Review for Bakuman: Season 1

Introduction

There are two long-running anime series debuting this summer, and I have been dreading one as much as I have been anticipating the other. The reason why is the same for both, the manga, although compared to the epic One Piece saga, Bakuman’s seventy-five episode run is just a flash in the pan. I’ve been looking forward to the One Piece anime because I just can’t find the time for the manga’s busy art style. Bakuman on the other hand comes from the collective creative talents of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the geniuses behind Death Note. I’ve caught a few volumes of the Bakuman manga and it is exquisite in its artwork, and has an engrossing and measured story that makes you wonder at just how it will translate to anime, even if Death Note was a successful adaptation. Another aspect of Bakuman that may not transition well to anime is its real world setting. It’s manga getting meta, it’s a story about two aspiring artists trying to make it as creators of manga, and as Bakuman is a Shonen Jump publication, the creators actually used the publisher Shueisha and the Shonen Jump magazine publication as elements in their story. That’s doable when you’re writing for that magazine, but when the anime is being made by a company that may not be affiliated with Shueisha, the potential for a licensing meltdown is infinite. Just how much of Bakuman will actually make it onto screen?


The UK is getting something of a coup with this release of Bakuman. This is the only legitimate English language release on DVD in the world at this time. Media Blasters in the US licensed it and commissioned a dub, but apparently funding dried up, and the series never got past the first seven episode volume in the US, leaving a lot of eager fans hanging. However, Kazé in France have a lot more passion for this particular title, and you can certainly see the subject matter working well across the channel where there is a lot more acceptance of the graphic novel as an art form. To date they have licensed, dubbed into French, and released the first two series of the show, and have even done so on Blu-ray. They are now bringing the series to the UK, although given Media Blaster’s truncated US release, it is a subtitle only release here, and on DVD only. Still, you can see a lot of US fans getting all fired up about importing the show.


Moritaka Mashiro is a junior high student who has already come to accept his lot in life. He has a good idea of how the world works, and has resigned himself to following the herd in doing well in his exams, going to college, and eventually getting the sort of salaryman job that everyone in that herd aspires to. The crush he has on fellow student Miho Azuki, and his talent for art are mere blips of individuality in an otherwise mundane existence. At least that’s how it was until the day he left his maths notebook at school, and the brightest kid in the class, Akito Takagi picked it up to find Moritaka’s idle doodles. Now Akito wants to team up with Moritaka to become manga creators. He’ll come up with the stories, and Moritaka will bring them to vivid life, and they will be famous. That’s Akito’s plan, only Moritaka’s past is such that, becoming a mangaka is anathema.


Moritaka’s uncle Nobuhiko was actually a manga artist himself, under the pen name Taro Kawaguchi, and he had one big, gag manga hit that even got made into an anime show, before burning out, and subsequently trying to recapture that fleeting glory. Moritaka’s uncle worked himself to death trying in vain to get another hit, and even though he idolised his uncle, he knows full well that his parents would never let him become a manga artist, even if he actually wanted to. Akito has the perfect angle for that though. He sets up a meeting between Moritaka and Miho, and it turns out that his crush is actually reciprocated. It seems Moritaka takes it too far when he blurts out a marriage proposal, but Miho actually agrees, with one condition. She wants to be a voice actress, and she agrees to marry Moritaka if he can create a manga, if he gets it published, and if it gets turned into an anime in which she will voice a character. Suddenly Moritaka wants to be a mangaka...


The 25 episodes of Season 1 of Bakuman are presented across 6 dual-layer discs, by Kazé Entertainment, and distributed for them in the UK by Manga Entertainment.

Disc 1
1. Dreams and Reality
2. Idiots and Geniuses
3. Parents and Children
4. Time and Keys
5. Summer and Storyboard

Disc 2
6. Carrot and Stick
7. Tears and Tears
8. Anxiety and Expectation
9. Regrets and Understanding

Disc 3
10. Ten and Two
11. Chocolate and Next
12. Feast and Graduation
13. First Results and Final Reports


Disc 4
14. Fight and Imitation
15. Debut and Eagerness
16. Wall and Kiss
17. Vanity and Kindness

Disc 5
18. Jealousy and Love
19. Two and One
20. Cooperation and Condition
21. Literature and Music

Disc 6
22. Alliance and Break-up
23. Tuesday and Friday
24. Phone and Night Before
25. Yes and No

