The Anime Almanac

Some months ago, I wrote in my Avatar retrospective that the humor in anime comedies just could not compare to that of our domestic cartoons. The Japanese and Americans have two different senses of humor, which are buried deep into our cultural upbringing. Domestic cartoons featured more sarcasm and cynicism into their humor, which are both concepts not that prevalent in Japanese culture. On the other hand, anime comedies feature a lot jokes from the tsukkomi-boké formula, where a straight man (tsukkomi) punishes the stupidity of an idiot (boké). While tsukkomi-boké can translate to a vaudevillian slapstick to an American viewer, it mostly fails to produce the same kind of laughter as it does in Japan.

Well, not long after I wrote that, I came across one anime show that completely blew this generalization right out the window. At the start of August, I signed up for Fios TV service in my apartment, and much to my surprise, it came with the FUNimation Channel. Now, the FUNimation Channel is still very new, and from what I hear, it’s only available over Fios. That is why it is no surprise that the channel only appears to air about a dozen shows on repeat. But even with the limited selection of shows, they had one that I’ve been meaning to watch for a while now, Haré + Guu.

Haré + Guu is the story of boy named Haré who lives in a small jungle village with his mother, Weda. After a night of partying, Weda unexplainably brings home an adorable pink-haired girl named Guu to live with them. But after a while, Haré discovers that Guu is not at all what she appears to be, and she makes his world a nightmare with all her crazy antics. The original Japanese title, Jungle wa Itsumo Hare Nochi Guu, is a play on Haré’s name meaning “sunny and nice” and can be interpreted as “the jungle was always nice, and then along came Guu.”

And my God, this show is funny!

It is really f@#$ing funny!

It is the funniest anime I have ever seen and clearly does not just play into the traditional tsukkomi-boké formula. There is something very unique about this show that you don’t get with other Japanese comedies. So this week, I’d like to take an analytical look at the humor of this show and why it translates so well even to this American otaku.

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Sorry, everyone. I was not able to get a new essay ready to post for this week. So in the meantime, please enjoy this repost of my first theoretical article ever on the Anime Almanac. I was reminded of this essay by this week’s Chicks on Anime column at the Anime News Network. It is much shorter than the length of my posts these days, but I think it still gets my point across. Originally posted on April 26, 2005, right at the start of the otaku boom / moé fad in Japan.

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Adaptation – in the world of media, it is the act of altering the written text of a story so that it may be preformed for film, television, or theater. It’s not as easy as just handing the actors a novel and expecting them to be able to preform the story on camera or in front of an audience.  It is up to a screenwriter or playwright to take the novel, visualize the story in their head, and then create a script specifically for the medium they intend to use it in.

There are two big tasks for the screenwriter to deal with. The first is to create a dialogue because that is the primary way that the actors will be able to communicate the story to the audience. While they may have some help with some dialogue in the original story, the screenwriter must create more conversation to fill in the gaps that one can narrate within the text of the novel but cannot convey on screen or stage.

The screenwriter must also map out how the story will visual play out in their adaptation. They must describe the set, the background, the camera angle, the positioning of the actors… every little aspect of the production must be written into the new script or screenplay.

When you come down to it, an adaption might have originated from a written novel, but the show really comes from the creativity of the screenwriter.

In the world of otaku media, it is not nearly this difficult to adapt between the two biggest mediums we care about – anime and manga. Manga, by nature, is already very visual and entirely dialogue driven. The panels can serve as a “storyboard” of how the anime adaptation will look and the word bubbles can serve as the script for the voice actors to use. And more often than not, many anime adaptions do just that.

That is, unless you are director Akiyuki Shinbo and his team at Studio Shaft. In a move of creative genius, this studio brings back the art of adaptation in many of their anime projects. This week, I’d like to go over two such series from the studio that are currently available in America, Tsukuyomi ~ Moon Phase ~ and Pani Poni Dash!

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Japanator’s Dick McVengeance issued a challenge in the comments of his response to my fansub controversy. He wanted to know if the American DVD sales of anime actually meant anything to the Japanese. Was the American market really important to the global anime economy, or were we all just gravy to them, just the icing on the cake?

It was a valid question, and one that I had been dealing with ever since I first said, “buy a damn DVD” all those years ago. Why did we have to worry about supporting the “industry” in America when all we wanted was the product coming out of Japan?

Well, being the industry fanboy that I am, of course my answer was going to be that we weren’t just gravy to the Japanese. I believed that America anime market was actually a critical part of their business over there.

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So the list of my anime pet peeves might not be that large, but they are topics I’m really critical of and have spent way too much time writting about on this website and twitter:

1) DRM
2) Fansubs
3) Crunchyroll
4) Bandai Entertianment Inc. (BEI)

Now it would seem like the last point just doesn’t match with the other three, but on the contrary, they all boil down to one thing –

What’s wrong with anime on the internet in America and why it is not getting better.

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I noticed something very amazing last Thursday. There was a common theme running with all the people I follow on Twitter. Up in Connecticut, Ramune and Neato, the team that makes up the web comic Kitsune Kiki, were making their way to JFK airport to catch a flight to Baltimore. Japanator’s Dick McVengeance was taking a drive down from New Jersey. Down in Georgia, long time anime blogger Matthew was also catching a flight, while Gia was preparing for a cross-country flight out of LA. And this whole time, I was on a Greyhound bus from New York to Baltimore, surrounded by nerds, fangirls, multicolored wigs, and cat ears.

