'Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne' manga ~ love and hate at the same time

beware of spoilers

story and characters

After I watched the anime - and I've always believed this is the right order to get acquainted with a franchise that has both an anime and manga, especially if the former is based on the latter - I was fully aware that the manga story would be different. It's not possible that a 44-episode-long anime follows the original to the letter when there are only 7 volumes. However, the story in the manga surpassed all my expectations. First of all, on part of...

After thorough contemplation, I decided the author was pressed for a more daring scene by her fans or by her editor who told her the manga wouldn't sell well if she does not give a treat to her fans. And I was wrong

The lovey-dovey mood went on unspoilt, and the mangaka went on treating us, the readers, with unexpected DOKIDOKI moments, moments that made my heart beat fast together with Maron's. I discussed it with my friend +Арагорн Араторнович and we decided that it's true: older anime and manga were bolder and more romantic than many of those aired/published now. I will never cease to use 'Faster than a kiss' as an example of a manga that made me drop it. I could only stand it for approximately a half of what it lasts, a half of how long the main characters fail to - due to different circumstances or to the fact that the characters prevent themselves from it - finally express their feeling in just ANY possible way. If I am not mistaken, the relationship between the main couple in 'Skip Beat' remained dim and vague, too, for all the 200 chapters that I had the patience to read. Another great example is 'Diabolik Lovers', in relation to which most fans are completely wrong - the reverse harem that gathered around the Heroine never raped her or laid a hand on her because she was a woman, she was insulted in a completely different way, being considered simply a source of blood up to the very end (of the anime).

In contrast to works like those, 'Jeanne' presents a pretty much normal relationship, and in a manner that makes me very happy. It's not very common to see a guy constantly claiming that he wants to touch the Heroine, in other words - that physical contact is pleasant and important to him, at the same time never failing to support her morally and be near when needed, showing his caring side and being worried for the Heroine, not just to 'posing for the camera' every now and then or claiming that 'she's his and that's it'.

I'd say I was very pleased to see some funny scenes and the mischievous side of the characters, too
’What are you doing? Hey, tell me, what are you doing? - Ahaha! You damned....'

It's probably one of the few, if not the only, times when I see a heroine use her charms to achieve her goal. This is how it was in the anime:

- Your leg is hurt, I'll get you out of this trap

- No, I don't want to be indebted to you!

And this is how it was in the manga:

- My sweet Sindbaddy, how about you get me out of this trap?

- Stop calling me that

The Heroine getting angry when she should rather be sad and distressed, and being cool instead of blushing or being embarrassed is another highlight of a shoujo of the old generation. And it's ok if she manages to escape from a prison cell just like that.

'I beg your pardon - Ugh, okaaay...'

Not all mangakas use chibi-style wisely, and some just do that in vain because it's still not funny, like ms Enjoji in 'hapimari', but ms Tanemura did a great job. shimpai nasshingu!

However, the main difference between the anime and the manga is that the story itself flows differently. Much less attention is paid to minor characters, some of them are not introduced at all, some play a role less noticeable than in the anime. That was a pretty sad discovery. On the other hand, unlike anime, where Fin's betrayal was a real thing, even though explained by the Devil's deeds, and where the second part crossed out all the relationship that was built between Fin and Maron. Fin's behaviour in manga was much more understandable, except for the part when she admitted she was lying and returned to the side of God, which was done... Oh I can't say it. I can't say 'poorly', so I'll just say, it was not thoroughly thought over. I'd say that I liked the manga version of Fin's story, including Access, too, and the general ending better.
The other critical moments in manga were also more acute, penetrating the very heart of me as a reader.
'Maron, you were my wind'.
It's raining. Wind power is 0.

graphics
I wouldn't name ms Tanemura my favourite artist, I'd probably say the eyes of the characters are too big and there are too many frills and pink colour for me, and the Heroine's smile is too wide. However, it's the style that inspires me to draw something myself, because I truly envy those mangakas who manage to create such a strong impression on readers and maintain their own style that is impossible to mistake for anything else.
It's already obvious but I'll stress that again - even though this may look like some exaggeration, I like it when a mangaka makes a character reveal his or her feelings in an obvious way. I could count mangakas that manage to move me with fingers on one hand, and ms Tanemura certainly is one of them

You may have seen this picture from 'Jeanne' artbook, which can be frequently found in the web. The same picture in black-and-white was used as a chapter cover.

