“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it”. – EB White.

Like that is going to stop me.

The Seitokai Yakuindomo anime started recently as part of the summer season of anime. It’s based on Tozen Ujiie’s 4-panel gag manga that currently runs in Weekly Shonen Magazine. The gags are hung on the premise of an all-girls high school having to open its doors to male students due to a falling birth rate (Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! also uses falling birth rate for a springboard). The main characters are three girls on the school council and the boy they press gang onto the council to represent the new gender in the school. So far, so cliched. School councils and press ganging people onto committees seem to be some of the most popular “me-too” ideas in manga and light novels at present.

The manga of Seitokai Yakuindomo stands out from its peers and influences on two main points. First off, it’s very low on fan service. In fact in terms of art it’s less salacious than Azumanga Daioh. Compare these bikini pin ups, Tozen Ujiie uses far less suggestive angles than Kiyohiko Azuma, who seemed to love that “looking up at boobs” angle more and more as Azumanga Daioh progressed.

The second point is in direct contrast to the first, indeed without the first it would not be as effective. Namely, “dirty jokes”. Obviously this is hardly unique, we’ve already had B Type H System adapted this year, another series whose female lead is sex-obsessed. The differences are that Seitokai Yakuindomo isn’t visually explicit, there’s no romantic underpinnings and while the lead does/says stupid things, she isn’t a complete idiot. Just a partial one when the gag demands it.

Most of all though, the series is highly focussed on gags over characterisation. The four main characters are basically there to be shuffled about into various combinations to set up and deliver gags. In fact they are barely characters. You’ve got Takatoshi (male, defacto straight man), Shino (President of the Council, sex-obsessed), Aria (busty, tells dirty jokes) and Suzu (super-intelligent, comically short). They’re basically hooks to hang jokes on.

A typical gag set up will be as follows:

* Character A says something ostensibly serious.
* Character A then says something stupid/incongruous to the setup.
* Character B reacts to it.

Normally it will have the same character deliver the setup as the punchline, rather than break it down to a standard feed/comic distribution of roles. The straight man often only comes into play in the last panel, commenting on the idiocy that happened in panel 3.

This is why I don’t feel it’s setting out to shock by using “dirty jokes”, but rather just using sex as the incongruity. Sure, the toilet talk adds a frisson to the joke, particularly as the comic doesn’t try to be sexy, but the funny is in how it gets from something perfectly clean to something dirty. It’s cleverer than just drawing a cock on a blackboard (which is still admittedly funny). There’s other joke formula they use (and over use) like Suzu being too short to do something and something innocent looking like something rude from a certain angle, but the one above is probably the most common so far. It’s all very music hall, rather than out and out shock humour.

The anime on the other hand is different beast to the manga, and that’s what I really want to talk about here. If you weren’t aware of the manga, then from a distance the anime might just strike you as your typical slightly smutty otaku bait shows. One thing that really adds to that is the colour palette chosen. Seriously fuck this colour palette. Particularly when it saturates the incredibly dull opening sequence of episode one, playing like the opening to some dumb erotic video game being adapted into animated homeopathic porn. You know what palette I’m talking about.

Yeah, that fucking palette. There’s some blue-green in there too, but the backgrounds in that opening are awash with oversaturated pastel blues and pinks. The blues should be complementary to the browns of the school uniform (at least in the RGB spectrum), but they are so oversaturated that they overpower the characters. The pink just makes it so much worse. This sort of thing is what annoys me the most about modern anime, moreso than poor hat animation!

After a couple of minutes of this opening that seems to go on forever, we get an opening animation full of brazen dick jokes and one of those tedious peppy J-pop songs (not to mention some ludicrously ambitious panning animation).

Then we get an even more ludicrous 3D shot to set up the first gag. Which isn’t that great so let’s skip to the second gag, based on the second 4 panel strip. Prepare to have any humour present killed by over analysis.

Panel 1 / Shot 1

The anime flips the characters around, and pulls the focus from them by filling the screen with a busy, garish background that overpowers the layout. Apart from that it’s pretty much adhering to the strip.

Panel 2 / Shot 2

Here we get a complete change in camera position, as the middle two panels are pretty much the same shot it in the original. By changing the shot, the anime can recreate the beat made by the movement from one panel to another.

Panel 3 / Shot 3

Here the shot is much closer to the original layout, however we now get a budget saving move come into play, where the anime hides the mouth of the character talking off screen. Hooray, one less thing to animate!

Panel 4 / Shot 4

And finally, the punchline is delivered with a shot that’s pretty much straight out of the manga. However, the anime has second response shot that it adds…

This is the sort of shot that doesn’t really happen in the comic, if only due to the restraint of the 4 panel half page format. It’s one place where the anime can take advantage of it’s medium.

Now while that’s not the funniest or the most typical gag on the show, it does demonstrate what the show does best – nail the rhythm of a 4 panel gag strip.

