Best of 2007: anime and manga edition

Hopefully I will get around to doing other media later; values of 'best' meaning 'the ones I enjoyed most and thought were the most well-done'; new to me, not necessarily new this year; your mileage may vary.

The best anime I saw in 2007: Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei (Goodbye, Mr. Despair).

I haven't talked about this anime on Livejournal, or in public at all, really. That's because it's incredibly difficult to find anything, coherent or otherwise, to say about this thing. Um. The first season is twelve episodes long. I think the second will be too, but it's running in Japan right now, so I'm not sure. It's an animated series, in that there are a series of pictures filmed in sequence so that they appear to move due to the illusion of persistence of vision. There was a manga, which I would not be surprised to find also appears to move, due to the illusion of persistence of consensus reality. The manga won the Shogakukan Manga Award, which is very prestigious, and the gigantic disembodied floating head of the mangaka made me aware of this at least once per episode, although he may have skipped several, but it's hard to tell, because he's so similar in appearance to the yin-yang subliminal penguin.

I'm sorry. I'm honestly trying.

Anyway. Nozomu Itoshiki, the titular character, is a high school teacher. If you write his name out horizontally, instead of vertically from right to left as is traditional, you can also read the kanji in his name as 'zetsubou', which means despair. The series is full of puns like this. Zetsubou-sensei lives in a world taken from the deepest, darkest depths of human depravity and nightmare. Everything is grounds for suspicion, and anything can drive him to attempt suicide. (It's a rare episode in which he doesn't try at least three times.) His students... don't live in that world. They don't live in the one most of us live in, mind you. One of his students, Kafuka (whom I suspect of being, in no particular order, a reference to the European author; a reference to Haruki Murakami; and the goddess Kwan Yin in a mood) lives in a world in which nothing remotely bad, scary, or threatening can ever possibly occur, a world of happy bunnies, sunlight, friendly household spirits, and of course no possibility of death or destruction, let alone self-inflicted death or destruction. Put together, she and Zetsubou-sensei utterly fail to make one normal person.

I don't know whether to recommend this show to anyone, or how to recommend it, or possibly even why. It's even more offensive than you're possibly thinking it could be, it obstinately refuses to make any kind of sense, it walks the thin and teetering line between parodying the objectification of women and objectifying women with no grace whatsoever, it's full of anime-industry in-jokes that only vaguely make sense to anyone outside the Japanese anime industry and nearly no sense at all to me, and it all goes by at a truly ludicrously manic, headache-inducing speed.

It's also the most literate and intelligently written comedy I've seen in years, structuring itself around individual sequences with some truly hilarious segment titles ('One Morning, Gregor Samsa Awoke To Find Himself On A Bandwagon'), occasional genuinely moving character moments, some brilliant voice acting, and an odd thread of Buddhist philosophy that causes it to produce some of the most hauntingly beautiful images out there. And it has one hell of a great opening song.

I learned the Japanese vocabulary word for 'normal' from Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, and the sheer irony of that continues to flatten me.

Also, I would like to take this moment to thank the fansubbers, who have performed heroically on a title that is the antithesis of easy translation: the screen fills up with text repeatedly, everyone's name is a pun, catchphrases from other shows go by at top speed, the segment titles are calligraphic... and they've done every single bit of extra text, produced copious ending credit notes, and thrown in everything short of pop-up explanations on the screen. It's the best fan translation since the original KareKano, and I'm grateful, because who knows how and when this will ever be licensed?

( Honorable Mentions: anime )

The best manga I read in 2007: Japan As Seen By 17 Creators, Fanfare UK/Ponent Mon.

I would recommend this to people who don't generally read manga, as well as to those who do. This anthology arose out of a cultural exchange program in which nine French comics authors were sent to different parts of Japan for a two-week stay and then asked to write about their experiences, while eight Japanese mangaka were asked to write about the same parts of the country. Ordinarily I wouldn't expect much out of this, but the results are nothing short of stunning. Many of the authors of either nationality are rarely translated into English, and those who are beginning to be translated tend to be translated in long-form work: here we get short pieces by Jiro Taniguchi, Joann Sfar (author of The Rabbi's Cat), Nicolas de Crecy (co-creator of The Triplets of Belleville), Moyoco Anno, and Kan Takahama, among others.

