Philosophy dabbler. Anime hotshot.
Written when the first episode aired.
Warning: lots of images ahead.
The first episode made me laugh. Right from the opening.
If you watch the anime first, then go back to the original manga, you will probably be quite surprised. Why?
Although the anime and manga have essentially the same plot, what they convey through their presentation is entirely different.
What does that mean? Let’s take a very simple example.
These shots show the first appearance of Shinako Morinome, one of the female leads, in episode one. The impression she gives is of an easygoing, attractive, cheerful woman. In the manga, though, Shinako makes her first appearance like this:
Doesn’t she seem like a completely different person?
When I first read this page, I thought Shinako and Haru might have some serious conflict the protagonist knew nothing about. I even wondered whether there was a bitter feud between them. The anime raises no such question: beside the manga’s sense of mystery, the anime’s expressive depth is flattened into a single plane.
Let’s look a little more closely. The comparison shows that Shinako’s eyes in the anime character design are very round, giving them a spherical appearance, and the larger pupils make her look cuter. In the manga, her eyes are longer and narrower, with slightly downturned corners. Her eyebrows are noticeably lighter in the anime, while in the manga they sit much closer to her eyes. Then there is one of Kei Toume’s distinctive touches: the thick lines of the lower eyelids, which are much less prominent in the anime. These changes in character design transform someone who originally looks reserved, aloof, and mysterious into a brighter, livelier figure. This was probably intended to fit the manga’s later tone.
That tonal change is not confined to character design. It is the central strategy of the entire first episode.
Let’s begin with the more obvious changes in content.
First, moral sensibility.
In the anime, when Haru—who should be about high-school age—asks him for a cigarette, the protagonist chokes on his smoke in obvious surprise. He does not give her one, of course. In the manga, although he makes a token inquiry, he hands over a cigarette almost without hesitation. When they meet again in the park, Haru still does not smoke in the anime. The manga, meanwhile, simply leaves out the handover and shows her smoking with the protagonist. Smoking is a form of social exchange: by smoking together, Haru and the protagonist share a physical and psychological space. Both characters in the manga also have an air of listlessness and decline, which fits some of the associations of smoking. The anime chooses not to portray this aspect of their temperament.
Many people will surely feel that a change on this scale could simply be a matter of broadcasting standards. Of course, the anime’s changes go further than that—
At the very beginning of the manga, the protagonist wakes to find his gas cut off. We subsequently learn that this is not the first time, and that he always waits until it has been disconnected before doing anything about it. When his buddy visits, Toume carries this thread forward: unable to make a hot drink without gas, the protagonist serves him a glass of cold water. Rent, water, gas—he is so short of money that he cannot afford any of them, to the point of eyeing the convenience store’s donation box. Nor is he the only one who behaves this way. Later, we see a senior coworker at his part-time job inspecting the box. The protagonist feels a pang of unease, only to discover that his coworker, too, steals money from it. Even Haru, one of the female leads, is no exception. Although she later returns it, she has little compunction about stealing nail polish from the convenience store.
Underage smoking and petty theft: the manga’s characters quite readily engage in misconduct that violates social norms. The anime removes these threads altogether.
But why is the manga like this? Because in 1998, when Toume was creating Sing “Yesterday” for Me, Japan was in the recession that followed the bursting of its economic bubble. Countless businesses went bankrupt; plunging house prices, waves of layoffs, and the ensuing waves of violent crime and suicide brought one disaster after another. For young people living through that era, there was simply no way forward in sight. They no longer looked toward the wider world, but turned back into their own inner lives. These historical conditions not only caused social and ethical norms to break down; they also formed a constitutive precondition for the manga’s temperament—its lassitude, disorientation, stagnation, and lack of agency.