It's not that they are completely the same sides of one moment, but have a look at a picture used inside the last chapter some pages before the end.

conclusion
I usually hate happy-endings like that. All problems are solved, unlike what was in the anime, where parents' and Fin's fate were left unexplained. Even Zen's and Miyako's future stories were described in bright colours. Which means, there will be no more fighting with evil, no more adventures, just plain everyday life of two Japanese families.
However, in case of 'Jeanne', it just didn't make me nauseous, like it usually does. And it was really painful to part with the characters. It's not that 'Jeanne' is the best manga I've ever read, but I realised I couldn't make myself read the last volume for 2 days because I knew it was the last one. All the previous were ok, but when I came to the finish line I couldn't make myself read it. I didn't want it to end, because reading it, the process of reading it, was so enjoyable. Because I liked it so much.
For the conclusion, let me translate what ms Tanemura wrote as an afterword in the last volume.
And you may decide for yourself whether you would like to try to trust this author.

'Writing such a story will be difficult for you. And you will have to fight with prejudice, too. If you still wish to continue, I'll give you my full support'. This is what I heard from my editor when I first showed him my idea about 'Jeanne'. My answer was 'I'll try'.
There were times when I was not in my best shape, but I am happy I wrote it. It's not that I want to convey something to my readers through manga. Something, huh?
Yes, I want you to feel 'something'. I want you to feel just anything - 'to like' or 'to hate', 'friendship', 'love', 'persistence', 'lingering affection', 'effort', 'bitterness', 'pain', 'happiness', 'joy', 'sadness', even 'irritation' is OK. It's OK if you'll think 'it's boring' after you've read it. If you feel something, I'll be glad. I'll be happy. I want you to feel just something there. To know it.
Manga is a wonderful media (not just manga but songs, anime, any entertainment). You can read it as you like and throw it away as you like. And you can feel it deeply and live by it, too, taking it as a way of thinking. It depends on you.
It's my opinion, but it can be just a mere artwork to others. However for me this is the only 'reality' in this world. A person like this does exist here. I want you to not to forget it. Feeling deeply is not something to be ashamed of. It's wonderful.
I wish the 'wind' that my heart releases will make you feel 'something'.
You can even see me as a rival. I'll accept your challenge (laugh). Let your heart rest forgetting sad things with my gags, at least for a second. When you're tired, it's necessary to leave it all for some time, too. It's OK to run away. It's a kind of courage. After all, you want to do your best even more, right? It's all right if you at least have that feeling.
When you're sad, try to open a book. When you're happy, try to open a book, too. I am always near you. You're not alone. You just try to open a book. Just try to find some strength to open it.
Still, I am a 'human' and a 'girl'. No matter how I try to forget about it and feel irritated by it, it's true. So, sometimes I get tired, too. Can I read 'your' letters in such times? Can I depend on your kind words? Can I believe them?
I was scared, but I tried to dip my feet into a sea with no bottom. Hahaha, it was surprisingly shallow. And it was very warm. You cried 'I don't want 'Jeanne' to end'. Thanks to your warm tears, the ice in my heart melted for the first time. Thank you.
Arina T. 2000.6.28

нет ничего лучше утренней уборки. особенно, когда из-за пыли и сухости каждое прикосновение к мышке приводит к маленькому фейерверку

Увидела, что тумбочка, оказывается, не приделана намертво к столу, а просто входит с ним в копмлект, имея при этом собственные колесики. Отодвинула, повернула, вытерла сбоку и сзади. Кажется, жить стало чуть-чуть легче.

'Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne' anime ~ being uncute is fine with me

Generally, it's your average mahou shoujo with a heroine who transforms into a magical warrior and fights evil. That's why some people would only give it 6 out of 10. However, this is the classics. This is a 'must see'. That's why other people would give it 10.

story and characters

After I said it's typical, there seems nothing more to add. You don't need to think hard to get an idea of what it's like. There is your usual Heroine, with a strong will and psychological trauma, her friend, no less positive in everyday life but vulnerable and cute too, the Hero - cool and daring at first but gradually falling in love with the Heroine and becoming softer, and the Enemy, in the person of a 'knight of sorrow' with a  dark and tragic past, small vicious girl and betraying friend. Nothing new and nothing special. This is how it looks now. However, it was the year of 1999, the peak of the genre.