Moyoco Anno was my major discovery of this collection, as far as being led to other things; I'd heard of her in passing for a while, as Viz is putting out some of her work, but I hadn't really thought of it as being my sort of thing. Her few dazzling pages in this anthology, an inspired combination of Beardsley and brush-painting that drips summer heat and scent, caused me to look into her other books. Sugar Sugar Rune, in particular, is a bitchy Goth spin on the magical-girl genre that unforgivingly grinds that genre's flaws into the dust; the jacket copy does not betray how deeply weird the contents are, Tim Burton with a dash of Kurt Weill somehow aimed at the teenybopper market. It did not surprise me at all when I discovered that Moyoco Anno is married to Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion).

My favorite story of the collection, however, is Aurelia Aurita's 'Now I Can Die Happy', a mixture of loose, sketchy brushwork, irrepressible good humor, and genuine joy that comes non-linearly to a moving and precise conclusion. Or Kan Takahama's meditation on what it is like to live on the very, very western tip of Japan, and to have a lover who comes from overseas, and the omnipresence of the loss and grace of the ocean. Or Etienne Davodeau's precisely mapped journal comic, scaled, detailed and photographed down to the inch, which only gradually reveals the gaping emotional wounds below its plethora of facts and captions. Or Kazuichi Hanawa's Hokkaido winter, cold and dreamlike, full of gods and the polite ghosts of children on a mountain; or Francois Schuiten's story about a tourist meeting a Japanese man who is going to see his brother, born the same day, hour, and minute, and the results of that.

Korea As Seen By 12 Creators is coming up later this year. I can't wait.

( Honorable Mentions: manga )

And that's it for now.

Best of 2007: anime and manga edition

Hopefully I will get around to doing other media later; values of 'best' meaning 'the ones I enjoyed most and thought were the most well-done'; new to me, not necessarily new this year; your mileage may vary.

The best anime I saw in 2007: Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei (Goodbye, Mr. Despair).

I haven't talked about this anime on Livejournal, or in public at all, really. That's because it's incredibly difficult to find anything, coherent or otherwise, to say about this thing. Um. The first season is twelve episodes long. I think the second will be too, but it's running in Japan right now, so I'm not sure. It's an animated series, in that there are a series of pictures filmed in sequence so that they appear to move due to the illusion of persistence of vision. There was a manga, which I would not be surprised to find also appears to move, due to the illusion of persistence of consensus reality. The manga won the Shogakukan Manga Award, which is very prestigious, and the gigantic disembodied floating head of the mangaka made me aware of this at least once per episode, although he may have skipped several, but it's hard to tell, because he's so similar in appearance to the yin-yang subliminal penguin.

I'm sorry. I'm honestly trying.

Anyway. Nozomu Itoshiki, the titular character, is a high school teacher. If you write his name out horizontally, instead of vertically from right to left as is traditional, you can also read the kanji in his name as 'zetsubou', which means despair. The series is full of puns like this. Zetsubou-sensei lives in a world taken from the deepest, darkest depths of human depravity and nightmare. Everything is grounds for suspicion, and anything can drive him to attempt suicide. (It's a rare episode in which he doesn't try at least three times.) His students... don't live in that world. They don't live in the one most of us live in, mind you. One of his students, Kafuka (whom I suspect of being, in no particular order, a reference to the European author; a reference to Haruki Murakami; and the goddess Kwan Yin in a mood) lives in a world in which nothing remotely bad, scary, or threatening can ever possibly occur, a world of happy bunnies, sunlight, friendly household spirits, and of course no possibility of death or destruction, let alone self-inflicted death or destruction. Put together, she and Zetsubou-sensei utterly fail to make one normal person.

