I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

NARUTARU (a.k.a. SHADOW STAR)
Review, Part I

I don't usually download fansubs, but there's this new, yet-to-be-licensed-domestically, anime series in Japan that is just too tempting for me to resist. It's Narutaru, based on the manga by Mohiro Kitoh from Afternoon magazine (which also publishes two of my absolute favourite series, Aa! Megami-sama/Oh My Goddess! by Kosuke Fujishima and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Hitoshi Ashinano), which is published in English in Studio Proteus/Dark Horse's manga anthology magazine, Super Manga Blast as Shadow Star.

Narutaru starts off like a sweet story of a girl on the cusp of adolescence, but it gets very dark and very disturbing very quickly. One infamous sequence, in volume 6, is so shocking,both for graphic violence and its portrayal of juvenile sexuality, that the publisher of the French-language version of the manga, Gl�nat, pulled the plug on their translation when they found out about it, even though they had already published two volumes of it. Studio Proteus will publish it in English, but they'll get Mohiro Kitoh to redraw the sequence for North America so as to not run afoul of any local obscenity charges. So, I guess this is a rare instance of an American manga publisher taking a bigger risk with the same manga than the French publisher did, although one other compromise Studio Proteus has to make is covering up the vagina of the completely nude prepubescent Princess with markings consistent with those on the rest of her body, while Gl�nat left the artwork intact.

The story is about a 6th grade girl named Shiina Tamai that goes to visit her grandparents on a smaller Japanese island. One night, she has an unusual dream about a glowing girl who doesn't seem to like the name Shiina. The next day, she attempts to swim out to a Torii Gate several hundred metres out in a bay, but, when she gets there, she's pulled under by the current and thinks she spots something. That night, she returns to the beach and finds a star-shaped creature floating in the air. The creature, though completely mute, seems to want to be with her, and he can transform himself into a flying surfboard among other things. She names him Hoshimaru.

At this point, the story of the manga and anime differ slightly... in the manga, there's a storyline wherein Shiina's flying back to the main Japanese island of Honshu, but the plane is attacked by a sword-like thing, and two mysterious passengers (including a male that looks like a girl) disappear. Shiina's sucked out of the plane, but she is saved before she hits the water by a mysterious, floating "Virgin Princess", and is returned to the plane, which is damaged but can still land.

However, in the anime, I think they couldn't include that sequence since it would be a half-episode in and of itself and they wanted to tell the island part of the story in just 22 minutes rather than having it spill over into the next episode, leading to a somewhat disjointed second episode. Either that, or, since this is only a TV series, the midair attack would have been too expensive and time-consuming to animate properly. Anyhow, Shiina still sees the Princess, but floating above the water at the beach when she finds Hoshimaru.

The second episode pretty much exactly follows the manga, aside from there not being an investigation of what happened in the air, since nothing happened. Shiina meets a painfully shy, withdrawn 14 year old girl in her Kendo class called Akira Sakura, who, it turns out, has a "Shadow Star" of her own, which she calls "Ensoff" or "Ain Soph" (depending on whose translation you're watching/reading). Unlike Shiina, she has a direct mind-link with the creature which causes her no small degree of pain and constant agony as she feels everything it feels, and this torments her to the point of seriously considering suicide. A month prior, the mental link had been established when she was in the middle of class, experiencing falling from the sky and hitting the ground firsthand, causing her to vomit all over the place (though it seems she was the sort of girl that seems to be sick all the time, though...). Shiina's presence seems to make her just a tiny bit happier.

The third episode deals with their first confrontation, against Tomonori Komori, a weird boy with a bizarre taste in hats. In the manga, he pulled up besides a Cessna, in mid-air, using his "Shadow Dragon" called Push Dagger. He opens the door and comes in the plane and asks the incredulous pilot if he recognized a girls' face which one of the tendrils of the Push Dagger recreates, Abyss-style, and the pilot tells him it's Shiina Tamai, daughter of Shunji Tamai. After the pilot tells him that, Tomonori gets the sword-like Push Dagger (the same being which attacked the plane Shiina was in in the sequence that didn't make it to the anime) and there's a really neat drawing of the Cessna getting split in two right down the middle, which, I guess, would have been much too expensive to animate. In the anime, they have none of that, so Tomonori's just this mysterious kid that seems to be stalking them. He attacks them in the woods near the airport, sending the Push Dagger to deal with Shiina. However, he's seems interested in Akira, dreaming that they'd rebuild the world together, and she would be his queen. Tomonori actually has a radical "back to nature" agenda, doing away with electricity and running water... and about half the world's population, starting with doctors and intellectuals (just like the Khmer Rouge) as well as anyone who needs medical treatment to survive. Then he'd make the remaining population walk for long distances without food or water, and those who would be strong enough would be the survivors needed to start a new, agrarian society. He then leaves, to take care of Shiina. He pins Shiina to a tree with Push Dagger between her legs (in a rather sensitive spot that's bound to smart should she move nary an inch) but then makes the classic bad guy mistake of talking for way too long, giving time for Hoshimaru to show up... Tomonori lets her go see Hoshimaru for some reason. He seems surprised when she tells him that she's not linked mentally to Hoshimaru. He sends Push Dagger to slice Hoshimaru... only it's not Hoshimaru, it's Ein Soph in disguise, and, while Tomonori is distracted, the real Hoshimaru pulls out... a piece of metal from the incident in the air in the manga, while he materializes a clone of Push Dagger in the anime, and impales Tomonori. Shiina and Akira are safe... for now, but Shiina must live with the weight of having taken a life.

Ah... I'm still working on my summaries of episodes 4 and 5... I'll give that, and my thoughts on the series in general, tomorrow or whenever....

posted by Steve Brandon @ 6:59 AM