Many anime adaptations nowadays update their source material’s setting to the present. Some do it well; others create problems so absurd that you do not know whether to laugh or cry. When communications were far less developed than they are today, chance encounters, getting lost, and the misunderstandings and imaginings caused by poor communication were all easy to come by. Naturally, writers of the time made extensive use of them. But transplant those devices into the present, and suppose two people arrange to meet, only to miss each other through a series of coincidences. How are we to be persuaded that it makes sense for them to wear themselves out running all over the place, yet refuse to take a phone out of their pocket and make a call?
Sing “Yesterday” for Me presents precisely the opposite case. In the anime’s advance publicity, we were told that it would adhere strictly to the original’s period setting. The protagonists communicate by landline. From portable cassette players to CRT televisions, both plot props and set dressing deliberately draw on the era’s signature objects. Yet the anime’s creators have quite deliberately changed its temperament. This is by no means a simple alteration of the plot. In extraordinarily fine detail, it replaces the manga’s underlying tone.
Now let’s turn to the protagonist’s actions.
In the scene where his buddy visits, the anime protagonist visibly freezes at the name “Shinako Morinome,” stopping what he is doing (Figure 12). When he learns that Shinako has returned to the area, the cigarette falls from his mouth. A rapid upward tilt, together with the expressive background behind him and the close-up framing, dramatizes his utter shock (Figure 13). His buddy notices the reaction and asks the fatal question: Did you two ever go out? The protagonist instantly goes limp, his head smacking down onto the table (Figure 14).
In the manga, we find something quite different. The protagonist is surprised and does drop his cigarette, but his reaction is not overly demonstrative. The panels simply narrate objectively, without exaggerating or emphasizing it (Figure 15). On the next page, he is also slumped over the table, but not as the result of a shock. Rather, the pose is a natural extension of his listless, relaxed posture as he recalls the past. Even when characters perform similar actions, subtle adjustments to the script and direction can change their meaning enormously, creating a completely different atmosphere and giving the characters entirely different dispositions.
And this is why I said the anime’s opening—to be precise, its first thirty seconds—made me laugh. Flip through the manga’s first few pages, then watch the anime again: I imagine you will notice the clear difference in emotional tone. First, as noted above, the disconnected gas and extreme financial hardship are gone. The anime’s opening does establish the clutter inside the protagonist’s home and the rubbish all over the floor (as well as his camera), but after that we see very little sign of his listlessness. Quite the opposite: brisk editing has him out the door in no time, followed by a clean, decisive close-up of him kicking up the bicycle’s stand (Figure 17, left). The transitional shot of the surroundings that follows includes a quick rack focus between foreground and background (Figure 17, right). Add the light, upbeat guitar music, and the whole sequence presents a morning full of vigor and life—nothing like the distancing, stagnation, and nonchalance the manga sets out to evoke.
When this adaptation strategy reaches the climactic sequence, the differences become even more pronounced—
Encouraged by his coworker, the protagonist finally resolves to stop running away and confess his feelings to Shinako. The climax is approaching: how will the creator present it? Director Yoshiyuki Fujiwara’s approach is to show us the decisive moment directly (Figure 18). The protagonist stops, turns quickly, and gets on his bicycle. As the camera follows him, the background recedes at an increasing speed, while detail shots show the effort he puts into pedaling. The visual rhythm builds, lifting our feelings along with his toward the final confession. In the manga, intriguingly, we are held apart from his psychological state in order to sustain the work’s cool tone, even as we hear his thoughts from different moments in time. After his coworker’s advice, the panels cut straight to another scene (Figure 20, second panel). The next panel shows us the result of his having made up his mind and acted, rather than the moment of decision shown in the anime. Through this narrative ellipsis, we are forced to keep our distance from his heightened emotions.
An even more obvious change comes after the failed confession. Although the protagonist speeds away on his bicycle in both versions, once he has fallen, the manga protagonist merely gazes at the sky and mutters to himself (Figure 21). In the anime, he actually shouts, “Goodbye, life!” (Figure 19). The shot construction supports the action: a quick cut first emphasizes the toss of his head, then the camera whips up into the sky—a camera movement Fujiwara uses over and over, apparently without tiring of it—to amplify the protagonist’s forcefulness.
