, and Miyuki, who’ve formed a semi-family in a tent city within Tokyo. They find a baby within a trash pile, name it Kiyoko, and after convincing Hana--who never knew his own parents and developed the quickest bond with the infant--that there was no way a group of hobos could properly raise a child, they strike out to find who she belongs to and return her (and to find out why she was abandoned in the first place). Along the way, they wind up running into their individual past lives and mulling over the reasons that they became homeless in the first place: Gin and his gambling, which wrecked his family; Hana and his past in a drag bar; and Miyuki’s fight with her parents over her pet cat. There’s also yakuza, foreigners, lottery tickets, lies about maternity, lies in general, falls off tall buildings, and a ton of action.

The film was produced by Madhouse, of Paranoia Agent, Hellsing Ultimate, and FFVII: Last Order (the short found in the super fancy edition of Advent Children) fame. It was distributed in the U.S. by Sony Pictures as a subtitle only release.

Black Butler, by Yana Toboso

I mentioned Black Butler in my post about Yen Press, and since it’s one of our new series here at Mooresville Public Library, I wanted to bring it up!

Black Butler is a supernatural adventure/dark comedy series, slanted towards girls but definitely not shojo. It’s set in Victorian England, specifically in the late 1880s--the time of Jack the Ripper. The main characters are Ciel Phantomhive, 12-year-old head of the Phantomhive earldom, and his butler Sebastian. While the Phantomhive family (such as it is, since Ciel is an only child and an orphan) heads a toy and candy empire, it’s also secretly the watchdog of England’s seedy underbelly for Queen Victoria. This means Ciel must track down any criminal threats that drift up from the underworld into polite society (like the aforementioned Jack the Ripper) and eliminate them. Ciel typically accomplishes this via Sebastian, who is not really your typical butler, on account of he is a demon.

Literally.

When Ciel’s family was murdered, he was kidnapped, and the anger and pain caused by his mistreatment at the hands of his captors summoned Sebastian. Ciel then entered into a Faustian compact, promising Sebastian that if the demon helped him avenge his family, he would have his soul in return. While hunting for the truth behind the murders, Ciel continues to fulfill the Phantomhive duties of destroying threats to the British crown, and Sebastian continues to obey his orders until the final day comes. (Funny as this manga is--and it is--there’s a reason I called the comedy dark. This is an older teen series.)

Black Butler is translated by (obviously) Yen Press. It’s currently ongoing, with 5 volumes available in English; we have the first four here at MPL! It’s also serialized in the magazine Yen Plus. In addition, there are two anime series, both complete. The first ran for 24 episodes from 2008 to 2009; and the second ran for 12 episodes in 2010. The first anime has been licensed and dubbed by Funimation as “Black Butler season 1,” but so far the second has not been brought over.

Publishers: Yen Press

Since I’ve mentioned Yen Press a few times in the last months (in reference to K-On and Kobato, as well as some upcoming titles), I figured I should give a little background on them.

Yen Press is a subset of Hachette Book Group USA, a company owned by Hachette Livre (a French company, so it’s not surprising that they’ve tackled such a wide range of manga titles--there's a lot more manga translated into French than there is into English, and titles tend to come out faster over there, too. The entire run of Yugioh was out in France when Shonen Jump was just getting into the start of the card game). Yen Press is also one of the newest of newcomers (that are still around) to the manga translation world: it was founded in 2006.

Yen Press took a page out of Del Rey Manga’s book and published translation notes with their volumes. They also tend to include honorifics; there are some exceptions, such as Black Butler, where they’ve eschewed honorifics because they would feel out of place to an English-reading audience (since that series is set in Victorian London). Unlike Del Rey, however, Yen Press doesn’t usually include a few translated or untranslated pages of the next volume at the end of a manga; they default more to a ‘teaser,’ similar to Tokyopop’s model. The difference is that Yen Press tends to do a full page teaser complete with summary and a panel from the coming volume, while Tokyopop typically only does a summary.

Yen Press is also what I would consider the most otaku of manga translators--they pretty much dived in assuming that their predecessors (Del Rey, Viz, Tokyopop, and some smaller companies like CMX or DrMaster) had sufficiently introduced manga and basic Japanese culture to the mainstream that they could dispense with Anglicizing their titles. They’ve also been the main introducer of manhwa, or Korean manga, to America (like Cynical Orange and Hissing); and they’re also publishing a few original English titles, like the Maximum Ride series and the Twilight graphic novel. So while they may not be the best place to start if you’re unfamiliar with manga, once you get the hang of it I highly recommend them!