For one day, it appeared that every otaku in America was traveling to Baltimore for Otakon. It was an otaku pilgrimage, and the Baltimore Inner Harbor was our holy land.

After spending my weekend at Otakon, attending many panels, and observing the otaku culture, I certainly know why it has become such a sacred place for our little subculture. Although I did a full coverage of the event live on my twitter account, I would like to go over a few major highlights of the convention that really stood out for me.

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A month ago, I wrote in my controversial essay that I was going to give up on downloading illegal fansubs. In a way, it really wasn’t that hard of a decision for me to make at the time. I had burnt myself out with covering the spring season on my Twitter account. What started off as a dozen new shows in the first week quickly filtered to only two shows the next week, and I even lost interest in those shows not long after that.

Instead of watching fansubs for the rest of that season, I was discovering many older shows through my Netflix account. I was watching them on my big screen HDTV, so I felt a lot more relaxed sitting on my couch than sitting in front of a computer at my desk. And for the most part, they were all turning out to be good series because I was only renting shows I recalled hearing good things about through out the years.

So when I was working on the Ayres piece, I had to deal with the fansub debate head on and really reevaluate why I was continuing to download things illegally. I’ve been saying for years that people who were watching fansubs were not buying DVDs, and this in turn was creating problems for the industry in both America and Japan. But knowing this, I went on for years using the reasoning of, “I’ll buy the DVD when it comes out,” as my justification for downloading fansubs.

But I never bought the DVD. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who regularly bought anime DVDs anymore. They all stopped when they discovered fansubs.

So instead of being a hypocrite and never fulfilling on my promises, I decided to give up on the whole thing all together. It didn’t really sound that difficult to do. Working on the Ayres piece just convinced me to go all the way.

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I was getting dinner at my local Subway restaurant the other day when I was overhearing the people in front of me. It was a mother and her 8-year-old son. The boy was acting like little boys do, a little hyperactive, loud, and very annoying to the people around him. So the mother came up with the best way to calm him down:

“You better behave,” she warned him, “or you’re not going to be able to watch Avatar tonight. You want to watch Avatar, don’t you?”

“Uh huh,” the boy said, and he did quiet down and behave himself after that. I was a little tempted to tell the boy, “I also want to watch Avatar tonight,” but I’ve learned from my days of selling DBZ toys at Toys R Us that this kind of  cross-generational fanboy talk never goes so well with the mother…

But I was actually taken aback a little bit when I overheard this conversation. I have been a huge fan of the series for a couple of years, and I’ve seen it become so widely accepted among my peers. I’ve talked about it with my anime club back in college. I’ve seen it cosplayed many times at anime convention. I’ve been to convention panels where fanboys would go nuts over the action sequences and fangirls would coo over various coupling… including some yaoi pairings!

In my mind, Avatar has become just as much as part of the American otaku culture as any other mainstream anime show from Japan. So now that the show has finally ended its run on TV, I’m left to wonder just how does this series manage to become such a huge part of the otaku community yet still appeal to your average American boy?

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Within the past couple of months, I have became a total fanboy for the new manga publisher Yen Press. With their manga anthology Yen Plus coming out in a couple of weeks and the release of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya coming out next year, I really see a great future ahead for these guys. But my first taste from this publisher actually came at the suggestion of Del Rey’s Dallas Middaugh. During a Q&A panel last year, someone asked Mr. Middaugh about his favorite manga series not released by Del Rey. His answer was Yen Press’s With the Light – Raising an Autistic Child by Keiko Tobe, and he was quite adamant about how much he enjoyed it.

With this suggestion, I picked up the first volume of the series shortly afterwards. Yen Press combines two volumes of the Japanese edition for each American release, making each volume much larger than your average manga. But you only pay $15 for what’s pretty much two entire books, and trust me, it is worth every penny of it…

Mr. Middaugh’s suggestion was dead on because With the Light would become the best comic I have read in years… and that’s saying a lot considering just how much manga I’ve read during that time.

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Darkness falls over the poor lands of the American anime market. What was once a prosperous and thriving area was now facing mass famine due to the abandonment and neglect of its people. Now the land’s most terrible foe, the evil giant Fansub monster, has grown so big that even the mighty warriors of the industry struggle to survive.

“It’s too much, I can’t go any farther,” calls out the Geneon Ranger as his giant robot becomes the first to crumble to the ground.

“I’ve lost all my support,” screams the leader, ADV Ranger. “I can’t continue on like this. Fall back! Fall back!”

But through all this chaos and destruction, one underdog steps forward to rally the others together. “I might not have enough to defeat this monster,” says the lone FUNi Ranger, “but my robot still has enough juice to fight! Let us combine our powers to take down this beast!”

“Right!” confirms the others, and they join their battle machines together to create the FUNizoid – savior of the market and fighter of the Fansub monster!

And unfortunately for everyone, this massive mech is the last hope left for the struggling industry.

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