On Negativity. Kinda. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this terrible habit I have of going on ranting tangents about how terrible something I dislike is, typically using - early on - a contrast point of something which I really like, against which the terrible thing looks even more terrible. It means that one can very easily get the impression I only like some things so I can dislike some other things more, and that kind of behaviour can give me a well-earned reputation for being a cynical jerk who doesn't like any art at all, which funnily enough, was something a friend of mine said to me when we met for the first time in four years.
Now, it's kinda true in that when something becomes extremely popular I am predisposed to become jaded and cautious about it, but that's not actually
because it's extremely popular. If I was to knee-jerk in the opposite direction as some kind of semi-rebellion against popularity, I would be just as bad as the chimps who will buy into anything mainstream, especially since I'd no doubt be pretentious about it. If one looks at the recent properties for which I've vocalised my disdain, it'd be very easy to get that pattern. After all, I've rubbished on
Death Note,
Hellsing, and
Pirates of the Caribbean, purely off the top of my head, and all three were or are outrageously popular (to the point where all are under discussions for More Of The Same).
On the other hand, these reviews all contain seeds of things I
do like. I held
Die Hard 4.0 up for scrutiny in light of
Die Hard With A Vengeance, and part of what made
so annoyed about
Death Note was just how
terrible it was
in comparison to 20th Century Boys. So why don't I ever talk about those series I
do like?
...
Well,
okay then.
Let's go over the basics.
20th Century Boys is a 249 chapter sci-fi manga by
Naoki Urasawa. The story is long, even compared to Naoki's previous work,
Monster.
Monster is a very contained story, time-wise; if you consider the opening section a prequel, with flashbacks to the past scattered throughout, the series covers about a year of time. In contrast,
20th Century Boys starts in 1967, and the story continues forward for almost forty more years. We see characters as they progress through varying stages of their lives, from childhood to adulthood and in many cases, to their deaths.
Normally, this kind of time passage is mishandled in manga and other visual story media, where characters come in three simple age categories - child, adolescent adult, or old person.
20th Century Boys averts this by making the story protaganists age very distinctly from time to time. This is a simple-sounding thing, to make characters age, but one of the things that visual media does as a very deliberate maneuver is to make the focus of the story visually distinct. Therefore, character designs in manga need to be clear and sharply defined, which can make things like design evolution tricky. Budget isn't the only reason character designs remain consistant throughout many series - it's often a very deliberate move to help the viewers track things when they get more hectic.
To both evolve a character design and keep it in a state where the readers can recognise or grasp a character is an impressive feat, and Urusawa does it through a numbenr of clever tricks. The easiest one I can point to without getting into spoilers is to point out the protaganist, Kenji, has a very pronounced upper lip. This is represented by a simple line over the line of his mouth - which typically diminishes his visual appeal, and tends to make him look pouty, and bored, but is just a feature of his appearance. This is just one thing, and you might never notice it if you read the manga naturally.
There are others (and other, more obvious ones, such as a fat child becoming a fat adult becoming a fat older man), of course, yet these are all examples of how Naoki's art style is subtle, but effective. Unlike a lot of other anime and manga artists, who have started to take their cues in art direction from more evolved anime sources such as the more Americanised styles of the early 1990s, Naoki's style instead draws upon the font of almost all Manga itself. Any fan of Osamu Tezuka's work would have an easy time seeing where I'm going with this, and I at one point laughingly declared
Monster to be 'the darkest
Astro Boy fanfiction ever.' One of the really interesting things, to me, is that in Naoki's Japan, the
Japanese people look like Japanese people. It doesn't stop there, though - the Thai people look like Thai people, the Chinese people look like Chinese people. Even the American people look like American people.
Now, I understand that I barely touched on the visual style of
Death Note as I reviewed it, instead focusing on things like the storytelling and the setting and the characterisation. That's because
Death Note was a competently-done work, visually, with pretty and distinct character designs that could easily draw the viewer's eye. They weren't difficult or challenging to make, and they are, I am certain, very much to blame for a lot of the show's popularity. On the other hand,
20th Century Boys is ugly. There are only a handful of character designs in the series that fit into any spectrum you could consider 'sexy,' and it seems almost as a direct (and perhaps unfortunate) backlash against the excessive prettiness of more modern series. Naoki's art style eschews many of the exaggerations and distinctions that makes manga such a visual feast - there's no bishounen ghetto, no buffet of sexy girls to dazzle your senses and keep you reading. There's no fanservice, really, either, with the exception of a few bits of fetish fuel I can remember.
This 'realism' in visuals makes the unrealistic things that transpire in the story all the more swallowable. It's not watching a pack of long-haired prettyboys swan around and have improbable adventures. The impact of each scene becomes much more like watching a live action movie with a small special effects budget, a more human style of drama. Plans and ploys are much more down-to-earth, characters' accomplishments less superhuman. The funny thing is, there are more than a few instances of characters in the series being
shot and surviving... which is itself, a subversion of what people
think of as realistic combat. By using a style that is almost
unheard-of in modern anime and manga, Naoki has created a work that doesn't just start off and touch upon the spirit of the 1960s and the 20th century, but has embraced it, could be
part of it.
The unfortunate side-effect of this striking visual style is that it's
not striking. The series doesn't look creative, or bold... it looks, by modern anime standards, plain and unexciting. This is very much a series that needs to tap into a reader's sense of nostalgia to really take flight. This is a series written for Naoki's generation - to people who can remember the Worlds Expo, people who can remember the moon landing, people to whom pornography was hard to get, where punishment was corporal, and where portable communications devices were unheard of.
The story is told at first in a kind of retrospective style; flashbacks to the 60s preface each chapter, with the characters being introduced by who they once were, compared and contrasted with who they are now. Ambiguity abounds and multiplies, and along the way, a lot of very wistful nostalgia is spread around. The storytelling wavers at times between wistful and frustrated, with a constant contrast between the future the kids thought they'd have compared to the future they wound up having. The group had a childhood defined by pursuing adventure, even in their own heads, and this makes the mundanity of their adulthood more wretched... even while they realise that the adventure that they thought they wanted is coming for them
and they don't want it any more.
20th Century Boys dabbles in alternate media, too. A song, which is a major focus of the story, is distributed on a CD with one volume of the manga; another volume has a number of cryptic notes, hand written bits of story detritus.
To summarise the plot of
20th Century Boys would require a lot of explanation, and would provide about as much insight into the joy of following said plot as would throwing a frog skeleton at someone could explain the miracle of life. Said summary would also be somewhat spoiler-heavy, given the way transitions are marked in the series. As it stands, this review is a bit long already - the
Death Note review was something like nine pages long, which I think turns people off commenting,
as if people are reading, so I'm going to pause here and come back to the writing later.
Hopefully, I'll generate some fiction tonight.