There’s no doubt that anime and manga are closely related. Most anime is based on an existing manga, or gets a manga adaptation after production. If you love anime, chances are you’ve read at least some manga, and vice versa. But if you love one, do you always have to love the other?…
A recent post by MkMiku inspired me to think about my personal experience with the “manga vs anime” topic. In my early years of fandom, especially in high school, I actually thought of anime and manga fandom as pretty much the same, and I indulged in the two equally. Now that I think back on it, my reason for doing so wasn’t necessarily because I liked manga as much as anime; it’s just that my access to anime was very limited back then, and I happened to have friends who collected manga. It was easy for me to borrow manga volumes from them and spend time with those when I couldn’t access any new anime. In fact, just about all of the relatively few manga series I’ve completed were from borrowing volumes from friends in high school. The friend that I borrowed the most manga from was a big shojo/romance fan, so I got plenty of such series through her – Fushigi Yuugi, Rayearth, Utena, Chobits, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Love Hina among others.
It wasn’t long until I realized that I was becoming more of an anime fan than a manga fan. Besides the 4-volume Pokemon manga series by Toshihiro Ono, the only other manga series I bought back then were Tenchi Muyo! and Evangelion. And the only reason I bought those was because I was obsessed with their respective anime. Once I lost interest, I stopped collecting the manga. Meanwhile, I was spending more money on anime DVDs even though manga volumes were cheaper. Even when Inuyasha was my ultimate favorite anime for many years, I never had any desire to buy all the manga and preferred buying the anime DVDs (didn’t complete a collection of either though). Once I got a better computer and high-speed Internet, anime became much more easily accessible to me. It wasn’t long before I found myself watching anime online all the time and rarely caring to read any manga series (besides Inuyasha weekly until the series ended in 2008).
From what I’ve heard over the years, the majority of fans of a particular series will almost always believe that the manga is better. So what is it about anime that I prefer over manga? Why do I love the anime versions of Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist, and One Piece, but don’t have any motivation to read their respective manga? To start off, I like to see color and movement in an animated story, and I like to hear sound effects and character’s voices rather than read them. Anime also has music in the form of background instrumentals and opening, ending, and insert songs, which can have a huge impact on conveying the mood and appeal of an anime. Also, like anime, I’m not about to buy volumes of manga from series I don’t know, and unfortunately I can’t stand reading manga on a computer screen online. And lastly, when comparing the manga character designs and the anime character designs in any given series, there hasn’t been a series yet where I didn’t prefer the anime designs.
After all this, one would think that I also prefer movies and TV shows rather than the original books they’re based on. But manga and regular literature books are very different from each other. Books, with little or no pictures, force you to use your imagination more, and the appeal comes from how the author describes what’s happening and paints pictures with words, at least for me. Manga is all pictures and spoken dialogue, which creates a vastly different experience.
The main defense for manga being better than anime is that the anime adaptations usually change, censor, add in, or leave out many things when compared to the original. But I judge the anime on its own and not how it compares to the original source. Usually I enjoy the anime anyway, and even if I hear that the manga is better/different, I don’t really care because the anime experience is what I’m looking for. Before Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood aired, I heard how much better the manga was compared to the original anime, but since I enjoyed the anime enough already, I didn’t care to get into the manga. I always hear how much better the manga of the big shonen trio (Naruto, One Piece, Bleach) are, but again anime is what I love and don’t care enough to get into both mediums. But that doesn’t mean I won’t ever read manga. Like with Tenchi and Evangelion, I’ll still only read manga of series that I become obsessed with. As much as I love the anime of Fruits Basket and Lucky Star, I’ve only cared enough to read a little of their respective manga. For anime that become my obsessions however, like Inuyasha and Kannagi, I’ve read all of their available manga (for Haruhi I’ve read all the light novels since those are the original source and way better than the manga). But much of my apathy to read manga comes from not wanting to read it online. If someone dropped all of Tokyopop’s Fruits Basket volumes in my lap, I’d read them.
To wrap things up, I’m definitely an anime fan and not a manga one, but I of course like and respect manga. I acknowledge that most anime adaptations are not as good as the manga they’re based on, and the variety of anime titles is only a fraction of the variety of manga titles and genres in existence, but since the two are mediums for entertainment, I’m going to go with what’s most appealing to me, and that would be anime. Like many other things in the fandom, “manga vs anime” again comes down to personal taste.