And still, being classic, 'Jeanne' doesn't fall into mediocrity.

In comparison with anime series that only try to attract customers by popular seiyuus and cute faces of little girls, 'Jeanne' offers a good story with understandable reasons driving the characters to their goals, and presents their troubles and their happy times in a way that moves the viewers' hearts.

Someone said that the characters in 'hapimari' were facing some real sh*t unlike trivial problems that school students have, like small lovers' quarrels etc. If I were asked what touched me more - 'grown-up' troubles of Chiwa and Hokuto in 'hapimari' or 'childish' problems of Maron and her friends in 'Jeanne'... guess what I'll choose?
The Heroine suddenly realises that  the glory of winning the competition and the audience's loud applause are nothing to her if the guy she likes is trying to console the girl who lost. Is this trivial? Or is this serious? Everyone decides for himself, but for me it's all about how the authors depict the problems that characters face and the characters' attitudes, moods and feelings. It might be a trivial matter in essence, but it's all about how it's shown.

I cannot insist there are no bad points in 'Jeanne', though. The story gets a little (very much, some would say, I guess) dragged in the middle, that is if you have enough patience to watch the beginning, of course, because the pace is really slow. In other words, if the initial episodes were good as an introduction, by episode #20-something one gets tired of this long row of short stories of how Jeanne meets new people, finds a demon, transforms and defeats it every single episode with less development on the part of the main characters. For this reason the anime really looks like it was created for younger girls than those who are close to the age of the Heroine.

However I had enough free time, and enough patience. And by the way, you don't always want to watch a psychological drama in the evening when you come home from work. Some mahou shoujo adventures is just right.

The reason is that even though the series became longer than the original (no way a 7-volume comic would be made into 44 episodes without any new episodes written specially), even though the story was repetitive, it also allowed the authors to pay much more attention to minor characters such as the family and friends of the main characters, their classmates, teachers, etc. Some of them were weird people too. Like a police officer in disguise

or a very determined gymnastics coach

music
It was around 2004 or 2005. The mp3 player I received from my father was my first player after a cassette one. Internet connection quality was still measured by speed - it was before the age when you could download a limited volume of information with an unlimited speed, to say nothing of the current system when you download unlimited volume of information with a not-so-limited speed. And the speed we had in our home was still 256. Music wasn't something to lay your hands onto just by googling. Japanese bands and performers seemed all great and so special. Then my friend meets me and gives me a copy of a CD with a small collection of Japanese songs that had been popular a few years before. Ayumi Hamasaki, Aiko, Day After Tomorrow, Chemistry, Lareine, Rina Aiuchi... Those names became sacred to me because I had nothing else to compare with.
Track #14 on that CD - Shazna's 'Piece of Love'. What a strange name, I thought. It wasn't particularly my favourite, because I thought it to be too bright, but after I listened to it several times, I realised I liked the song very much for its clear and sunny mood. What color was it? It has always been light-green for me.
Even though its bitrate was only 20 kbps.
I could not simply ignore that it's used in 'Jeanne', so I'd say I'm happy to hear it as an opening theme here, and I find it proper.
The rest of OPED themes weren't as enjoyable, but certainly complicated the general attitude of the series.
The OST was never released as a CD, so I was pretty sad about that, some melodies were really good. The characters' image songs are also very good. Of course it's not that the songs are extremely original or introduce something new, but I do believe that image songs in 90s and early 00s were much more serious, if I can say so. They were written seriously, not just to let the seiyuu pronounce some words into the mic.

graphics
It's common to draw characters close to how they look in manga, if there is one. Isn't it? At least it was 15 years ago. And I liked it. Though not a complete copy, the anime series where characters were made to resemble the mangaka's style somehow really do feel 'handmade', feel like they were created with love and care.
The backgrounds were usually plain but bright-coloured

 The characters were of average coolness

Sometimes the animators had to insert strange tricks to show what was necessary

I'd like to note the overall design of Jeanne, her transformation and attacks was... if not Sailormoon-ish, then typical-mahou-shoujo-ish. It's actually interesting how all the story is based on the legend of Jeanne D'Arc with all those European attributes, but Jeanne's uniform uses native Japanese shinto-associated elements.

