Week ten: Manga and Anime

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Tonkaradani Mongatari Manga


It's very interesting, I never really thought about manga and anime, other than them both being Japanese cartoons or something. But with some research I realized that manga and anime have a lot of overlap whenever talking about them. I always thought that mangas and animes could be comic books as well as movies/ series but the only difference between them were that one was more realistic than the other. Obviously in the West we see manga and anime as very generic terms when we refer to Japanese art in general; at least that's how I saw it from others when growing up. But when I actually researched about anime and manga it appeared that they were really similar to how cartoons are made in the US, or in the west generally. When I looked up the term anime it literally means 'animation' in Japanese which refers to the Japanese animated cartoon videos/ movies/ series. The term anime and manga can get confused because there are stories that are made into mangas as well as being made into animes too. For example, it's like Tekkonkinkreet, the first time I knew about it was when I watched it, but then I found out that there was a manga that was before the anime. For manga, when translated from Japanese it literally means 'whimsical drawings'. The but difference between manga and anime are that animes are cartoons in motion that (literal animations) whereas mangas are like comics that you would read from a book. Another key difference between them are that animes are in full color and mangas are in black and white. For this week I read the Tonkaradani Mongatari Manga. I'm sure the version I read was modified, because I'm sure reading a Japanese manga comic would be read from left to tight and would be in Japanese text as opposed to English. What I didn't expect was to see a comic about animals instead of people. This comic actually goes back and forth between animals and people. But, I'm not sure why but the whole feeling of the comic reminds me of Betty Boop; it's probably because of the design of the characters and because it's in black and white. But, it's interesting I can compare it to Garfield for example because the cat interacts with his owner as do the characters in this comic with their animals. 







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