I think they do not always go together. I’m on the same boat. Love Fruits Basket, but never read the manga. I’m happy with the anime as it was. I do leave some other manga like Hayate no gotoku, but it seems to drag too much. So I kind of like anime series that last 24-26 episodes, or a max of 52. That is plenty to tell a good story.
But, then comes the real issue, and the main differences, and why you sometimes never have good anime adaptations… It all comes down to costs. While a manga is very cheap to make/print/distribute, an anime is a very expensive affair. All the color, animation, voice actors, songs, etc, all have a cost that is immensely higher to manga costs. So in manga you can have hundreds of smaller chapters for the cost of 1-2 anime episodes.
With it being cheaper, and easier to get into and lower investment/risk. Creative writers would probably prefer to start there, get their best stories in and hope to get an anime out of it (Bakuman comes to mind as a good example of all that goes in I guess). So there is more space for story telling, char development, etc in manga, than anime. Once you get a good manga that you want to make into an anime, then comes the part where you have to compress it to fit 12 or 24 episodes for one season (that’s where you may lose lots of content), and then go from there. That in itself is a huge cost and risk that they are taking right there.
So I’m sure that even anime companies like J.C. Staff and others probably do not want to change much when adapting a manga to anime, but they have their own budget and time limitations, so something has to suffer. So in the end, many anime adaptations may suffer from some of that, and there is really not much we can do there.
I do agree that watching an anime is way more engrossing than reading a manga or short novel. We all want to see our favorite characters move, and talk, laugh and cry. So we are always eager to watch the anime of those nice manga we have read and may end up a bit disappointed.
There are always exceptions though, and you can run into incredibly good adaptations that hold most of what the novel/manga had. Haruhi is a good example. I’ve read the short novels as well, and the series and movie adaptation was nothing short of great (with the exception of the endless eight. Even the short story only had one loop).
So I think the way you handle things, is the way to go. Watch anime as it is, and judge it separately. Enjoy it for it’s merits and try not to compare it too harshly against manga/books. They have other limitations, so it has a good chance of not reaching all your expectations.
Good points. I agree that anime has more budget and time limitations. But even so, with proper writing I think that most anime adaptations can still be just as good. It’s just when the manga becomes very long – like Naruto and One Piece for example – that the anime has to either keep going longer than the typical 20+ episodes or end prematurely and let fans get the real story in the manga (like with Inuyasha) or subsequent seasons of anime.
Sometimes they go together. Other times, not.
Some of the series that I prefer the anime over the manga (no matter which adaption came first) are: Utena, Cowboy Bebop, Jigoku Shoujo, BLOOD+, Madoka Magica (plan on writing a review on it), and Nanoha. Possibly CCS, but I love both the anime and manga equally. I just watched the anime first.
Cases where I prefer the manga over the anime include Fruits Basket (I wish the anime had another season. They had so much stuff they didn’t cover.), Naruto and Bleach (blame the fillers), Kuroshitsuji, and nearly every CLAMP manga.
Usually I”m not a fan of manga that’s adapted from anime. (Madoka, Cowboy Bebop, Jigoku Shoujo.) Something about all three of those examples take away the unique atmosphere the anime gave us. (Also the art style changed for all three cases, and it disappointed me.)
And of course I agree about anime really giving the characters life, and being generally more captivating than simply reading it. But I guess that I’m so used to all the seiyuus that I can imagine their voices in my head when I read the manga sometimes, haha.
Manga also has its advantages because reading a single chapter is much quicker than watching an episode. We also get much more violence and gore that probably couldn’t be put into an anime, as you said. And when an anime adaptation diverges away from the original manga storyline, I usually get very mad. While I acknowledge that having an alternate story/ending can actually can be very interesting, it can also be done very poorly and seem like bad fanfiction sometimes (Kuroshitsuji).
But all in all, I’ve always been partial to both. If I”m asked which I like better, manga or anime, I’d probably say manga, but it really depends on the series in question.
Speaking of manga adapted from anime not being good, the Evangelion and Tenchi manga came after their respective anime and I actually thought they were very good because they followed the anime closely and expanded on it rather than retold it. But you’re right that usually they’re nothing special – I’ve only glanced at a few others, like the Haruhi, Wolf’s Rain, and Cowboy Bebop manga, and they’re not as good as the anime (it’s usually the art style I dislike).