Picture

The image comes in 1.78:1 anamorphic format, given a native PAL presentation, free of ghosting and smoothly animated. It’s clear and sharp throughout, with consistent colours. In this day and age of HD masters, when PAL DVD masters are created, they are usually done so from the HD masters, which for one thing gives smooth progressive looking playback, and for another thing it makes full use of the 576 lines of resolution available to PAL. While Bakuman is out on Blu-ray in France, and while the PAL conversion is pretty good, it does look as if the image source for these DVDs is from a 480 line NTSC source, rather than HD, as it has a softness that implies a lower resolution. There is also a little more digital banding than you would expect for an anime show on DVD. Other than that, Bakuman looks pretty good, quite faithfully rendering the manga characters in animation, and making a good stab at recreating the level of detail in the manga artwork.

Sound

Audio comes in the form of DD 2.0 Surround Japanese, with player forced English subtitles. The dialogue comes across clearly, and there are no problems with glitches or dropouts. It’s not an action-oriented show, so it isn’t the liveliest of sound mixes, but it gets the intent of the story across. The music is therefore the main test of the audio, and it comes across reasonably well. The problem here is that this is a show with PAL speed up, and it seems that Kazé have pitch corrected the audio, resulting in a whole lot of clipping. This is most apparent when there are sustained notes in background music, and especially noticeable in quiet piano instrumental music, of which there is a significant amount in Bakuman. What should be a single, sustained and smooth note comes across as fractured and distorted.


And we come to the subtitles which as usual are my main point of criticism on a Kazé release. I had a niggling concern here that the usual problem with signs translations would strike. Kazé have shown on previous releases that they are unable to show more than two lines of subtitles simultaneously, and that when there is dialogue, that will be prioritised over signs translation. No matter that every other anime distributor is able to overlay signs and show dialogue at the same time, Kazé just won’t. Bakuman is a show about manga creators, there is a lot of text in the show, and sure enough there are plenty of moments when you will see text on screen, and there is no translation for it, because characters are speaking. At other times, signs are translated as you would expect. Normally I’d suggest watching the dub instead to get all of the signs, but of course there is no complete English dub for Bakuman.


But this turned out to be the least of Bakuman’s issues. The dialogue subtitles themselves are seriously screwed up. Broken English abounds to the point that you have to pause the disc four or five times an episode to parse a sentence and try and work out what is being said. Personal pronouns can be inconsistent, even within the same sentence, with ‘I’ turning to ‘he’, and a lack of clarity as to which is meant. Indefinite articles are an optional extra it seems and you’d never think that you’d miss the words ‘the’ and ‘a’ until you watch this show. There are some bizarre translation choices as well, episode 6 throws in ‘Manichean’ and again I was pausing the disc and rushing to a dictionary. I shouldn’t have to be a student of ancient history and philosophy to enjoy a show, although under different circumstances I’d applaud the attempt to widen my vocabulary.


Not here though, not with subtitles so riddled with errors that they keep saying ‘cheer up’ when they should be saying ‘cheer on’, and you keep seeing the word ‘did’ when there should be an ‘nt’ on the end, reversing the meaning of the sentence and making it nonsensical. The penny dropped in episode 3, with the line ‘Mashiro et I want to be manga artists’ followed up by episode 9’s ‘Apologise de Mashiro’. These subtitles have been sourced from the French subtitles (Media Blasters only got to episode 7 on the US release), presumably on the French Blu-ray and DVD release, but are of such inconsistent and dubious quality that I think that rather than actually pay a translator, they just ran them through Google Translate. These subtitles are bad enough to cripple the show, and would be unacceptable on a fan sub.

Extras

All discs come with the usual Kazé restrictions, which make them the least user friendly anime discs on the planet. With this being a sub only show, it is less of an issue but it is still annoying. The discs’ content is presented with animated menus, and each disc will boot up with trailers for other Kazé product.

Trailers include, Persona 4: The Animation, Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan, Penguindrum, Journey to Agartha, Code Geass, and Black Lagoon.


Each disc will also have a textless credit sequence of sorts, whether for the show itself, or for one of the ‘imaginary’ shows set in the story universe. These are presented as karaoke credits, with burnt in karaoke subtitles at the bottom, and optional English language translations at the top of the screen (the only place on these discs that you have control over the subtitles, and the only place where the song lyrics are translated).

