Roving Thoughts archives

Made in Abyss passes the threshold and enters the unknown

(There are some spoilers here.)

"The Great Fault", Made in Abyss's ninth episode, is well known as anime-original content. Despite the stereotype that usually comes along with that, the episode is widely regarded as solid work that does important things with Riko's character and is simply enjoyable. You could quibble about the ending, where Reg is the one to make the climactic finish instead of Riko, but perhaps this was intended to be part of the point of the episode, to show that Riko could hand a fight to Reg when necessary and wouldn't insist on doing it all herself.

(I'm making an excuse for the show here. It's not flawless.)

It is my opinion that episode 9 is much more than this and that it shows that the show's creative staff fully understood what they were doing. Episode 9 does one very important but inobvious practical thing, which I'm putting in a sidebar at the end, but beyond that it carries a huge metaphorical and mythological charge that is the silent marker and foreshadowing of a phase change in Made in Abyss. This is because of just what Riko and Reg face and defeat at the end of the episode. What they face down and see off is not just any monster of the Abyss; it is the initial monster that Riko and Reg faced, the crimson splitjaw from the very start of their adventure together.

This crimson splitjaw is the gauntlet that has haunted and dogged Riko and Reg from the first episode onward; it was unfinished business from the past. In defeating it, they pass beyond the threshold of the past and enter the unknown, moving on into a new world. The crimson splitjaw was a lingering remnant of their old life that started in Orth, and now they're beyond it.

(Yes, this is a very Campbellian view of things.)

As people who have watched Made in Abyss know, episode 10 will go on to make this change very concrete.

In short, episode 9 primes us for episode 10, not in an obvious way but in a subtle, indirect one. I think it's deliberately designed to do so, since the staff of the anime adoption specifically brought back that crimson splitjaw, not just any monster and not even a generic crimson splitjaw (if they didn't want to design another type of monster). As a result, I like this episode quite a lot.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: The important practical thing episode 9 covers

Episode 9 contains Riko's first serious encounter with the Curse of ascending in the deeps of the Abyss, and illustrates how hard and wrenching it is even in the third layer. This serves as an important lead in to the ascent she goes through in the fourth layer during episode 10, and means that the major impact of the Curse there doesn't come out of more or less nowhere.

(Being told about the Curse in exposition with semi-cute pictures isn't the same thing as having seen it in action the previous episode. The latter primes us much more; it's more visceral and real, especially with how Riko's hallucinations went.)

Rearrangements from manga to anime and how they alter the feel of the show

This year I watched a number of shows where I've also read the manga version (either before or after the show aired). One of the interesting things I noticed about the anime versions is how they rearranged and adjusted early elements of the manga, and how this changed the feel of the story being told from one media to the other. To make this concrete, I'm going to talk about three shows (and there will be some spoilers).

The most straightforward to talk about is Land of the Lustrous. As part of an interview available on Sakugablog, director Takahiko Kyougoku explicitly discussed how some manga elements were restructured to give us more focus on the main character so we'd know who it was:

To go into more detail, we took steps like giving the main character more close-up shots, or having them intentionally repeat important lines. It may not seem like much, but when you watch it, you can tell which character had the most presence and what their goals are. [...]

What doesn't get mentioned in this interview is that the anime also completely omits a big infodump that happens within the first few pages of the manga, when Kongo tells Phos to recite the history of the setting as the gems have been taught it; this exposition includes both information we only heard later in the show and some that we still haven't. This leads to a restructuring of the conversation between Kongo and Phos where Kongo gives Phos their job.

Next is Made in Abyss. As mentioned in this interview with the mangaka and the director, the early portions of the show are revised from the manga for various reasons (including that the mangaka explicitly asked for the first part of the story to be 'brushed up'). As in Land of the Lustrous, the MiA manga starts with an infodump about the nature of the Abyss. It then goes in to a relatively long lead-in sequence before Riko and her classmates head into the shallow end of the first layer of the Abyss as part of their training, which is where the first episode of the anime starts.

In Made in Abyss, the change from the manga to the anime does more than cut out some material and tighten the story up; to a certain extent it changes our view of Riko's character. The manga opens with Riko boasting and making wild theories up, then her classmates cutting her down to size and being dismissive, and it goes on somewhat in this line. In the anime, we pretty much start with the heroic and active Riko who throws herself into the line of danger in order to save a classmate from an unexpected menace. Manga Riko comes across as someone with rather more significant feet of clay than the anime version, someone who somewhat stumbles into things rather than throws herself bravely in.

(As a result of this shift from the manga to the anime, I'm glad I saw the anime first before I peeked at the manga. Manga Riko is a somewhat less attractive character than anime Riko, since some of her flaws are more front and center and more emphasized.)

The rearrangements in both of these shows have been made primarily for structural reasons; they've been done to show us who to focus on and tighten up the story, partly because what works and is seen as necessary in manga doesn't necessarily work in anime. Their effects on the story itself are secondary or incidental, although I suspect that at least Made in Abyss is conscious of them. This brings me to my final example, The Ancient Magus' Bride.

In The Ancient Magus' Bride, unlike the first two works, the rearrangement isn't in the form of chopping out early manga material; instead it's the other way around. The manga version of AMB starts with a very cold open, where the first panel is Chise on stage in chains, being auctioned off as an implied slave. Only somewhat later do we find out that Chise had more or less voluntarily put herself in this situation instead of committing suicide. In the anime, the show opens with Chise explicitly agreeing to all of this; it is immediately front and center both that Chise is in an extremely nihilistic and bad mental space and that this is voluntary on her part. The story effect is to remove a certain amount of the initial shock from the manga and tone things down and make them nicer in general. More is explicit and explained, and as a result the whole affair comes across as more sad and less shocking and horrifying, at least to me.

With that said, I suspect that part of the rearrangement was driven by the structural mechanics of storytelling in manga versus anime. The manga version of Ancient Magus' Bride gives us the background of Chise's situation in a series of flashback panels that are intercut when present-day dialog and events trigger Chise's traumatic memories. This fluid intercutting between past and present is harder and less natural to do in an anime, and also not as clear. With manga's variable-speed pacing, readers can slow down to take in the flashback panels; what's going on is clear to us even though the panels themselves don't take up much room in the manga's first chapter (probably about a page and a half in total, spread across several separate flashbacks and specific incidents in Chise's past). I'm pretty confident that a good direct translation into animated form would take a lot more time, and so doing the whole background as a more or less linear sequence at the start of the first episode takes up less time and may well be clearer.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)