anime + manga

I was around eleven or twelve when I first watched Spirited Away, and it was beautiful . Back then, as a kid, I wasn't quite concerned with critically thinking about media like I am now. I just know that when I saw it, I saw something magical come alive on the screen. This might sound weird, but I can still remember the feelings I had while watching the movie a decade ago - the confusion when Haku made Chihiro eat the berry, the surprised fear when the stair under Chihiro broke, the awe of the washing/bathtub scene. I read Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga this week, and I was pretty surprised at the vast differences in the manga and movie. I think he did a great job at compressing the manga while keeping so many of the themes and significant details, like Nausicaa's uncontrollable rage at the soldiers and the prophecy of the blue dress and a wheat field. Despite watching my first Ghibli movie at eleven(ish), I actually only first watched Nausicaa when I was around fourteen o...

This week, we talked about romance manga! I reread several of my favorite romance manga to celebrate this week (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii  (Love is Hard for an Otaku), commonly abbreviated to Wotakoi, is one of my favorite romance manga that I'm following. It's about - you guessed it - two nerds who decide to date. One is obsessed with games and one is obsessed with doujinshi. They both love anime and they have to keep it a secret to preserve their professional dignity at the company they work at together. I like this manga because I think it's a really sweet representation of young people in the workforce bonding over their love of nerdy things, and it also shows the cultural impact of anime/manga in average Japanese life. Also, the art style is really dang cute. I've been following Skip Beat!!  for, oh, maybe about ten years now? I definitely started reading it in middle school. Skip Beat came out in the early 2000s when a lot of romanc...

This week, we covered documentary manga, specifically an autobiographical manga called  I Saw It by Nakazawa Keiji. I was first introduced to this manga by having taken David's Comics class in Sophomore year, so this was my second time reading it. The bone-chilling effect, however, remains. It reminds me much of Studio Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies , in that these stories were both autobiographical events of the authors who survived the atomic bomb. However, Studio Ghibli's movie was adapted from a book by Nosaka Akiyuki, who wrote Grave of the Fireflies  in what many scholars say was a show of deep remorse that he didn't  die with his sister during the atom bomb. In Nosaka's real life, his sister died of malnutrition, but he survived. In his novel (and the movie), the characters that are based on Nosaka and his sister both ended up dying. Talking about the atom bomb is incredibly important, especially (!) in a class devoted to anime and manga, because it ...

This week, we read Cigarette Girl by Masahiko Matsumoto. It's drawn not necessarily in the style of gekiga - the style is really simplistic and cartoony - but the themes are surprisingly mature. Gekiga is a style of manga meant for a mature audience and drawn more realistically to lend itself to that serious vibe. When David defined the term of gekiga, the first things I thought of were seinen and josei manga, or manga aimed at older men and women. The typical style of the 60's gekiga reminded me of the 1988 film Akira, a landmark Japanese adult animation film. The same with Ayako from the first week of reading, Cigarette Girl sort of threw me in a loop. What I expected from the art was NOT what I got from the thematic elements. I think the one about the woman getting the abortion made me the most sad, because of how... realistic it was. The poor girl was essentially tricked into sleeping with her boyfriend, who leaves her because she's pregnant, and her new husband i...