Conclusion

Let’s pay a visit to cloud cuckoo land, where Bakuman has just been released on DVD in the UK, and there is nothing wrong with the presentation of the show. It’s there, in Japanese, with accurate and legible English subtitles. How does it fare? Bakuman isn’t bad. Its artwork is great, looking just like the manga that it’s adapted from, and the animation is top notch as well. The actors cast in the roles are suited to their parts, and its aesthetic works well given its story. Death Note, by the same authors got a very moody and melodramatic adaptation, perfect for the source material. Bakuman on the other hand is more of comic docudrama, a peek behind the scenes of the anime industry, albeit an industry populated with larger than life and colourful characters. On top of that Bakuman is a nigh on faithful adaptation of the manga, bringing across the story pretty much word for word, beat for beat.


That unfortunately turns out to be Bakuman’s Achilles heel. Other than some exaggerated comic moments, Bakuman’s commitment to recreating the manga results in awkward pacing, and a general lack of drama. Bakuman is one of the best manga out there, in terms of story and character it’s compulsive reading. But you can read at your own pace, take things in at leisure. The anime dictates the pace, and it’s distressingly slow at times, devoting a whole episode to the angst that erupts when the seating arrangement in class changes and Moritaka finds himself sitting next to the girl of his dreams. In some episodes, scenes are dutiful in panning over the latest manga creation, a monochrome still image, with a disembodied voice reading out all the speech bubbles. At other times, months will flash by in a few scenes, shortcutting the creative process and having the mangaka produce their next work with seemingly no effort at all.


The biggest problem with all this is that it makes it difficult to empathise with and root for the characters, and that results in a degree of separation from the story, where it really needs to be more immersive. Another nitpick that I had was the constant reiteration of the mission statement. We learn pretty quickly what the story is about, so it gets tedious to have our protagonists striking a pose once every couple of episodes, proclaiming yet again that they will be famous manga artists. It might be funny in Only Fools and Horses for Del Boy to tell Rodney that ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires’, but hearing Captain Janeway set course for home at the end of each episode quickly made Voyager my least favourite Star Trek incarnation.


Bakuman is a fair adaptation of one of the best manga in recent years. It fails to do its source material justice, but remains perfectly watchable. Also, to its credit it doesn’t lose too much in the licensing stakes. While Shonen Jump becomes Shonen Jack, and Shueisha becomes Yueisha, Jump titles aren’t given the same treatment, and the show maintains its authenticity by showing artwork from titles like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece and Dragon Ball without having to alter or obscure anything. In cloud cuckoo land I would be happy to award it 7/10.


Unfortunately we live in the real world, and I still have to deal with the elephant in the room of those terrible subtitles. When something that you have been especially anticipating turns out to be broken, you feel the pain even more, and I was so very much looking forward to Bakuman on DVD. If this had been Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan, I wouldn’t have been half as bothered. That Kazé have given this show such disrespectful treatment really does gall. Realistically, 95% of the subtitles in this release are legible, and in accurate English. They’re not great subtitles though, as they don’t always flow well, no thought has been give to word choice, and there is no thought as to character. They are just straight up translations, which leaves everyone speaking with the same ‘voice’, stilted and awkwardly.


But 5% of the subtitles are rife with error, in broken English, or incorrectly translated. A few lines are left with French words, and some are just so wrong that they state the opposite of what the characters are actually saying. They’re like injections when you’re a kid. You go to the doctor, and you’re already afraid of the inevitable injection, the anticipation makes the dread worse, and when the actual moment arrives, you might burst into tears before the actual jab, or when it does hit, the pain is magnified by your negative expectations. With Bakuman, the show is ruined because you wind up expecting the next screwed up subtitle rather than paying attention to the show.


While I was watching Bakuman for review, I got into the habit of face-palming every time another screwed up subtitle appeared on screen. I now have a bruised face. Kazé have ruined Bakuman, a show that I was really looking forward to. It might have been salvaged if there was an English dub, but if there was an English dub, this would be the usual point in my reviews for Kazé product where I would point to other options for watching the show. For Bakuman, there are no such legal options. Media Blasters never got past volume 1, and no one else in the US or Australia has licensed it to date. The only thing I can suggest is that as the show is a pretty faithful adaptation of the manga, you keep the manga at hand while you watch it, ignore the subtitles, and read the dialogue from the manga. Of course then you’ll realise that the manga is superior, and you’ll just turn off the TV. I won’t tell you whether or not you should buy this, you’re all grown consumers. But I will remind you that you have statutory rights as consumers. You can expect full refunds on any goods that are not fit for purpose. The subtitles on this release of Bakuman are anything but fit for purpose.