I don't know whether to recommend this show to anyone, or how to recommend it, or possibly even why. It's even more offensive than you're possibly thinking it could be, it obstinately refuses to make any kind of sense, it walks the thin and teetering line between parodying the objectification of women and objectifying women with no grace whatsoever, it's full of anime-industry in-jokes that only vaguely make sense to anyone outside the Japanese anime industry and nearly no sense at all to me, and it all goes by at a truly ludicrously manic, headache-inducing speed.

It's also the most literate and intelligently written comedy I've seen in years, structuring itself around individual sequences with some truly hilarious segment titles ('One Morning, Gregor Samsa Awoke To Find Himself On A Bandwagon'), occasional genuinely moving character moments, some brilliant voice acting, and an odd thread of Buddhist philosophy that causes it to produce some of the most hauntingly beautiful images out there. And it has one hell of a great opening song.

I learned the Japanese vocabulary word for 'normal' from Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, and the sheer irony of that continues to flatten me.

Also, I would like to take this moment to thank the fansubbers, who have performed heroically on a title that is the antithesis of easy translation: the screen fills up with text repeatedly, everyone's name is a pun, catchphrases from other shows go by at top speed, the segment titles are calligraphic... and they've done every single bit of extra text, produced copious ending credit notes, and thrown in everything short of pop-up explanations on the screen. It's the best fan translation since the original KareKano, and I'm grateful, because who knows how and when this will ever be licensed?

( Honorable Mentions: anime )

The best manga I read in 2007: Japan As Seen By 17 Creators, Fanfare UK/Ponent Mon.

I would recommend this to people who don't generally read manga, as well as to those who do. This anthology arose out of a cultural exchange program in which nine French comics authors were sent to different parts of Japan for a two-week stay and then asked to write about their experiences, while eight Japanese mangaka were asked to write about the same parts of the country. Ordinarily I wouldn't expect much out of this, but the results are nothing short of stunning. Many of the authors of either nationality are rarely translated into English, and those who are beginning to be translated tend to be translated in long-form work: here we get short pieces by Jiro Taniguchi, Joann Sfar (author of The Rabbi's Cat), Nicolas de Crecy (co-creator of The Triplets of Belleville), Moyoco Anno, and Kan Takahama, among others.

Moyoco Anno was my major discovery of this collection, as far as being led to other things; I'd heard of her in passing for a while, as Viz is putting out some of her work, but I hadn't really thought of it as being my sort of thing. Her few dazzling pages in this anthology, an inspired combination of Beardsley and brush-painting that drips summer heat and scent, caused me to look into her other books. Sugar Sugar Rune, in particular, is a bitchy Goth spin on the magical-girl genre that unforgivingly grinds that genre's flaws into the dust; the jacket copy does not betray how deeply weird the contents are, Tim Burton with a dash of Kurt Weill somehow aimed at the teenybopper market. It did not surprise me at all when I discovered that Moyoco Anno is married to Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion).

My favorite story of the collection, however, is Aurelia Aurita's 'Now I Can Die Happy', a mixture of loose, sketchy brushwork, irrepressible good humor, and genuine joy that comes non-linearly to a moving and precise conclusion. Or Kan Takahama's meditation on what it is like to live on the very, very western tip of Japan, and to have a lover who comes from overseas, and the omnipresence of the loss and grace of the ocean. Or Etienne Davodeau's precisely mapped journal comic, scaled, detailed and photographed down to the inch, which only gradually reveals the gaping emotional wounds below its plethora of facts and captions. Or Kazuichi Hanawa's Hokkaido winter, cold and dreamlike, full of gods and the polite ghosts of children on a mountain; or Francois Schuiten's story about a tourist meeting a Japanese man who is going to see his brother, born the same day, hour, and minute, and the results of that.

Korea As Seen By 12 Creators is coming up later this year. I can't wait.

( Honorable Mentions: manga )

And that's it for now.