If I start reading the manga of a series that I’ve already seen the anime of, I can also “hear” the seiyuu speak in my head XD Actually, I think with the exception of Chobits and Love Hina, I watched the anime of every other manga series I’ve read first.
And I totally agree that reading a manga chapter takes up way less time than an anime episode (I could usually read one Inuyasha chapter in five minutes). So if someone’s looking to get through series as fast as they can, manga would be the better choice =)
I looked at the original post that inspired yours. That blogger raised a common concern about manga and graphic novels — they don’t give you the “full immersion” of colors, music, movement that anime or movies do. Our mass-mediated culture now seems to offer all levels of intense sensory experience and sadly leaves little or no space for the imagination, because we’re being driven to consume in increasing quantities.
I’m a fan of both anime and manga, and I see them as two different media each with its own way of doing things that we would do well to learn and appreciate, and to be a fan of one doesn’t mean you have to be a fan of the other. Apples and oranges: they belong to a similar realm of Japanese pop culture/media but are really quite different inside. Having said that, I have a few thoughts:
Manga for me works best when the images on the page achieve the old aesthetic paradox, “stillness in movement; movement in stillness.” Manga makes us work a bit harder to figure out how things flow or change or jump from one panel to the next, and to appreciate the power of stillness, of blank space, and of connecting and dividing lines on the page. Of course it doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s worth the effort.
A popular anime like the original Fullmetal Alchemist is sadly limited by the 52-ep format that it couldn’t possibly flesh out the details like the manga, which kept running after the original anime series ended. Even the original anime viewers who didn’t read the manga felt that it left something to be desired — not that it was bad, but that it felt a bit rushed and left some loose ends hanging. So the manga is a way of “picking up” where the anime left off, and it says a lot about the FMA fandom that the studio did a remake based on the manga.
It’s not true that the manga is always better than the anime; some manga adapted from anime fare badly (OMG the Rahxephon manga…). I tend to treat anime and manga as alternate versions rather than “canon”/”not-canon.” It’s more important to have a franchise or series and follow that through its anime and manga incarnations. For e.g. Neon Genesis Evangelion has FOUR related manga series: the official manga, and three others based on the video games, each with a slightly different take on the characters and events. I’m not a big EVA fan, but I’m happy for the franchise and fascinated by how much creativity can come out of it!
Sometimes turning to manga is the only way to continue your fan support of the anime. This applies to anime series that weren’t very popular, like Library Wars. A good 13-ep series, but it wasn’t a big enough hit for a sequel. I’ve been collecting the manga because I like the whole premise & the characters & I want to continue enjoying that world. Or a manga like Gundam: Ecole du Ciel provides a different perspective on the Gundam universe by introducing female pilots as the protagonists — it’s doubtful this girl-centered storyline will ever be turned into an anime, given the preferences of the fanbase. In these cases, the anime and the manga are in a dynamic relationship with each other, one complementing the other.
Great thoughts! I especially liked how you described the movement and stillness thing in manga. You’re right that the two tell stories in a different way and offer different interpretations of the same story, just like TV shows/movies versus the books they’re based on – neither is necessarily better overall than the other, it just depends on what the individual finds more enjoyable. I like the Haruhi novels a bit better than the anime only because Tanigawa’s unique narration style is its main appeal, and we get the best of that in the novels. On the other hand, I like the Harry Potter movies more than the books because the world it takes place in is just so visually stunning, I’d rather see it come alive than just read it (also, J.K. Rawling’s writing is good but just not unique to me). I don’t think anime is better than manga, but I personally like anime better =)
I agree with focalizer that one has to look at anime and manga in two completely different formats. Anime have the luxury of being in constant motion whereas manga are limited by panels and pages. There’s positives and negatives for both and the way that it’s carried out is only limited by the format.
Due to the costs of producing a show, it’s more profitable for both publishing companies as well as animation studios to tie in a show with a manga version or adapt a manga into a show in order to reduce the risk if the show isn’t as good as assumed. Regardless that a second season was already in production The World God only Knows is proof that a popular manga doesn’t always make a popular show. Conversely, due to the anime K-On! grew into a monster when it was unknown beforehand.
As long as the story with either is executed well, the format is of little difference to me.
