It’s something I constantly hear on social media: “The anime is good, but the manga [or game, or light novel] is much better.” While this is a common opinion, there are plenty of counter-examples, cases where the anime proves to be the better story. So today we’re going to ask, is the manga better than the anime?
Translating a great story from one medium into a mainstream anime production is a challenging business, sometimes requiring that shorter story elements be expanded greatly in order to create enough material for a series, or that only a part of the larger story is adapted. Naturally, anime is a lot more expensive to create than the manga, so economics plays a big role, too. We asked J-List’s readers to tell us what manga was better than the anime, or vice versa, and here’s what we came up with.
Cases Where the Original Work is Better
Some cases where the original manga, game or light novel are generally considered better than the anime:
- Obviously, a story that has a long manga story can’t fit everything into a single 12-episode season, so some story elements are shortened, as in Goblin Slayer.
- It can be easy for anime creators to fail to “get” the original work, and reduce it to so much fan service, which happened with Rosario + Vampire.
- When a manga story is still ongoing it can cause problems for an anime. This leads to frustrating “thanks for watching, continue the story in the manga!” non-endings for anime, or lame filler arcs (*cough* Naruto *cough*).
- Often an anime is green-lighted, but with a low budget or (ulp) only enough money for crappy CGI animation, like Ajin or the otherwise promising Fist of the North Star prequel Fist of the Blue Sky. Usually, fans are not amused and move on right away.
- As I recently learned, One Piece fans can get defensive if you imply that, just maybe, a show doesn’t need 875+ episodes to tell a proper story, and that Gurren Lagann might be the better show. And within these fans are die-hards who love the manga more than the anime for the show.
Cases Where the Anime is Better
- Since the success of Lucky Star, a lot of proper anime stories start out based on 4-koma comics which generally present cute characters making short gags. Animators can choose to either keep the same short joke format, as in shows like Seitokai Yakuindomo, or greatly flesh out the characters and story, as K-On!, New Game!, Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun and Hitori Bocchi’s ○○ Lifestyle did.
- Two more examples of 4-koma comics being reworked into outstanding series include Working!! and Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid.
- Often an anime can take the time to craft a more mature story than the original version offered, advancing the story beyond the original or “fixing” issues with the artist, whose style often improves greatly from early to later volumes. Some readers included Attack on Titan in this category.
- Initial D. The manga is nice, but the excitement of the racing scenes in visual form is superior.
- Some shows like Nodame Cantabile or Your Lie in April are heavily reliant on beautiful music as part of the story. Naturally, the anime version, which lets us experience the music as a character in the story, is better because the music is part of the story.
- It’s often the case that the anime can take all the best elements of a story and tighten everything up into a masterpiece, like Kaguya-sama: Love is War.
Cases That are Undecided
- Sometimes it can be hard to choose. The game version of Steins;Gate is superior in one sense because it’s got seven different endings, allowing Okabe to give up on saving the future and deciding to live in a new timeline with [spoiler]. But then, a lot of the great chemistry between Okabe and Kurisu is only seen in the anime.
- Sometimes it comes down to personal preference. I thought the anime ending to ERASED was a lot more reasonable than the manga version, but others might disagree.
- What I love best is when creators give us two complementary stories to read and enjoy, but which aren’t necessarily joined at the hip. The manga I learned Japanese most from back in the 1980s was Orange Road, about a family of espers who have to hide their superpowers. The manga and the anime each told stories that were very different, allowing fans to enjoy twice the story, not unlike the HBO and the book versions of Game of Thrones.
What anime have been better than the original work? Which manga is better than the anime? Tell us on Twitter!
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