Anyway, I love NHK – even after reading the manga. If one thinks episode 13 was a coruscatingly brilliant episode … I wonder what they’d think if Welcome to the Starry Sky arrived.

Case in point: Full Moon Wo Sagashite.
Songs are an audio perception. Unless you are a musician and the writer of the author actually uses musical notation the lyrics on the panel evoke nothing.

Moreover, the plot on rare occasions work better. Anime – Full Moon Wo Sagashite works as a sort of bittersweet Cinderella story. Manga’s Full Moon is basically a story that wants to be seedy but isn’t willing to go the distance and asking the reader to support Takuto+Mitsuki in the manga is a bit much given Takuto’s behavior.

If you only read one manga series in your life, make it that one!

As far as this article goes, I suppose I was getting frustrated by the nay-sayers that are constantly ragging on the NHK! anime in comparison with the manga – to me its an unfair way to critique a show. It wouldn’t irrate me as much if NHK! really was that bad, but it clearly isn’t, and doesn’t deserve the sensationalist panning it’s getting from certain sections of the anime community. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, though one hopes that bad taste isn’t a requisite trait of being an anime fan; perhaps if it had been adapted from a porn game their reviews would have been tweaked?

wildarmsheero – I agree with you on the budget comment; if there is one real complaint I have about Welcome to the NHK!, it is the low budget animation. From a seemingly "popular" studio like Gonzo, it’s quite sad that animation is terribly inconsistent (but not as bad as Gonzo’s amatuerish efforts on Speed Grapher – really, that was scrapping the bottom of the barrell).

And thank God you’re still blogging NHK! I love the show dearly (just watched episode 12, great stuff, as usual), and hope to hear more of your thoughts about it in future posts. The character development stands out above all, and hopefully the manga will live up to the hype.

Another anime adaption that, in my mind, truly captures the manga’s intent, is Karekano. Anno did a great job instilling true feeling into the characters without deviating from the story (practically at all – the anime and manga follow each other for the most part perfectly). And in my opinion, his work on Karekano actually outdoes the manga. The main reason for this, I’d say, is that Karekano is very much reliant on motion, and that motion is difficult to deliver in the manga format. The beautiful soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

Overall, I’d say that Nausicaa stands as the best anime-manga pair out there, because it was created by the same person. Miyazaki’s vision is truly captured in the manga, which is so epic and grand that one cannot help but be supremely impressed by its scope and intelligence. Thankfully, he chooses not to attemp to capture the sweeping breadth of the story in one two-hour movie, but instead narrows it down to allow adequate character development. By no means is Nausicaa the best movie of his career, but the manga is his greatest work by far.

Besides, the NHK manga is going to be released soon so we won’t have any cause for complaint then!

In most cases, I would immediately latch onto the manga to see the author’s original vision, but since in this case it’s based on a novel, the proceedure is different.

The question of which is better is not an invalid question, but I think any complaints that the anime didn’t *live up to* the manga aren’t really appropriate, because it should first be compared to the novel.