Here’s a few other notes on how it takes advantage of the medium:

• Movement. Gags that rely on movement (e.g. the kick with the shoe flying off the foot) are framed to take advantage of actual movement.
• Asides. Not super-keen on this technique, if only because it’s been done to death by Family Guy, but it will throw in extra shots to illustrate something said, rather than keep to the proscenium leaning step ups preferred by the manga.
• Visual gags. Similarly it will sometimes add visual gags to the background that weren’t present originally. The best example is the strip where Aria’s suggesting boys might join the school to start a harem and in the anime we see someone in the background clearly hoping for just that. That strip’s anime version is also a good illustration of the asides the anime uses, as we get asides to both an 80′s style sex comedy and a Maria-sama ga Miteru style show to match what Aria’s suggesting.

However, as good as the anime is adapting individual strips from the manga, there’s a couple of flaws.

Firstly there’s the issue of repetition, both in terms of the structure and the punchlines. The structure of the jokes can be so similar, that over half an hour it can get wearisome. Add in the fact that so many punchlines seem really similar in the first episode and I wouldn’t blame you for tapping out. Personally I found enough to admire in the mechanics of it to push on, particularly as most of these sort of adaptations let the air out of the gags, and this gets the rhythm right. You, on the other hand, might find the amount of times Shino turns the conversation towards periods somewhat sapping.

The big flaw though reveals itself in episode 3. Or rather in the preview to episode 3. It just gets confirmed in episode 3.

One of the anime’s gags is that in the preview the characters mention what pages from the manga they are adapting next week. Episode 1 covers the first 32 pages, episode 2 covers pages 33 to 56, episode 3 on the other hand only covers page 57 to 60.

Four pages. In a half hour anime. Even Naruto manages more pages than that.

What this meant was we were going to get lots of anime “original” material. And by original I mean they turned the show into exactly what you might have thought it was going in. We get a load of fanservice, gags that outstay their welcome and finally, accidental bestiality.

There’s a fine line that the manga walks with its dirty jokes and in episode three the anime takes a running jump over that line. There’s clues that the screenwriter’s sense of humour might not be on the same page as the comic’s in the first two episodes, but by episode three it becomes crystal clear. The big problem with it is they don’t have the character Takatoshi around to act as straight man to Shino and so her digressions into stupidity go unanswered. Without someone to annoy them in the show, idiots are just annoying you the viewer. Plus she seems more idiotic when the anime screenwriters write her without the original manga’s scripts to base the gags on.

In short, it’s a really awful episode.

Episode four promises more manga adaptations so hopefully that will get back on form, though given how bad episode 3 was that’s the only chance I’m giving it.

If you do have an interest in the mechanics of gag anime I’d definitely recommend the first episode at the very least, as to me it felt much closer to the sort of shows we got during the dawn of late night anime than we get nowadays.

Oh, and the ending animation is really well made, to the point where you’ll wish you’d seen whatever show from an alternate reality it really belongs to.

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COME!

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Spending too much time researching and not enough writing of late. In order to write that promised piece on the early 90s TV anime malaise, I’m now gathering information on anime from 1970. May have over shot my target a little there.

The following thoughts might find themselves in the even longer promised “Science Fiction is the Arthritis Crippling the Anime Industry” post, but then again I may never finish that, so might as well use them here while they’re fresh in my mind.

Going back through titles both pre- and post-1977 it struck me there’s threads of discussion that are perennially under-discussed in Anglophone online fandom outside of a few places like Mike Toole’s new column on Anime News Network or Ben Ettinger’s site.

When you do see discussion of older shows it has a tendency towards the sci-fi end of things. It’s not surprising given that anime otaku-dom as we know it likely has its birthplace in Yamato, both in Japan and the US. Your version of history is coloured by what you were exposed to. In the UK you’d be probably be breaking some kind of law if you failed to mention Dogtanian or Mysterious Cities of Gold in an anime history article. Because of that colouring of formative experience, some historical articles end up feeling like they are writing about the fandom, while ostensibly discussing the product, but that’s hardly unique to anime and manga fandom.

However, there’s a couple of big areas that struck me as being under discussed and they are…

Baseball

Forget giant robots or magical girls, there is one genre that weathers all storms in the audience’s taste. Baseball. There are so many big baseball series, both classic and modern, that I’m certain you could easily run a blog just about baseball anime/manga. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t any already. I tried searching for them, but while I found shows like Major discussed on baseball forums, I couldn’t find any dedicated baseball anime/manga blogs.

Possibly the reason for this is that baseball itself attracts an audience with a certain degree of nerdish obsession, given that it lends itself to the accrual and processing of statistics, and those people are already expending their blogging energies on REAL baseball.

Gags

Now I do write about this occasionally myself. I’ve discussed some recent gag manga adaptations and various shows from Wonderful among others. Not to mention the vast amount of coverage I’ve given to Urusei Yatsura. However I feel there’s some pretty severe gaps in my knowledge, for instance I’d love to see more of the second Tensai Bakabon series. I tend to find myself judging all long form gag anime against prime Oshii/Ito period Urusei Yatsura and all 4 panel gag manga adaptations against Akitaro Daichi’s adaptations, and as good as they are, I’m not sure they’re the real benchmarks.

