This Week in Anime

Back From Far Away

Sylvia
Chris, I don't know if you've heard, but there is a light o'er yon horizon. After years and years of our complaints, gripes, and quips, the overlords at Kadokawa have finally deigned to admit that they might have gone a little too hard on the whole isekai thing. They dun goofed. They relied on Truck-kun's generosity one too many times. We are so close to being free. Like a great weight being lifted off my shoulders.

Yet...what if the problem was never isekai in the first place? What if there were a different way the genre could have taken? A different world we might have traversed, with different priorities and different storytelling capabilities? And what if we did a column on a bunch of those right now?

It's funny. I always held the idea in abstract that isekai was more or less originally a shoujo thing. Heck, my first isekai anime was Escaflowne way back in the day, and it is very easy to differentiate that series' influences from our more modern descendants of Sword Art Online and Mushoku Tensei. But I don't think I ever appreciated how many different shoujo (or otherwise girl-targeted) isekai existed, especially around the 1990s.

In fact, one reason we might be currently seeing a resurgence of shoujo isekai is that time gap, which is long enough to foster a sense of nostalgia. After all, another series expected later this year is a remake of Magic Knight Rayearth, a show that is, to me, about as '90s as it gets.

God, the immediate onslaught of chibi zapped me right back to my Anime Web Turnpike days. How could we as a society have turned our backs on this? Also, another thing that quickly struck me about Rayearth is how distinctive and evocative the character and creature designs are. Like, yes, comparing most anime/manga on that front to CLAMP is not going to be a favorable mashup for them, but so many modern isekai adaptations seem to lack any sauce whatsoever. Rayearth even makes the big ugly mud monster look somehow cool.

Unfortunately, I am also weak for girls with terrible personalities who fence.

But yeah, fundamentally, Rayearth just has the, well, fundamentals—those of a more traditional kind than the set of tropes that bled into Narou isekai. So even though Rayearth's appeal doesn't quite skew to my current tastes, I can still appreciate its appeal much more readily. And I'm interested in seeing what the new adaptation might bring to the table. I hope it knows it has big shoes (and small chibis) to fill.

Hmm, making Umi even worse. Something very important to consider indeed. And for the record, I am pro-meandering. The anti-"filler" propaganda of the last two or three decades has done tremendous damage to the artform, if you ask me. But that might be a topic for another time.

For now, as you mentioned earlier, we not only have a Rayearth reboot, but we have two forthcoming adaptations of two shoujo isekai manga that have never gotten the anime treatment before. The first of those is From Far Away, which foregoes Truck-kun for the far more compact Bomb-in-a-Paper-Bag-kun.

Bigger, buggier problems.

Seriously, I like how much peril the story throws at Noriko right away. From Far Away does not mess around. There's no leisurely pulling up of a status screen and allocating her new stat points. She has to worry about the big worm.

I agree! And I understand why most authors would handwave the problem away—their interests likely lie elsewhere—but in From Far Away especially, it enriches the narrative and forms a basis for the beginning of Noriko and Izark's relationship. It's an interesting challenge for a writer, and I'm glad to see Hikawa tackle it fearlessly.

Friction is what makes a story interesting! I think there's a temptation in a lot of people to oversimplify shoujo as nothing but fluffy romances, and that couldn't be further from the truth. Sure, we get a flowery page of Noriko going doki-doki for Izark, but we have to weigh that against Izark solemnly contemplating whether he might need to kill this strange girl who can't even understand him.

She probably has strong opinions on the adaptational choices/differences across Lynch's 1984 film and Villeneuve's take, yes.

Anyway, I'm very impressed by the first volume of the manga. I want to read more, and I want to see what the anime does with the material. The adaptation's announcement seemed very random to me at the time—I hadn't even heard of the series at that point—but now I know I was missing out.

Portrait of every writer in this column when the seasonal sampler comes around.

Whereas From Far Away takes its isekai interests to the realm of far-flung fantasy, Red River reins itself into more of a time travel situation, with its heroine Yuri getting dragged back about 3000 years to the heyday of the Hittite Empire. Which, in itself, sets it apart from every other isekai I can think of off the top of my head. There aren't many manga that double as an historical survey of Anatolian antiquity.

More like pulled through it. Because of all the hands.

But yeah, they want her ass dead in Hattusa. Like super dead.