You’re right that an anime adaptation done well can greatly increase the popularity of the original source, as it did with K-ON! and Haruhi. On the flip side, a bad anime adaptation doesn’t usually affect the original manga, as fans will be inclined to turn to that to find out the real story. So it seems that either way, a manga benefits if it gets an anime adaptation =)
I agree that manga has more limitations when it comes to storytelling than anime. Books have to rely mostly on words to tell a story, while anime and other TV shows/movies don’t require as much effort on the part of the audience. Manga exists between the two because it’s made of pictures and words rather than just one or the other, which makes it it’s own unique medium.
I don’t think you need to be a fan of both to be a fan of one, although I think it’s impossible to love one and hate the other.
For me I enjoy anime a lot more but I enjoy mangas too. I’m sort of a huge anime fan and a mild manga fan.
I’ve also discovered that I pretty much only enjoy reading shoujo or romance mangas. Being a huge fan of some shounen anime series I tried buying the first few volumes of Bleach and found that I don’t enjoy reading action scenes as much as I enjoy watching them. They don’t make as much sense if I can’t see the actions and I’ll sometimes have to stare at the panels for a while to figure out how the character just moved >.<
So I watch pretty much all genres of anime but with manga I remain a minor fan who reads a handful of shoujo/romance series when she can afford to buy a volume or two, and perfectly content staying that way =)
Actually, I’ve encountered many fans who love manga but dislike anime. Haven’t met anyone who loves anime but hates manga though…
I also much prefer to see action series in anime form than manga form. The very term “action” evokes movement and speed, which is conveyed better when there’s actual movement and speed. But for dialogue-heavy series, or series focused on character expressions and relationships, a manga and anime could convey the story on pretty much the same level.
Thanks for linking to my post. ^^ The argument of manga vs. anime has persisted for years, but as you said, it all comes down to personal tastes. When I go to book stores, I see so much manga on the shelves, but I can’t choose any, because I know I’ll prefer the anime version instead. Most manga get adapted into anime anyway (with a few exceptions like Yotsuba and Doubt). I started reading the Highschool of the Dead manga long before the anime version was even announced, but I like the anime version better (here’s hoping for Season 2).
Most manga fans argue that the manga version is always better, but we anime fans have just as many reasons to say why anime is best.
For me having limited access to both i hostnestly don’t know…. Interesting to think about though….
bye.
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Well they don’t HAVE to go together, no. I have friends who prefer manga and barely read any anime, and I have friends who prefer anime and barely read any manga.
Personally, I love both equally. Sure, I watch more anime, but that’s because it’s more easily accessible. I can get it online, I can get it for free, and while it is possible to get manga online for free, I have to sit there and read it on a screen…when I already have bad eyesight, I don’t like straining my eyes to read the manga.
Then again, a lot of the time for me it depends on each series, which medium I’d rather see it in. If I get attached to a manga and I know the anime does it no justice, then no, I’m not going to watch the anime. Typically this happens with the long-running series that barely gets any episodes, or series that aren’t done yet when the anime happens. So I refuse to watch the Black Cat anime, I refuse to watch the Samurai Deeper Kyo anime (it came out when there were only 10 manga volumes released and the series ran 38 volumes), I refuse to watch the Fruits Basket anime (sorry!), I won’t watch the Loveless anime, and I won’t watch the Angel Sanctuary anime. I also won’t watch the Junjou Romantica anime, but that’s for other reasons entirely.
There are also things that reverse this, where I’m only interested in the anime. These include series like Death Note (I know they’re basically identical, so why bother with the manga?), and…actually I have less of these examples. Death Note is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.
Then there are the ones where I like both mediums of the same series. Jigoku Shoujo, for example–I adored the anime and I’m collecting the manga. The same goes for FullMetal Alchemist. In watching the original anime, I knew it differed from the manga, since I was following that as well, but I didn’t mind, because they did it excellently. When Brotherhood was released I was excited, sure, but I’d also already been pretty satisfied.
So really, it just depends on the person, like most other things do.
I’m back~ Now, this postwas an interesting read, and it made me think about a couple of things regarding the topic. I started off by watching Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Digimon, but when I was introduced to manga in high school, I found I was hooked. It didn’t mean that I stopped watch almost all the anime that was being made available at the time, though.
For awhile, I was equally into both, as I really just wanted to get my Japanese media fix any way I could, but as I got older and my resources became more restricted, I found myself gravitating towards manga more than anime.
I guess the main pull of manga for me was the art; since I draw, when I discovered it, I wanted to be able to create something as beautiful as what I saw in manga. And I’ve pretty much always had the issue of being able to stay awake while watching things (be it movies, anime, television, class lectures, and regardless of how much sleep I get). Add that to the fact that up until about a year and a half ago, I didn’t really have the means to watch much anime (my old computer couldn’t handle it, and I can’t usually afford to buy DVDs, manga is my current drug of choice.
