I suppose a twenty-five-odd minute episode of an animé seldom reflects the texture of a nineteen page manga chapter, or however many total pages and chapters it covers. When one thinks about comparing and contrasting the manga chapters with the animé, there are all sorts of theoretical choices one might consider in approximating best the original source material...or even judging whether the source material is doing something it needs to do. The content of a chapter is one thing, but does one consider how the animé episode feels vis-à-vis the weekly chapters in isolation? Does the difference between how satisfying a chapter of HxH feels weekly need to be engendered in an animé episode, or would it be better to consider how those manga chapters feel when conflated in a volume--does that influence how an episode should end more appropriately than if you just saw reflected how the manga chapter itself ended? This might be so given that some chapters flow into other chapters very elegantly because they don't have title pages; but some chapters do, marking a very discrete beginning and sharpening the divide with the previous chapter. Togashi uses the manga medium very well, I'd say: he seldom squanders a panel. Contrast that with Bleach, which tries very hard for an animé-cinematic feel and sometimes comes across as vacuous an unfulfilling when read as a weekly chapter as a result; too much framing and panels wastes time when they're empty--it's over too soon. HxH doesn't have that problem; panels of exposition number fewer, and they're usually smaller and waste less space. Moreover, contrast Togashi's characters and speech bubbles and their relationship with the panels with those ofNARUTO. The former's so frequently pop out of the panels themselves--read a couple of chapters and notice that characters seem to climb out of their boxes--and this evinces Togashi's fluency with the manga medium. That's something that you just don't get in NARUTO all that often, where the characters keep to their panels and feel contained--and all too often constrained--within them. Togashi works to the advantages of his medium--I genuinely believe that. There are things that a manga can't do, or probably shouldn't do because they don't play to the medium's strengths: the 1999 series could afford to do lovely recaps for the first minute of most Yorknew episodes because the director could use the music and clever camera timing with that music to make the recap feel exciting and speedy, setting up for the episode to come--but Togashi could never afford to waste manga pages because the cost of doing such a thing elegantly in manga format--which is tight enough as it is--is greater than doing it in animé form, as negative response to Bleach and its empty panels of staging sometimes indicates. There are things, also, that I feel Togashi didn't to because he didn't need to, or because he was working alone, and didn't have the time to do on a weekly schedule. I've never seen a manga, for example, with as many photocopied pictures and black panels with white circles in them as HxH--but he makes that an asset, because those repeated pictures or empty black boxes add emphasis to the words inside them, which are different, shocking and colourful. How does an animé accurately emulate that effect? The effect of there being nothing there but text and black? Stylistically, it's worth considering that it might not be as simple as just showing the characters moving and talking--that takes away from the effect of the black panel with nothing but text on it. Crucially, though--crucially--you might argue that Togashi didn't intend for the black panel to be so important or pored over, because of their relationship with the other panels or whatever--but then it comes down to reasoned opinion. That's something that's always going to hurt any adaptation of this series because we all believe that Togashi has peppered his series with subtleties. But Togashi has put those subtleties there in manga form; I don't always feel they'll be there even if the director tries to be as faithful as possible. In light of this, I believe that it's up to the director to recognise that subtlety or finesse is there in the first place and to do what he can to create finesse of his own. Koujina left out Gon and Killua's contest this week, sure, and some of the bartering--but he's a fairly experienced animé director; his expert opinion might suggest that the episode might have felt uneven are even lacking in focus if they were present. Ultimately, you could argue that they're not wildly important in the grand scheme of things, anyway. Milluki's failure to register the "NPCs walk through walls" bit in the 2011 series is something that, I think, is a circumspect omission--Greed Island itself doesn't seem to possess any need for coding how an NPC charset interfaces with a chipset; I reckon that whole bit was just something Togashi included after tinkering with RPG Maker 1995 one day, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, before he worked out what Greed Island would actually entail. And hey, Leorio's bartering skills can still be underscored later on with the Benz Knife, or something, when the texture of the episode might not be upset as badly by some further exposition. By contrast, adding some filler of Hisoka and Chrollo might be, in Koujina's opinion, more apt in the context of the episode--or even the context of the episodes that follow!
Playing to a medium's format is perhaps a concern for Koujina and his buddies at Madhouse. It's hard to make a manga chapter resonant and lasting with nineteen pages--harder still when you flirt with nine pages, as Togashi did on one occasion--but an animé episode has more time; it can labour scenes that Togashi didn't labour--not because he didn't want to, but because it would more have been a detriment to his material than an attribute. In animated form, however, where there is more time to grapple with the source material, an expansion on a scene might--if the director is confident in his analysis--underscore what he perceives to be the crucial underlying thrust of the panels. In an animated show, I think this is necessary; I know some might say that it sullies Togashi's intentions, but the director wants to make the show as good as he possibly can--he wants it to be the best it can in animated format because Togashi wants it to be the best it can be in the manga format. We might lose some subtleties, but for all we know those nuances might not even have weighed heavy on the author's mind in the first place; and we still gain something for a change. For all the talk of Togashi's intentions, I think that making his manga the best it can be is the one thing we can say for certain. Koujina's made a few changes all over the place, but I'm sure he wants the show to be the best it can be--and if those changes that have been made reflect what he and his staff feel will make the show better, than I want to mark him up if he does them well rather than just mark him down because he changes something. The reason I hold the 1999 animé--and not, for example, Greed Island: Final--in such high esteem is because the staff had the confidence, wherever something had been rearranged or added, to try to play their game as smart as Togashi--and though others sometimes say otherwise, I really think they pulled it off. I remember the scene where Hisoka punches Gon in the face while the latter tries to return the badge: in the manga, you get Hisoka's outline filled in black with white slivers for his eye and mouth. In animated form, that might have looked a bit cheap, so the director illustrated the silver sliver of Hisoka's mouth through the crescent moon that hovered behind him. I think it's worth trying to read into omissions or rearrangements to try to reconcile them with the manga and to try to consider how, from a stylistic point of view, their absences or presences might better how the animé feels--which is what I think Togashi would want, because I believe he wants the manga to feel as good as it can in its context as a weekly series that only appears every so often. Koujina's doing things--some of them smart things--that we might not notice if we always compare and contrast with the manga. Togashi likes to play it smart; if the director is able to play things smart with his alterations, then I would feel that he's evoking the manga's spirit better than if he'd unimaginatively did things in a straight-forward sort of way, which would yield an animé that was basically a manga shoe-horned into an animated format--and there's a case to be made that this wouldn't do the manga the sort of justice it deserves, because manga doesn't always translate affectionately to the screen, as I wanted to try to illustrate in the paragraph above.
I have rambled to excess and wanted to say 101 things when I should've settled on one or two. Someone's left the radiators on in the house and I'm sweating badly and will probably die by way of dehydration within the next couple of seconds, so I'd best sign off by saying that the demands of a TV audience will be very different to the demands of a manga audience because the capacities of and expectations for both are quite different. Whenever Koujina does something that differs from the manga, I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt; as a animé director, he probably has some learnèd ideas about what makes a manga good as an animé. And we should try to figure out what his reading of the manga is like. Or something.
And now I am dead.
mood when I finished watching.
