Sunshine Sketch – vol. 1

While Yen Press is still relatively new and unkown to most English-speaking manga fans, they have licenced and published some very interesting titles lately. One of these titles would be Ume Aoki’s slice-of-life four-panel manga Sunshine Sketch AKA Hidamari Sketch, which was released just a while ago.

Sunshine Sketch follows the lives of Yuno and her friends, Miyako, Hiro and Sae, who go to Yamabuki Art High School and live in Hidamari Appartment right next to their school. Every chapter focuses on one theme, such as the school’s opening ceremony, welcome party to Hidamari Appartment and going to a summer festival together. While the chapters have “plots” of their own, there isn’t many connections between the chapters, which is all pretty typical for mangas like this.

Compared to the most of comedy/slice-of-life mangas, the humour is rather subtle in Sunshine Sketch. However, I don’t believe for a moment that Sunshine Sketch was drawn with the intention of making the readers crack up while reading it. Instead the feeling I got from reading the first volume was happiness, which is far more precious to me than simple laughter.

I usually won’t compare manga and anime versions to each other, but this time I think it’s unavoidable. First of all the anime was made by Shaft and directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and Ryouki Kamitsubo. People like me watch and enjoy pretty much any anime that fulfils this criteria. While I don’t think the two versions of Sunshine Sketch are that different from each other, the fact that Akiyuki Shinbo brought his own unique style to the anime won’t change. So if you’ve seen the anime and ponder wheter the manga is worth reading or not, read it if you liked the characters, but I can’t guarantee you’ll like the manga if you liked the anime for its unique visual style and all that craziness Akiyuki Shinbo is known for.

Sunshine Sketch is simple yet brilliant manga that is guaranteed to make anyone reading it smile with happiness. If that’s what your looking for, search no further for Sunshine Sketch exists for that purpose alone.

Kure-nai

Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Almost everyone watching anime is familiar with at least one or two of the animes I just mentioned. While they’re completely different and incompareable to each other, there is one thing in common between them; they’re all multi-genre animes. Nowadays everything is more or less multi-genre, but there are only a handful of animes that belong to multiple genres and succeed in all of the genres. This is where Kure-nai comes into the picture. I’d categorize Kure-nai under following three genres: drama, action and comedy. Although Kure-nai won’t ever be something that’d redefine any of these genres, it’s succesful at all of them.

The main character of Kure-nai are Shinkuro Kurenai, a high school student who also works as a negotiator, and Murasaki Kuhouin, whom Shinkuro is supposed to protect as ordered by his employer. Drama is probably the most significant part of Kure-nai. As the story goes on Shinkuro learns more of the Kuhoin family, where female children are isolated from the rest of the world and serve the family by giving birth to children of their male siblings. Shinkuro’s mission to protect Murasaki transforms from just another job to something he desires to do out of his own free will without seeking any profit from it.

On the other hand, quite a few of the episodes aren’t really about developing either the plot or the characters. Episodes like these focus on everyday lives of Shinkuro and Murasaki. Since Murasaki hasn’t been to the world outside the Kuhouin residence before, there are lots of things she finds new and strange. Compared to other episodes, these episodes are a lot lighter in mood and could probably be called slice-of-life type of comedy.

The third genre and aspect of Kure-nai is action. Although there aren’t that many action scenes in Kure-nai and half of the episodes have no action scenes at all, quantity ain’t necessarily as important as quality. The action scenes of Kure-nai are extremely well animeted and some of the most beautiful hand-to-hand fighting I’ve seen in a while. The importance of these scenes is another story. Of course the characters could just handle their business by talking the matters through and decide who’s right using logic and stuff like that, but a good fist fight has a lot more impact on the watcher than boring talk.

Speaking of animation, Kure-nai is animated pretty well and the art style in general is to my liking as well. The characters look somewhat semi-realistic, meaning there’s no gigantic eyes or ridiculously impossible hairstyles, but they still look more like cartoon characters than real people. And there are actually women who look like women! That’s pretty rare in anime nowadays.

And since I’m sure some people, myself included, will be watching this anime just because Murasaki is a little seven years-old girl, I should probably say something regarding that. So, is Kure-nai worth watching for moe? Yes and no. While Murasaki is definitely moe, and aren’t all female anime characters more or less moe these days, there are relatively few “moe moments” in Kure-nai. If you liken moe to non-stop cuteness like Lucky Star, which isn’t really moe in my humble opinion, and that’s what you’re looking for, the answer is no as Kure-nai isn’t your weekly delivery of cuteness. I won’t say there’s no moe in Kure-nai, but if you want an anime overflowing with moe, this isn’t what you’re looking for.

Putting moe aside for now, Kure-nai is an excellent drama-action-comedy anime that does a great job focusing on all of these genres. While it isn’t suberb in any of these genres, it’s a great mix of these genres that you won’t see every day, which alone makes it at least worth checking out.

I, Otaku – vol. 2

In the second volume of I, Otaku – Struggle in Akihabara, Kenji and Sota end up as models for a BL magazine, Eri attempts to understand the meaning of moe by watching Papico the movie together with Sota, Maniaku Nia, a kohai from Eri’s club, has fallen head over heels in love with Eri and Sota visits a maid cafe for the first time in his life. All of the above and lots of more is going on in this book.

Personally, I think I, Otaku vol. 2 is vastly superior to the first one. A lot of the first volume was spent on introducing the characters and almost all of the stories were centered on Sota and his obsession over Papico. Obviously that is still one of the main themes of the stories, but lots of new themes and characters, like Kanariho Momoe, editor-in-chief of a BL magazine, and Nia, whom I already mentioned, are introduced in this volume. If you thought the first volume was crazy and hilarious, you haven’t seen anything yet.

If you enjoyed the humour of the first volume, you’re going to love the second one. And if you haven’t read either of them yet, now’s the time to get familiar with the funniest otaku-comedy. There is nothing funnier than a comedy where you can point at the characters and say “Hey, I’m just that guy over there!”. Being an otaku may be serious business, but it’s not like we shouldn’t laugh at ourselves from time to time.