I also find it interesting that you prefer anime designs to manga designs; yes, I’ve seen some AMAZING anime in my time (because I’m sooooo old, right? XD) design-wise, but I find I love the detail work that goes into manga, especially for color art. This also might be because I’m rather fond of shoujo series, which tend to be rather heavy on uber-tailed, fairy tale like features (like CLAMP, and a good chunk of their older works, for example, or Arina Tanemura’s work).
And from there, I admit to having been disappointed at least a few times about the design translation from manga to anime (i.e. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle), and sometimes I feel like the anime art just can’t compare to the manga art, even though I happen to think both are awesome in their own ways (i.e. Card Captor Sakura, which either way I love to death!). Then there are those series where, for my own sanity, I have to consider the anime and manga as two separate entities (like in Angelic Layer, where I loved the manga, really liked and have re-watched the anime, yet do not think of them as occurring in the same canon.) Any of these is fine; I guess we just need to allow for differences in deference to our own tastes. :)
So no, I don’t think that anime and manga fandom always have to go together; that’s something that’s subject to personal discretion. I guess you could say that I’m more or less the opposite of you in that I adore settling down with manga, either online or in print, more so than watching anime, just because I enjoy being able to take it with me and interpret the story at my own mental pace. But I can definitely enjoy and appreciate the delights of anime just fine~
(Goodness, I hope that made sense… -_-;;)
Well, I’ve only ever read one manga to completion, (and that was because its anime version ended horribly (obviously) half-way through the story). Reading it has been an acceptable experience whenever I’ve tried, but there just isn’t the pull, the feeling of “there’s some manga I’d like to read”. It only happens when I’m pushed into it by something.
But rather than specifically anime and manga, I feel that television is a superior format for drama over almost everything else in general.
The purpose of drama, I feel, is to convey feelings and impressions. If you want to convey facts, then you’re best off just stating them. Story in itself isn’t interesting, it’s what the story does which counts. So the key to drama is what you can do beyond merely conveying bland information about cause and effect.
And here, television can call upon so many things. Dialogue, acting, music, sound, colour, movement, space, timing, design, style, and the synchronisation and consistency or lack of such of all of these, can all go on top of the essential narrative. Other formats have a far smaller toolbox to work with, and so are necessarily limited. (Cinema only by the need to do things in chunks which are long enough to be worth going out for and short and simple enough to take in during a single sitting, but that’s still a small limitation.)
Simpler formats do have the advantage of being cheaper, and hence easier to experiment with, produce single visions and lots and lots of attempts, as well as avoiding the risk that all the possibilities of television will make creators lazy or confuse them with possibilities. But the best television should be able to exceed the best of other formats at doing what drama is really for, and I think with recent-ish anime it’s finally reached that point.
So whilst being an anime fan, I’m also a bit of a fan of television in general, and I feel anime has only been at the peak of dramatic television from about 1995 (when Evangelion changed all the rules), before which the BBC-and-regional-ITV-inspired British television scene had a virtual monopoly on the best stuff. And in particular, before anime came into my life, Doctor Who was the pinnacle of my TV world. And my favourite 3 or 4 stories in that are all novels which were written when the series was off-air, because despite not having the power of television, the aforementioned advantages allowed them to go further than the TV series ever had. In particular, they could give the fans what only the fans were capable of handling, instead of having to deal with the mainstream.
But anime has two key advantages; it has a fan-base big enough to fund shows on their own, which allows it to do stuff Doctor Who could never have got away with, and it also doesn’t have to be all mimetic and look real like live-action, which allows it to fully unleash the power of the medium for the first time in human history, instead of having to stay within certain boundaries.
So I don’t think simpler formats can compare with the very best of anime. Given which, you start to wonder whether there’s a purpose in searching for the minor gems which are the best which can be found there.
(For a similar reason, another format I’m quite interested in is visual novels, since they add all sorts of extra feel-conveying possibilities onto the format of prose; one so tired people can suggest some guy who lived centuries ago* produced the best the medium can manage and be taken seriously. The simple sense of place you get from Tsukihime’s monochrome backgrounds, for example, is amazing. But I don’t think that medium has yet produced its first great work; it’s still limited by attachments to its pornographic roots.)