what i was forced to watch this week #32: black cat

It’s expected that when you’re doing any kind of adaptation, you’re going to need to make changes. Sometimes it’s stuff that only works in one medium as opposed to the other, but usually it’s just trying to make the material fit into the new timeframe imposed by the other medium. Black Cat cuts a 20 volume manga series down to 23 episodes, so naturally there need to be a lot of cuts.

gonzo does it like this...

..while the manga does it like this

I read the first couple volumes of Black Cat and then flipped through the summaries of the rest of the manga series. Most of the differences were standard cuts in order to pare the series down. There was, however another change, which is exactly the sort of pointless change that Gonzo loves to do: they straightened out the chronology. The manga starts with Train and Sven already being partners, and going around hunting bounties. After the first volume, we are introduced to the villain, Creed, who Train has a history with.

but(t) wait, there's more!

The anime starts in the past and continues linearly. This is weird because there’s not a lot of Train in the past. He barely shows up in the first 8 or so episodes of the show. It hurt my sense of identification because we instead get a lot of time with Sven and Rinslet and not the protagonist. The other weirdness is that it creates dramatic irony where there shouldn’t have been any, as now the viewers know things that the characters do not, even though the story is supposed to be focalized through Train.

meanwhile, the manga is downright demure

Oh, and being Gonzo, they couldn’t resist the opportunities to amp up the fanservice. They take every excuse that they can to show Rinslet’s boobs or to make Creed act flamboyantly gay. In the manga, you’d have to read any yaoi subtext into the relationship between Train and Creed (NOOOOOO WE WERE THE PERFECT PARTNERS UNTIL THAT WOMAN SHOWED UP AND DROVE A WEDGE BETWEEN US!), but in the anime…yeah. With Rinslet, on the other hand, at first I expected all the random boobage and whatnot to have been in the manga. It is, after all, by Kentaro Yabuki who later wrote To Love-ru. I just figured that maybe what he really wanted to do wasn’t an action series, but just to draw nekkid girls in goofy situations. Nope! The manga had like, one servicey page in all the volumes that I read. Oh Gonzo.

and of course, we mustn't forget

Would I watch it even if I weren’t forced? Nah, I’m not the biggest fan of Shounen Jump series.

One final note: I have been told that rather than it being my final series, my next series will be Inuyasha so that I can know what is going on when the 9001th season airs this fall. This may take the better part of the month to finish.

[Via http://jphinano.wordpress.com]