There’s a vast amount of gag manga and anime that just falls under the radar, even incredibly popular series. And while there’s plenty being written about modern gag strips and anime like Hetalia or K-On, is often without a sense of the genre’s history. It often feels like Azumanga Daioh is year dot for some of the audience. As we’re seeing more and more of a move towards this genre again, particularly as web-anime and web-manga expand, a discussion of the genre in a historical context would be helpful.

Am I right? Are these under-discussed? Or are there people out there writing about these areas and I’m just sleeping on them?

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And now, what may be my favourite arc of Violence Jack. There’s no doubt the original run is better, it came during Nagai’s peak years after all, but for sheer crazy remixing of another Go Nagai property, this cannot be beaten. Why?

It is the Mazinger Z chapter of Violence Jack.

Mazinger Z is Go Nagai’s seminal giant robot work from 1972 and revisited multiple times since them. We’ve already seen one sequel, Great Mazinger, and one alternate retelling, God Mazinger, referenced in Violence Jack. In turn, Yasuhiro Imagawa’s 2009 anime retelling of the series, Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen, would reference Violence Jack heavily, including this arc specifically.

This arc does not involve giant robots. Oh no. Instead it involves a blind black martial artist, Jim Mazinger, who uses the young Japanese boy Kouji Kabuto as his eyes. By having Kouji sit on his shoulders and pilot him like a robot.

Jim is obviously a mix of Jim Kelly and Mazinger, with a bit of Gorongo from Zuba and Barry Hercules from Starfleet/X-Bomber (maybe Jun Hono’s father too? I don’t think I’ve seen his character design though). While Nagai had used stereotypical “sambo” characters during the sixties in titles like Shameless School, he certainly didn’t persist with it as his career progressed. Which kind of makes the cultural ignorance defence harder to take when people use it to defend manga character designs that persisted with that stereotype into the 80s and 90s. If someone like Go Nagai, who frequently goes out of his way to shock and offend, could make an effort back in the early 70s, then nobody following him really has any excuse.

Jim makes an appearance in Imagawa’s Shin Mazinger as the body that Viscount Pygman uses through much of the series, before eventually shedding that body for something resembling his traditional form. That in turn has echoes of a scene later in this particular arc, albeit with a different Mazinger cast member. I also wonder if the spear and lion we see him with in the opening episode are a reference to Gorongo from Zuba. More on the insanity that is Zuba in a later Violence Jack arc.

We open the arc with Mondo and Ryoma encountering Jim and Kouji destroying some evil karate practitioners. Kouji explains their plight while we see Doctor Hell’s evil karate dojo. Eventually Hell sends Ashura and three burly karate types to attack Kouji and Jim’s dojo. I’m going to guess those three would be analogues for particular Machine Beasts (the enemy mecha in Mazinger), not sure which though.

They attack while Kouji is away from Jim, murdering their students and taking advantage of Jim’s blindness. They are about to win when Violence Jack makes his one appearance this arc (not clear if it’s a vision or something physical), giving Kouji the chance to leap onto Jim’s shoulders. And then remove some heads from other shoulders!

Meanwhile Ryoma and Mondo are spying on some Amazonian looking martial artists dueling in the river. Naked. These are Aphrodite and Diana, based on the female robots from Mazinger. Ryoma and Mondo get spotted and surrounded by the women.

Back at the dojo we get a lengthy training sequence where Jim is training kids in karate. Sayaka, Boss, Mucha & Nuke show up during this sequence.

While Jim and Kouji prepare, Hell makes preparations of his own. Ashura trains more evil martial artists, and Hell recruits a gang of gunmen and assorted other hoodlums under the command of Count Brocken. Yes, he is headless here too…

Things begin to escalate as Brocken’s men arrive at the Kabuto dojo, Ryoma and Mondo are caught peeping by Aphrodite and Diana and Hell has a visitor at his own dojo. Kouji’s presumed dead father, Kenzo Kabuto!

As Jim makes short work of Brocken’s men, while Kenzo challenges Hell to a fight, which Hell accepts. Jim and Kouji then face the other evil karate experts that Ashura has brought with him.

Alas, tragedy awaits Jim as he faces Brocken. Brocken appears to be using a sword, but fells Jim with three gunshots. How you may ask? Well, Brocken is actually a pygmy on stilts wearing a trench coat and fake arms & head! This is why this is the best arc in Violence Jack.

All is not lost though, for back at Hell’s dojo, Kenzo defeats Hell in front of his men, tearing his heart out of his chest.

Aphrodite and Diana mop up the remaining members of Hell’s army, dispatching Brocken with a rock to the head. We then get a brief epilogue showing the grave of Jim Mazinger and the Kabuto dojo move on with their lives.

This is probably the purest remixing of another Nagai property in Violence Jack, mainly down to the fact Jack barely features in it. Instead the focus is just on changing elements of Mazinger into a martial arts movie parody. The flexible supernatural nature of the series means you can buy a headless hoodlum like Brocken, after all we’ve seen giants, demons and psychics already. So the gag of revealing him to be the Pygman stand-in in a ridiculous disguise, is further out there.

That flexible supernatural nature comes back in a big way during the next arc, where we get a prison exploitation movie homage/parody. More on that next time!

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