If you haven't heard, all the cool people either watch anime, read manga or both.When it comes to manga and anime, I'm going to have to side with manga being the greater of the two.Of course anime has some advantages.It does add a sort of dimension with music, movement, sound, and color. I especially love it when I can identify one voice actor for a character of an anime to a character in another anime.Yet, there is one fatal flaw in more than a handful of anime though: story.I can't stand to see a great manga plot ruined when converted to the screen.
While being converted from page to screen, some story lines get some serious tweaks.I guess you could even go so far as to compare my Manga vs Anime to a Book vs Movie/Show type of discussion.If you've read My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult and then watched the movie, you know what I mean.I don't see why they would have messed with the original story.I guess the movie people (technical term) think, "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is."Honestly, I thought the book was every shade of better and they missed a chance to tell a great story to a wider audience since more people watch television than read books.
In the case of manga and anime, Fullmetal Alchemist is an example of a story that got twisted.As one of the most popular anime shows, was actually made before the manga was even completed and does not follow the original story line of the manga (Fullmetal Alchemist originally aired on TV from 2003-2004 in Japan, but the manga was started in 2001 and didn't finish until 2010).Luckily for us, the anime was still a hit despite that last tidbit.The success led to the creation of , which is the anime version that actually does follow the manga's story line.I'm just going to flat out say it: I liked Brotherhood better and a lot of the fans did too.I'm willing to bet that's because the actual writer of the manga knows how to complete the story better than the anime people (again, technical term).
Then there are manga books likeorthat were adapted into anime and which remained true to their manga counterpart's stories.However, Naruto is currently at 64 volumes while Bleach is at 58 volumes and both are ongoing manga series.Nevertheless, they were made into anime, but instead of finishing up the story differently like Fullmetal Alchemist, a bunch of "filler" episodes were put in.Basically, some random episodes were put in between major arcs of the story until the manga could catch up.That's nice, but out of the 500 some episodes of Naruto and Naruto Shippuden, roughly 210 are filler.That's a lot of extra time for parts that aren't going to impact the story and quite frankly, fillers are not of a very high quality.I don't even watch fillers because they are so terrible.Truthfully, I am willing to wait for the good episodes and I think other people would as well so I don't see the point of fillers.
One of my favorite manga of all time, , was later converted to an anime.The story was virtually untouched and I couldn't have been happier with it.I'm willing to bet that the reason it turned well was because the manga was near finished before the anime was created. To give you an idea of how good it is, my mother who had never seen anime was immediately drawn into it.She used to sit up until midnight when she normally would go to bed at around 8 to watch it on Adult Swim of Cartoon Network. The live action films that were made were not very similar to the original story, but they were still decent enough so that if one couldn't stomach reading the manga or watching the anime, one could still get a good story out of the movies.Just heed my warning: the first two films are good, but don't watch the third one as it isn't pertinent to the story and it was an utter abomination.I just don't understand why anyone felt the need to create that third film, it was like a kick in the shins, a slap in the face, and a punch to the gut all at once.
While I still watch anime, I prefer manga.Anime is nice if I want to see my favorite characters "come to life", but story is still number one in my book.Story is the most important part of entertainment and not the vessel it comes through. Anime creators seem to have a tendency to toy with good stories too often and usually very poorly (there are just so many fillers).Manga trumps anime as a better story conduit.
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