voice acting
The strangest thing that apart from Nishihara Kumiko, whom I knew from 'Sakura Taisen', and Kuwashima Houko, whom I remember voicing a completely different heroine in 'Noir', I knew nobody in 'Jeanne'. Chiba Susumu's name sounds familiar to me but it's not that I remember any of his roles in particular, but he did a great job voicing Chiaki. The greatest discovery was Matsui Naoko, voicing not only Maron's friend Miyako but also their teacher, which I did not realise until the second before the last but one episode, when Miyako's intonations changes together with her personality and some notes in her voice started to resemble the manner of speaking of ms Pakkyalamao.
The biggest surprise was, however, when I listened to the image songs CD and saw that the second song in the list just after the main Heroine's one is not that of her Hero, but of her classmate... The order of songs was not usual at all, but I was really surprised to hear that Takahashi Naozumi is really good at singing. It feels like I've started to forget that most seiyuus were pretty good singers those times.

conclusion
It's a story about young but strong people. And it's a very romantic story. As you see

'Happy marriage' ~ when there's everything you want but something's missing

story and characters

The problem is as follows: I love it when the characters are bound to be together, especially when it's because of marriage, and their feelings start to develop only after that. Moreover, it's a josei, so the heroine is not the shoujo-manga 16-year-old-innocent-maiden, and the guy isn't a high schooler, and the relationship is more mature - at least it should be. Still, in fact, we get all those parameters right except for one thing - it didn't differ that much from shoujo in terms of maturity of the story. What we have here is a cool guy, in both senses of this word, and your usual emotional miss clumsy who's struggling to get him while in fact he's all hers already.
I mean, seriously. A guy who does nothing but repeat to her that she's his. And a girl who does nothing but trust him and then distrust him. All that because they both can't open to each other.
Oh, now that I put it this short it doesn't sound that bad, huh? Then, what's the reason?
Well... Maybe the reason is that there weren't any moments that make your heart skip a bit. Like, when you finally see a romantic scene it has to be a great pleasure to read it, but then you read it and don't get what you came for. And that there weren't moments that make your heart break because of sympathy. Because the actions of the characters were so unnatural that you couldn't really believe it happened that way. Because the characters were made of soap which changes its shape when you pour hot water on it. Because I simply dislike it when a heroine is lying on her bed in tears and just a few pages later she's eating supper merrily with the one that made her suffer as if the problem was solved by just one more 'no you can't go away from me'.
By the middle of the manga they finally manage to do IT, and I was probably supposed to be very happy, but I couldn't really understand how a 4-volume-long problem could be solved by a single phrase of the heroine, and why all her previous phrases were not enough. There is but one reason I can imagine - it's 'Hapimari', it's not 'Darling wa namamono ni tsuki' to have the characters do it in the second chapter. The latter made the readers enjoy every, every single chapter. The former was only keeping its readers by making them wait for IT to come.
THEN comes the second part of the manga. It's the time when the author has to use all her wits to create situations which would make the readers not_drop reading.
And the main object of the readers expectations is, of course, the white wedding dress. So we'll let them divorce not because it really was the only option, but because we need a chapter to show the heroine finally wearing IT and the characters finally have a proper wedding ceremony.

In the end, I'll tell you how it looks to me - it's a story about a typical Japanese family with a hard-working husband, clever and able, not coming home before midnight, but instead, having hard times dealing with the world of feelings and emotions; and a tender wife caring about him and waiting for him, though probably there's a difference from the usual picture that she's not a full-time housewife. In vol. 6 one of the Hero's female acquaintances utters an important phrase. 'What's with her? Does she think that if she cries a guy will come and save her?' I couldn't but agree. It's strange that the author even understands how her heroine looks in the eyes of other people, and still she perseveres with this type of a heroine. A heroine who doesn't have to actually do her best. She only needs to show that she's willing to. And occasionally develop good relationships and acquaintances.

That's how it should be in the eyes of the Japanese society. That's appropriate. That's welcome.

Graphics

There are mangakas who draw the readers' attention by their beautiful design, or colouring, or style. And there are those who don't. I have my favourites among both of them. And it just happens so that miss Enjoji captured my heart neither by the story, nor by art.

Conclusion

I was only going to let myself indulge in a romance for grown-ups, because when you're the same age as the heroine of josei you feel like you can possibly relate to her. Unfortunately, this manga didn't let me feel any pleasure, even if it was supposed to be a guilty one.
The manga definitely made me want to go and plunge into some very plain, naive shoujo, which I considered to be tired of when deciding to read josei instead.