By this point, I think we can sum things up. If the manga’s male lead is somewhat listless and dissolute, lacking agency and always reacting passively to changes in his surroundings, then the anime’s male lead is nothing short of a model young man in an inspirational drama.
After all that, someone is surely getting impatient: So do you think these changes are good or bad? And are you optimistic about the rest of the anime?
My view is that there is good and bad.
What is good about them? First, fans of the source will presumably see quite clearly what the staff are trying to do: these changes all serve to bring the adaptation into line with the manga’s later stages. Over the long serialization of Sing “Yesterday” for Me, the manga’s overall tone gradually changed. Given the anime’s length, broadcast time slot, and production requirements, it necessarily needs to establish a consistent tone across the work, and that consistency will naturally take the later material as its basis. So although the anime’s changes fundamentally alter what it expresses, they are all intended to make the work more consistent and coherent.
Second, judging by both the advance publicity and the finished first episode, the anime staff’s abilities inspire a fair amount of confidence. Fujiwara is a highly experienced director, and his work on this first episode does not fall below his usual standard. Jin Tanaka’s changes to the script also convince me that his claim to be a “fan of the source” is not empty talk (unlike a certain Tenshō, who pretends to be a fan of the original Rewrite but is really just a Kagari obsessive and a Rewrite hater).1 As the world’s number-one direction obsessive (self-appointed), I was actually most delighted by what I’ll discuss next. Now let’s see how the direction and script demonstrate both solid fundamentals and real depth of skill.
Because of its limited running time, the first episode repeatedly combines several manga scenes into one. The key is to fulfill their dramatic functions without making the result feel contrived. The first episode not only meets these basic requirements but enriches the anime with further detail. In the scene in Figure 22, the blond coworker hears that Haru went to karaoke and invites her to go with him. When she immediately agrees, however, he pauses, then scratches his neck. This detail is original to the anime, and it fleshes out his characterization: his casual invitation to Haru is not an invitation in the literal sense, but a conversational opener, a way of livening up a social exchange. Her immediate acceptance therefore takes him by surprise and leaves him a little at a loss. Meanwhile, precise staging within the shot guides the viewer’s attention naturally. As the conversation between Haru and the coworker draws to a close, the protagonist stands up, blocking the coworker from view. The narrative focus shifts with him; Haru turns to look at the protagonist and says that she came to see him.
Then the other female lead, Shinako, appears. In Figure 23, the frame cuts halfway through her eyes, both to emphasize the smile at the corners of her mouth on seeing the protagonist and to use off-center framing suggestively. In the next shot, her hand tightens slightly around the plastic bag: the same directorial thinking is at work, hinting at her inner state. We subsequently learn that the bag contains leftovers from the class reunion. Worried that the protagonist might not be eating properly, Shinako has brought them especially for him (and we know that his living conditions are indeed just as she imagines). This anime-original detail gives the character another facet and adds meaning and motivation to her behavior. The combined scene itself also gains a new dimension: the blond coworker’s envy, jealousy, and resentment. In the original manga, only the protagonist and Shinako are present. Combining the scenes makes the structure more three-dimensional and creates new meanings, extending the dramatic tension to a third person looking on.
Immediately afterward, the protagonist accepts Shinako’s invitation and heads to the restaurant. As noted earlier, the manga presents a stretch of reflection and recollection here (Figure 27), consistent with its emphasis on his private inner life. In the anime, the coworker’s presence makes a livelier scene possible (Figure 25). Shinako opens the door and leaves the convenience store; a tight match cut immediately takes us to the protagonist hastily putting on his jacket, showing how eager he is to spend time with her. The blond coworker comes over to ask who the beautiful woman is. The protagonist dodges the question with a casual goodbye, and after a brief transitional shot, we are already at the family restaurant (Figure 26). The passage that conveys his reflection and shyness in the manga has been replaced by clean, tightly paced dramatic construction and comedy.
