bakuman 1
Categories: bakuman, episodic review
Tagged: bakuman
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Yet another manga turned anime about manga being turned into anime. #meta #matryoshka
If I told you that the directors of Code Geass and Nodame Cantabile teamed up with the scriptwriter of K-fucking-On! to turn a romance series from the author of Death Note into an anime by JC Staff, would you be interested? I probably had you at “Code Geass.” And, if I didn’t, why the fuck are you reading this blog? Luluko 4 ever. No homo.
Bakuman features the second biggest early shocker of the season (sorry, you’re not topping Ring My Bell from Sora no Otoshimono Forte unless Luluko and Suzaku show up) in that, well, fuck it, I thought this anime was about spinning tops or some shit. I guess I’m wrong. Bakuman is not the same as Bakugon. My bad.
(Actually, the “spoiler” is that the main character, Mashiro, gets roped into teaming up with Takagi into developing a manga. Apparently, Mashiro is some genius artist whereas Takagi is known for writing anime blogs or some shit. Mmm… sounds… familiar? Oh well.)
“This one-sided crush is going nowhere. It’s going to drag me straight to hell.”
So, you can probably guess, Mashiro has a crush on this girl, Azuki, who also secretly likes him. Takagi, because he’s a masterful writer, figures this out and tries to blackmail Mashiro into drawing his manga by forcing a confrontation with Azuki. He divulges her secret aspiration to become an anime seiyuu hoping it would spur Mashiro into action. And, it does. Mashiro, I guess blinded by how cute Azuki looked in her delicious dress, proposes to her. He asks her to marry him if she becomes the seiyuu for his anime. She… accepts! But tells him they can’t meet unless it’s through texts. What, no Twitter? No Facebook? No FaceTime? Glad anime has caught up to 2006. Now can we please get an anime in 2010 for 2010?
(Tony Stark screaming into a landline… yeah… that’s going to happen. What’s with anime’s aversion to modern cell phone use patterns? When will I see an app being used in anime? Why don’t we see Ritsu playing Angry Birds when waiting for Yui?)
“Why so serious?”
I like quick reference to Death Note right off the bat. If I were responsible for a kick ass manga, I would keep referring to it in all my future work. Like if Tsugumi Ohba did K-On! instead of Kakifly, Ui could be using the Death Note to kill anyone who got too friendly with Onee-sama.
(Takagi is voiced by Satoshi Hino, who did Yuji from SnS and Saito from ZnT… really weird to hear him in a role where a wrathful loli isn’t beating the shit out of him.)
… they meet at a dark place, Takagi tells Mashiro that he likes him, and they hold hands. No gay undertones here. Just like how there weren’t any gay undertones between Light-o and L.
Animation quality… JC Staff shoujo level. Definitely not their top team, which I suspect would be working on Index during this time. The characters don’t move a lot, and there’s not a lot of background animation. Not really a series that needs to look pretty on HD, but definitely screams budget anime.
I guess interesting to see how Tsugumi Ohba handles a growing up show… it’s a very different genre from Death Note, that’s for sure. The setup is kinda out there and a bit forced/rushed. But it seems sweet and naive. I guess time will tell if it has legs to run on (a la Nodame) or crash and burn (a la Kimi no Todake). And, yeah, it would be funny if the guy who brought us Death Note also brings us typical manga-styled romantic angst.
(I hope the manga they start developing focus on four guys going through high school and find themselves, happiness, and direction in life while playing music in a jazz club.)
12 Responses to “bakuman 1”
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At least it’s not dragging the traps or the yaoi ero scenes like the anime treatment of Genshijen did in the second season. But with Hato in the revival…
The manga you just suggested is called BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad.
The premise for this show is just so ridiculous that I can’t bring myself to even watch it… it’s like Welcome to the NHK! all over again. No matter how good, how critically acclaimed, just the synopsis of it makes me want to avoid it.
“When will I see an app being used in anime?”
…Eden of the East
What’s with the sarcasm about gays ?
Luluko disapproves ….
Romance series? I don’t think so, Tim.
It’s more about manga and how the manga industry(?)/world works. Anything else in there is just an aside.
And ridiculous premises, K.K.? Come on. A very successful anime that just finished was about 5 girls sipping tea in school with the odd (very loose) reference to music. This is bloody Shakespeare in comparison.
I read the first volume of the manga and you could really tell that the series was by the artist and writer for Death Note. One page alone was just a straight-up splash panel filled with speech-bubbles about planning what their next moves on the way being god (sorry, “manga-ka”) should be.
Super genius, smartest kid in the country, excelling at everything he does, slightly mysogynyst… Takagi is a shoujo male lead!
Well, if the manga thing doesn’t work out Takagi can always get a job accelerating the love lives of spineless male leads. Bet Mashiro is wishing he hadn’t leapt straight to proposing and just asked Azuki out, she’d have jumped him there and then!
Also after that Bakugon comment, do we get a “I am the white void. I am the cold steel.” pun next episode?
All I really need to know about making manga I learned in Golden Boy.
Fan of the manga, look forward to how this will be implemented (scheduled for 26, I think?) after the horrible choice of trying to follow HotD.
Regardless; this doesn’t seem too far off. Maybe it’s because they only have 26 scheduled, but I felt the episode was a bit rushed.
And +1 to the whole cheap budget animation; I was in disbelief when I saw JC Staff on the credits at the end.
I think the manga’s pretty good, so I hope this’ll do it justice. I wonder about the pacing, there’s 103 chapters out so far so no way they’re trying to cover even most of that… perhaps they’ll continue on 1 chapter = 1 episode pace like the first, which would place them almost exactly at the end of volume 3 (but lacking any exciting season finale).
“Ui could be using the Death Note to kill anyone who got too friendly with Onee-sama.”
I just want to thank you for that mental image.