History of Manga

Manga’s origin has a long history to do with the culture of Japanese art and literature. During the Heian period, picture scrolls were an established art form and during the Edo period woodblock prints were introduced which allows the artist to reproduce the original and make multiple copies in cheaper price (Brenner, 2007). Thus, it is more accessible and could be distributed widely. It is considered as apart from Western art, the images are bold and colourful, very flat as lack of perspective or shadow and comes to a very distinctive approach on composition and proportion. It is said that Japanese favour symbolism over realism (Le Blanc & Odell, 2014).

 

The term ‘manga’ was first used by Hokusai, a leading woodblock artist during the Edo period, to describe his 13 volumes of sketches. Though Hokusai’s manga did not take the form of modern comic books we well known today, they were collections of sketches and caricatures and many of them were humorous. Modern manga developed in the years following the Meiji restoration and notably after the Second World War when Japan was occupied by the United States, reflecting the influence of American culture, particularly comic books and movies in the Japanese society (Le Blanc & Odell, 2014).

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In the late 1950s the manga market developed into the model we know today. Contemporary manga mostly is distributed on a weekly or monthly basis from huge, commercially successful publications that capable of handling large quantity of prints and sold them at a low price. Readers can vote on their favourite stories and the most popular become stand-alone high quality multi episode publications. Moreover, successful manga marketing may also lead to the adaption for the animation format (Le Blanc & Odell, 2014).

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History of Animation and the Beginning of Adaptation

The earliest form of animation in Japan was the magic lantern which was introduced from the Dutch. Utsushi-e was a different technology. An innovation of the magic lantern that is capable of projecting images. Adapting to the technique it could back project images onto Japanese paper, which is partially transparent. Using multiple lanterns with individual operators, animation can be produced in real time.

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It was until 1940s, Yamamoto Sanae and Masaoka Kenzo established the Toei Doga studio, one of the greatest pioneers of animation develop studio in Japan. By 1962 Toei started developing animated series for television. Recognising the demand for content to sustain the medium, adaptation from popular manga at the time such as Tetsujin 28-Go and Cyborg 009 were created into animated series. In the meantime, Astro Boy also has his own adaptation of animated series from its manga created by Tezuka Osamu while established his own company – Mushi Production.

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During the 1980s, this is when the Japanese animation was taking different forms of distribution and were not restricted to television broadcast or cinema. The animation market expanded with the laserdisc, in a format called OVA (Original Video Animation). In terms of the production cost, OVAs were relatively cheap while it allowed animators experiment with different style. Also, the quality of the animation was considerably better than TV series. In the 1980s, it was also the time when production companies expanded into larger scale. It was a time when companies had the budget to expand ideas and cinema release was becoming more ambitious. Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira, the animation was an adaptation from its manga, the production cost over billion yen. Considering at the time having such high quality animation, the animation did not recoup its budget from box office in Japan. Instead, it received notable cinematic distribution in the West and bringing the Japanese anime culture over the world (Odell & Blanc 2013).

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The Economic Influence and Globalization of Manga and Anime

In 2002, English translated edition of the long running weekly manga magazine – Shonen Jump made its debut and all 250, 000 copies were sold out in the United States. Moreover, as of recent report detailing the latest sales figure for One Piece, written by Eiichiro Oda and published by Shueisha, it has sold 450 million copies worldwide which came close to compete with another long running series from DC comics – Batman with 474 million single-issues to date. While Batman had more than 16,000 issues since debut during 1939, One Piece has under 1000 chapters since its release in 1997 (Comicbook, 2019) (Statista, 2019). Cooper-Chen stated that two-thirds of the world’s animation were produced from Japan (Cooper-Chen, 2010). Koji Senda, director of the Anime Center in Tokyo’s Akihabara, told her that in April 2009 the center annually attracts 34,000 foreign visitors. Also, the boom of other sub industries related to manga and animation such as VIZ and Crunchyroll which do English translation for manga and online platform for free streaming of Japanese animation. In addition, Cosplay Shopping is one of the biggest online stores specify in anime manga costumes and gears or even the demand for English voice acting for Japanese animation (Reesman, 2005) – this shows how Japanese manga and animation is an ongoing influence worldwide.

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While the manga can be a great success, not all animation of its own adaptation are successful. For example, The Quintessential Quintuplets (五等分の花嫁), written by Negi Haruba, published by Kodansha and broadcasted during January 2019 and We Never Learn (ぼくたちは勉強ができない), written by Taishi Tsutsui, published by Shueisha and broadcasted during April 2019, both had the same genre as a high school love comedy with a very similar setup about not being able to concentrate on study. As Schwartz and Eilane stated, what begins as manga gains popularity is likely to become anime (Schwartz & Eliane, 2006). Consider both as a successful manga with the potential of having an adaptation of animation, according to the Crunchyroll’s ratings and review, both received differently. The Quintessential Quintuplets tense to have more positive review, especially regarding on retaining the beautiful graphic style from manga to animation while We Never Learn did not go well regarding the pacing for the introduction of characters (Crunchyroll, 2019). This is a result of having different approaches to the decision for the adaptation in terms of techniques and editorial decision and shows the importance of how we acknowledge it.

Judging from the statistics as described above, we could understand the popularity of manga that takes part in global and having a successful adaptation of it may bring more potential benefits to other industries.

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Questions concerning the directorial and technological aspects of manga anime development

The purpose of this research is to look into the in-depths of the directorial approaches of how animation adapted of its original manga and expand the idea of it. I developed this idea during my research as described above, I have come to realize that not many people have looked into the matter of how animation was adapted from manga. Although there were a lot of research mentioning about it in cultural and historic terms, there were limited amount of in-depth analysis of directorial and technical skills in the way of making animation through manga. Therefore, by knowing the elements of how a successful animation is adapted from its manga form, this may potentially open new approaches for directors or studios outside of Japan. And through investigation we may generalize rules that are commonly used for adaptation and systemize the different process from static to motion.