Manga (9)

There is so much to talk about relating to manga, and in some ways it can be a challenge for us, cultural Americans, to fully understand. Japan, much like the US, has many many many many problems in its borders and faced by its people. As a result, much of their media focuses on discussing and critiquing problems and elements of the culture they must live in, not different at all how American media acts, or realistically any media from any culture really. Japan, like the US also has a very patchy and terrible past, that many inside their respected countries feel their leaders are trying to downplay or cover up. As a result, there are a lot of similarities in the social commentaries of media produced in both places. There is something so interesting in seeing a media created in a place which has different cultural inspirations, different religious inspirations, different legends, history, social contracts, and so much more. And yet much of what is at the core of these stories can connect with people of any culture, hints the rising popularity of manga and anime in the US as well as the rest of the world.

For this week I read Buddha 1 and 2. I did find it a little bit funny, and probably simply coincidental that after all the talk of Japan in the opening (of the writing response for this assignment) the first page of the first story we read is in India. Stylistically speaking, I was really under impressed by these. I'm not inherently against anime, and I think commonly it is really successful, but in this particular case I am not a fan. the style is quite stiff, it's not as expressive as i feel it could be. faces are fine in terms of expression, they get the point across, but not really much more. The body language is just kinda meh, again it got the point across but there were so many times where it was just very weak. not to mention that a lot of the characters just don't really follow any kind of style guide. For example the main character is cartoony, but still fairly human proportion. However the characters he meets and the world he lives in regularly goes into the rubber hose style. Now this is probably due to how early on this comic was made in the grand scheme of anime and manga, and it was one of the first. also the stylistic differences are not as bad in this as they are in some other Animes which would come in the years to follow. It was something distracting to me, someone who's draws for a living, but I doubt the general audience of around the world would really care. I do find it interesting because I actually see primitive versions of things which would later be ingrained into anime and manga in the future. For example, a lot of Animes will juxtapose extremely cartoony, large eyes, big heads, out of proportion characters with ones of extreme details and normal proportions. which makes sense knowing that this was the starting point for the style, and people built on this over time, pushing the style to its limits. 

    
As far as the writing went, I did enjoy reading about a religious story that wasn't about christianity for a change. It was interesting because i do not know that much about Buddhism or their belief system. so realistically this could be completely wrong and doesn't represent it at all and there is no story about a rabbit sacrificing itself or any of the other legends told in these narratives.


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