Cross Game, episodes 1-25
23 September 2009 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerSince everyone and their grasshopper seems to do television posts, I suppose I should as well. This being the only current show I'm keeping up with.
Anime adaptation of the award-winning manga by one of the modern masters of the form, Mitsuru Adachi. His metier is the sports manga, and this is his third great baseball series (the others being Touch and H2) -- but that ... understates so much. He writes not so much sports stories, as stories in which sports are one medium for the expression of character arcs. A closer approximation to the genre would be "understated romantic comedy with sports". And that includes this series, which like most of his works is unlicensed boo.
The anime has been remarkably faithful to the manga, not only in the sense of sometimes storyboarding directly off the page, but in maintaining the characters as well as story's spirit. The pacing, especially, is pitch perfect -- not so slow that younger viewers will get bored but slow enough to develop exactly why we care about these characters so much. What changes they've made, aside from trimming Adachi's good-natured fanservice,* have been are mostly in two areas:
1. At the start of the of series, events were restructured to put the climax of volume 1 at the end of episode 1 -- which meant moving some scenes later, after the timeskip, to be presented as flashbacks. This on top of Adachi's common use of flashbacks as part of characterization. As a result, after a wowser of an episode closer, the next couple episodes are a bit wobbly as stories-in-themselves. Things shake out by episode 4, though, so stick with it.
2. Aoba, one of the two protagonists, is even better served by the anime. Specifically, the anime-original characters and the so-far two-and-a-half episodes of original story all serve the purpose of focusing attention on why, given girls' baseball is a growing thing in Japan, she joins a boys' team even though she can't play in tournament games. This question is somewhat glossed over in the manga. The anime hasn't answered the question yet -- indeed, it's only recently, now that Aoba has been excluded for the first time, become a conscious question for her -- and if the producers are any good the answer won't come until the series climax. But the result is already a more complex characterization of what was already Adachi's best female character yet.
(Added bonus: getting to hear how Aoba drawls "Kitamura-semmmpai" at Kou is delicious. Cranky obsequiousness FTW.)
The series, both anime and manga, are ongoing. At the current pace, the anime will catch up with the manga somewhere around episode 52, at the end of volume 18.** And that happens to coincide with my sense of about how much is needed to wrap up all storylines in flight -- the manga is currently in the middle of what should be*** the penultimate game. The final game, of course, will be Wakaba's dream: Kou, Akaishi, and Aoba in Koshien, seen in the anime's opening scene, and we don't even need to watch the game played out -- I eagerly await learning how its starting somehow resolves the four relationships between the five central characters and their attitudes towards Wakaba.
Anyone else following this? or just us grasshoppers?
* Not only skipping his frequent cheesecake scene-setting panels (bikinis, cheerleaders, sports bras, et cet.) but also removing the panty-shots from the handful of plot-relevant scenes that had them. The show airs 10am Sunday, prime children's market -- current episodes have been running a drawing contest complete with catchy theme song, with winners mostly 5-9 years old. No loss, really.
** Episode 25 adapts a couple chapters from the middle of volume 9. The latest chapter is from mid-what-will-be-volume 16, so another 25 weeks of manga serialization, including breaks, gives us almost exactly enough chapters to fill volume 18.
*** Unless, of course, Wakaba's dream isn't of the team's first game in Koshien. Adachi does like to play ironies upon reader expectations.
---L.
Anime adaptation of the award-winning manga by one of the modern masters of the form, Mitsuru Adachi. His metier is the sports manga, and this is his third great baseball series (the others being Touch and H2) -- but that ... understates so much. He writes not so much sports stories, as stories in which sports are one medium for the expression of character arcs. A closer approximation to the genre would be "understated romantic comedy with sports". And that includes this series, which like most of his works is unlicensed boo.
The anime has been remarkably faithful to the manga, not only in the sense of sometimes storyboarding directly off the page, but in maintaining the characters as well as story's spirit. The pacing, especially, is pitch perfect -- not so slow that younger viewers will get bored but slow enough to develop exactly why we care about these characters so much. What changes they've made, aside from trimming Adachi's good-natured fanservice,* have been are mostly in two areas:
1. At the start of the of series, events were restructured to put the climax of volume 1 at the end of episode 1 -- which meant moving some scenes later, after the timeskip, to be presented as flashbacks. This on top of Adachi's common use of flashbacks as part of characterization. As a result, after a wowser of an episode closer, the next couple episodes are a bit wobbly as stories-in-themselves. Things shake out by episode 4, though, so stick with it.
2. Aoba, one of the two protagonists, is even better served by the anime. Specifically, the anime-original characters and the so-far two-and-a-half episodes of original story all serve the purpose of focusing attention on why, given girls' baseball is a growing thing in Japan, she joins a boys' team even though she can't play in tournament games. This question is somewhat glossed over in the manga. The anime hasn't answered the question yet -- indeed, it's only recently, now that Aoba has been excluded for the first time, become a conscious question for her -- and if the producers are any good the answer won't come until the series climax. But the result is already a more complex characterization of what was already Adachi's best female character yet.
(Added bonus: getting to hear how Aoba drawls "Kitamura-semmmpai" at Kou is delicious. Cranky obsequiousness FTW.)
The series, both anime and manga, are ongoing. At the current pace, the anime will catch up with the manga somewhere around episode 52, at the end of volume 18.** And that happens to coincide with my sense of about how much is needed to wrap up all storylines in flight -- the manga is currently in the middle of what should be*** the penultimate game. The final game, of course, will be Wakaba's dream: Kou, Akaishi, and Aoba in Koshien, seen in the anime's opening scene, and we don't even need to watch the game played out -- I eagerly await learning how its starting somehow resolves the four relationships between the five central characters and their attitudes towards Wakaba.
Anyone else following this? or just us grasshoppers?
* Not only skipping his frequent cheesecake scene-setting panels (bikinis, cheerleaders, sports bras, et cet.) but also removing the panty-shots from the handful of plot-relevant scenes that had them. The show airs 10am Sunday, prime children's market -- current episodes have been running a drawing contest complete with catchy theme song, with winners mostly 5-9 years old. No loss, really.
** Episode 25 adapts a couple chapters from the middle of volume 9. The latest chapter is from mid-what-will-be-volume 16, so another 25 weeks of manga serialization, including breaks, gives us almost exactly enough chapters to fill volume 18.
*** Unless, of course, Wakaba's dream isn't of the team's first game in Koshien. Adachi does like to play ironies upon reader expectations.
---L.