Now for another point: the direction’s awareness of the setting’s expressive possibilities.
In the manga, Toume actually makes little deliberate expressive use of the settings. Whether in the convenience store, the family restaurant, or the streets at night, the setting merely supplies the objective information the narrative requires; it does little more for the staging. The atmosphere comes from the consistently cool, distancing treatment she maintains across these different environments.
In the anime’s first episode, by contrast, the direction makes as much expressive use of the settings as possible to build atmosphere. The nighttime walks are dark in the manga but brighter in the anime (Figure 30). The protagonist and Shinako stroll at night, but this is not a night that threatens or unsettles them. On the contrary, the direction clearly establishes the light sources and provides ample illumination (for the Japanese convention of overhead lighting, see Yang Tingmu’s article). It also deliberately places other pedestrians on the street. Their presence is certainly no coincidence: in the second nighttime sequence, we again see passersby clearly placed in the background (Figure 30, bottom left and bottom right). This is a way of creating the sense of a shared public environment.
Later, when the two arrive at Shinako’s home, the direction becomes subtler still (Figure 31). A streetlamp absent from the manga has been added to illuminate the scene (think about the expressive difference between this lamp, set at eye level, and the earlier lights shining down from high above). The compositing now gives the scene warmer light than before. With the streetlamp determining where the shadows fall, the light models the protagonist’s and Shinako’s faces, creating a somewhat pensive, romantic atmosphere.
Not every scene, though, is handled with sufficient assurance. When Shinako and Haru meet, the direction tries to raise the tension instantly, from the flashing red warning light to the use of the train as a light source and a means of applying pressure through both image and sound. Personally, I found all this rather distracting; it pulled me out of the scene. I actually laughed out loud while watching it. Trains are a very common directorial device in anime, and objectively speaking, the sequence’s technical quality is not poor. But the moment the plot gets tense, out pops a train. This makes the creators’ intentions far too obvious—so much so that even many of the viewers’ on-screen comments called it the “tactical train.”
Having discussed the strengths, let’s turn to the problems. They are quite simple. By now we have seen more than enough to understand the anime’s overall strategy, from script to direction: to turn the manga’s lassitude, distancing, and lack of agency into something more youthful, inspirational, and full of enthusiasm. The richer, more three-dimensional script and the direction’s energetic, clean, tightly paced execution all serve this ultimate purpose. As noted above, the transformation has value. At the same time, though, it erases a recurrent depth marked by negativity and suggestiveness in the original manga. The manga’s distanced reading becomes the anime’s engaged viewing.
This also produces a qualitative difference between the recollection sequences in the anime and manga. In the manga, memories are remote, unfamiliar, languid, held at a distance, and about to be lost. Toume deliberately encloses both dialogue and thoughts in rectangular text boxes rather than ordinary speech balloons. Together with the white backgrounds and elliptical fragments of impressions, these create emotional distance. In the anime, we do see black borders above and below the image, hatching, somewhat subdued colors, and even omitted movement and manga-like panel divisions. These devices in the storyboarding, color specification, and compositing signal the distance of memory, but they remain decorative: they are an aesthetic effect. The memories themselves are still remarkably vivid and scarcely faded, vividly present and within reach for both the audience and the protagonist. This is another key difference in expression between the manga’s lack of agency and the anime’s inspirational male lead, brimming with agency.
My conclusion about the anime’s changes, then, is that there is good and bad. For viewers who place greater value on the manga opening’s inexpressible atmosphere of mystery and expressive depth, the anime undoubtedly loses points. For the anime itself, however, both its coherence as a whole and its potential for aesthetic engagement have been fully realized. And I believe the quality of the episodes to come will not disappoint.
My first time writing a Zhihu answer. Turns out it really is exhausting…
One last recommendation. On how changes of period affect dramatic devices and a sense of romance, take a look at this highly upvoted article by @Tata-jun Minkun: zhuanlan.zhihu.com.