April is Anime Month!

Ah, sweet April…month of my birth, host to blooming flora and fauna, the end of the spring academic semester (woot!) AND the beginning of the new anime season in Japan! Seriously folks, this has me doing fangirl cartwheels. Let me explain why.

First of all, as most of my close friends know, I am addicted to serialized narratives. When it comes to anime and manga, which take this to all kinds of zany extremes, I’m like a crack ‘ho trying to get my next fix. Thus, with a bevy of new series starting all at once I am already falling into geeky raptures.

Although there are several shows I am particularly looking forward to this season, I have decided to blog about only one of them today. A die-hard fan of the manga, I nearly had a stroke when I found out it was being turned into an anime series. I am counting down the days and sending prayers of sweet love and gratitude well in advance to the wonderful folks at aarinfantasy who will no doubt be fansubbing all 24 glorious episodes for the rabid fangirls (and boys) like myself.

Junjou Romantica Anime

Junjou Romantica, by Nakamura Shungiku, is a boys’ love series that is still ongoing in Japan (and being translated far too slowly by Tokyopop’s Blu division, curses!). Focusing on three main relationships, this manga manages to achieve a successful balance of humor, romance, and super hawt man/man smexiness. Nakamura-sensei’s art style adheres to the androgynous conventions of male beauty that are hallmarks of the genre but sets itself apart in several ways. Firstly, she has a real gift for depicting emotions in characters’ facial expressions at crucial moments in the narrative that can leave the reader dumbfounded and breathless with awe. Secondly, she is able to create a fluidity of progression in some of her panels that feels wonderfully cinematic. Her mise-en-scène at these moments can be utterly minimalist (although not to the same degree of say Fumi Yoshinaga) and yet hauntingly powerful. There is this one sequence in volume three of the manga (which I wasn’t able to scan because my printer is misbehaving) that I’ve returned to several times because it is just so beautifully done. I’ll try to post it later if I can find my printer driver disc…

In the meantime, here’s a quick promo video for the animated version of the series, which will begin airing on April 10th (happy early birthday present to me!):

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