If anything, it guarantees the exact opposite! That's what fiction is for, after all. It's a controlled space to indulge, interrogate, and otherwise explore stuff that might feel unsavory or weird in real life. Our world puts young girls through the wringer as it is, so transplanting these feelings into a more fantastical setting constitutes both commentary and a kind of escapism. And I may be biased, but this kind of escapism interests me far more than the straightforward power fantasies of many modern isekai. A series like Red River balances danger and titillation deftly. Which is to say, even Yuri's savior manhandles her throughout the entire first volume.

Ditto! And again, pretty darn cool that it's going to air in proximity to From Far Away and Magic Knight Rayearth. Between those three series, we already see a lot of the variety that shoujo sensibilities impart on the isekai premise.

However, that's hardly the extent of shoujo isekai. There's a lot more. Our aforementioned Shoujo Sensei Rebecca pointed us towards Ouke no Monshou as a probable origin point—a manga that started in 1976 and still hasn't wrapped up 50 years later. That's half a century! 70 volumes and counting!

As a point of curiosity, it has "technically" received an anime adaptation, in that they made an OVA for the manga's 20th anniversary, although it's more of a collage of colored manga art mixed with various effects and live-action footage with a voiceover summarizing the story. So not really a normal anime adaptation. But it does have music from Joe Hisaishi! If you look it up on YouTube, you might even find a Laserdisc rip of it broken up into four videos.

Also, I apologize in advance, but the demons inside me are forcing me to post this image underneath that one.

Fushigi Yugi translates to "mysterious game," but nothing is more mysterious than an unadulterated McDonald's logo in an anime series.

I had pretty much the same experience. It felt ubiquitous at the time, but I just never checked it out. And oh my god, the first episode throws a truly gargantuan pile of spaghetti at the wall: Miaka and Yui's parallel stories and metanarrative, those wrestling moves, slave traders and threats of sexual assault, hamburgers, phoenixes, ancient China, intimidation through vaccination scars, and much more.

It's bonkers, and I love it.

Hooray for the bare minimum!

Well, with Nuriko...it's complicated. Many such cases.

That's right, Fushigi Yugi has a heaping helping of Gender as well! Nuriko switches between female and male presentations. The emperor appears disguised as a woman in the second episode. Gender for everybody!

This is '90s Gender, of course, so it lacks some of the, ah, sensitivity one might expect from a more modern series. But it's also worth noting that mangaka Yuu Watase has since come out as X-gender, so I don't believe she was approaching these characters from an inauthentic or thoughtless place.

I also really like the metanarrative aspect, with Yui following Miaka's exploits through the magic book in the library. She even shares Miaka's wounds through a psychic link. It's a neat approach to isekai, explicitly linking the real and other worlds, that I don't believe I've seen done before in the same way—at least not in manga/anime. And if you'll allow me this one indulgence: more like Fushigi Yuri.

It's normal for girls.

Ah, Escaflowne. I remember watching the first couple of episodes on VHS in my high school girlfriend's basement. A foundational series. One of the best OPs in anime. The best noses in anime. The list goes on.

We've sadly forgotten as an industry how much room a two-cours original series provides for important narrative, tonal, and thematic explorations. Escaflowne is an incredible ride start-to-finish. An adventure brimming with more ideas and creativity than an entire year's slate of isekai here in the 2020s. It's got cat girls, mecha swordfighting, Gender, Sir Isaac Newton. Something for everybody.

It's one of the anime that made me fall in love with anime. An isekai for the girls. Better things are always possible.

We should also mention The Twelve Kingdoms, which, while technically not "shoujo," is a series of '90s fantasy novels adapted into a 2002 anime. It counts. Plus, it's another I'd heard of but never watched, and wow, I immediately loved the premiere episode. It's very dour and moody in a way that speaks to me, focusing (like Escaflowne) on Yoko's life in the real world before the isekai shenanigans pop up, except (unlike Escaflowne) her life sucks big time. Another several points in the awesome critter design column, too.

It's still around, too! Seven Seas is right now in the middle of localizing the novels, if reading is more your vibe. You might even see them in your local bookshop. Clearly, as one mode of isekai is in decline, this other mode is gaining traction again. Maybe temporarily. Maybe for the long term. But it's happening.

Bring it on.