First of all, I shall review the anime, as it is shorter and therefore has less to talk about and because, I watched it much earlier than reading the manga, so I'll probably ramble less.... Heh.
Alrighty, here goes.
ANIME:
When I read the general plot for this anime, I seriously thought, "What the hell?"
Here is Wikipedia's (ah, Wiki, how I love you) summary of the plot:
When high school student Tohru Honda's mother died in a car accident, Tohru begins living in a tent and supporting herself. That is, until she finds a home in the least likely of places, inhabited by her classmate Yuki Sohma and his cousins Shigure and Kyo. The Sohmas however, live with a curse. Thirteen members of the family are possessed by spirits of the Chinese zodiac and turn into their zodiac animal when hugged by the opposite gender or when under stress. When Tohru discovers the Sohmas' secret, she promises not to tell and is allowed to keep living with them. The Sohma's curse, however, is deeper and darker than Tohru realized, but her presence soon becomes a large, positive influence on those possessed by the zodiac. She sets out to break the curse, and on the way, meets and discovers each of the Sohma's vengeful zodiac spirits. Each has a different personality, just like the animals in the Chinese Zodiac. Tohru's existence changes the Sohma clan's lives forever...
That pretty much sums it up well. Yeah, they turn into animals. Pretty cute animals too :P
Now, after watching the first episode I thought, "Holy cow, this is actually not completely spastic and actually really good!" and I have been hooked ever since. Now, it is quite a girly anime and is shown, over 90% of the time, from the perspective of Tohru Honda, as she is kind of like the narrator for a lot of it, sharing her thoughts with the audience.
Here is my review of Miss Honda...
At first, I found her pretty MEH. She is extremely nice. She is young, nice, non-judgemental, too trusting and generally pretty darn naive. She really does see the best in people, even when they are horrible to her. Seriously, if someone insults her for no good reason, she will assume that she did something wrong and will still try her hardest to make sure the other person is OK. This bored me at first but the more I watched the series, the more she seriously annoyed me. She is a very unrealistic character. Yes, there are nice, forgiving, naive people in the world, but no one as nice as her. She always apologises and goes out of her way to do anything for anyone else. I mean, she is constantly cooking and cleaning for Shigure, Yuki and Kyo. Yeah, that is kind of her payment for living with them, but still, she hardly ever takes a break, and she is too naive to notice that they would definitely let her have a break because two of them are in love with her. There was only one or two episodes when I really liked her and it was towards the end because she showed genuine emotion and it wasn't happiness; she was genuinely depressed. I liked seeing that because it showed she actually had a more normal human side to her.
Back to the general anime review.
I liked the fact that you got to know everyone Sohma family members stories, but sometimes it felt dragged out and slow. I liked the development of the characters and their personalities, especially Kyo, kinda Yuki (I hate him, but his character development was pretty good) and probably Hatori- all changed because of Tohru. I did like the importance of Tohru's friends, Uo and Hana, but I thought Uo needed a bit more, because, as the series went on, Hana was getting several moments where she expressed her love (in a friendy way) for Tohru, where Uo seemed less important and as though she cared less.
This series really does have a good balance of humour and drama. It is hilarious and fully cracks you up at times, but makes you cry at others.
Now, the last three episodes were some of the best anime I have ever seen. It kept me on the edge of my seat and made me cry several times. It was wonderful. Except for the very ending. Now, I am a huge, mega, uber TohruxKyo shipper and these last episodes provided for the best TxK moments EVER. I shall not give away any spoilers, but she seriously accepted him for who he was and he opened up and they had a lovely moment. I was extremely disappointed in the ending of the last episode, however. It ended with them all walking off, joking around as friends. The whole series had been showing the love triangle between Yuki, Kyo and Tohru and in the end there was no romance. This really ruined the end of the series for me.
At times it felt like things moved slowly and some parts were kind of boring, but it does depend on your opinions of each character. If you love a character, you'd obviously love an episode based around them and vise versa. Overall, I loved this anime to bits :D
MANGA:
The manga is very different to the anime. It is 136 chapters, and the anime is 26 episodes. The first 40 or so chapters are very similar, if not almost identical to the anime episodes, but after that it is completely different. Many things confused me while reading this manga. Firstly, it was the first manga I've ever read, so it took me ages to get the hang of "reading backwards". Secondly, I read some pretty awful translations that make it much harder to understand the plot...
I liked almost every character better in the manga over the anime. I still hated Yuki and Momiji (because, even though their lines were written, not said, I could still hear the annoying anime voices in my head.. *shudder*) but everyone was a lot more tolerable. Except Shigure. He was one of my favourites in the anime, but I quite disliked him in the manga. He was kinda mean and quite confusing. I never really understood his stance on anything and found him almost menacing as opposed to the light-hearted, larrikin he is in the anime. Tohru is over 100x better in the manga. At the start she is the same, but as the story progresses, she actually experiences normal emotions. She gets worried, upset, depressed and actually falls in love. I actually quite liked her in certain chapters.
There is a lot more visible character development in the manga, especially in Kyo. You can easily see him change from being short-tempered, impatient and kinda mean to be a generally nice person who doesn't yell all the time. This is, of course, because of lovely Miss Tohru, but I loved reading the moments with just the two of them talking and joking and flirting and being different people- both of them.
TVTropes gives this manga the trope "Tying Up Romantic Loose Ends" and I completely agree. Almost every character ended up with somebody and for many of them, it seemed it was just so they wouldn't be alone. Take Yuki for instance. He was in love with Tohru for most of the manga but randomly realised that he wasn't in love with her, he actually just thought of her as a mother figure. I thought this was a poorly thought through way of eliminating him from the love triangle, so that Kyo and Tohru could be together. Yuki meets a different girl and, eventually, they get together in the end. I actually quite liked his ship by the end, but I don't think there romance got enough attention until the end.
Hatori also falls victim to this trope. He has a tragic back story that made me cry... Several times...
He fell in love with his assistant. They got engaged. She didn't care that, if she hugged him, he'd turn into a seahorse (yeah, seahorse. Cause that's TOTALLY a dragon.....). They asked permission from the head of the family and he got angry and hit Hatori, blinding one of his eyes. His fiance got depressed because the head of the family said it was her fault. Hatori couldn't bear to see his beloved so upset so he erased her memory. She left being his assistant and married another man. It is very sad but, throughout the manga it is revealed that, some chick who I can't remember the name of, or her relation to anyone, is in love with him. He never shows any feelings towards her at all but, at the end of the manga, when everything is wrapping up, they are shown together alluding to their romance. I strongly disapproved of this. Hatori loved his first fiance, Kana and never showed feelings towards this other girl; their romance seemed very rushed. Many people may say, "Yes, but Hatori deserved to be happy." Now, I agree but I would have found it better if he could have found happiness through finding a way to accept his loss of Kana and moved on and been happy with that.
The student council. Zomg. Yuki becomes Student Council President and there are many chapters revolving around him and the rest of the student council. I hated these chapters. I found them unnecessary and confusing. I think it was too much to add so many new characters (they council had about... 6 people) when there are already around 17 characters already introduced. I could not keep up with the council characters and their various relationships. I usually skim read them because, apart from the YukixMachi romance that was kind of underlying sometimes, nothing very important happened in them.
Akito. Again. ZOMG. Akito is the head of the Sohma family. For the first 3/4 of the manga, you are under the impression that Akito is a man. Then it is revealed that he is actually a she :O
She is the "bad guy" in the series. Always yelling at everyone and hurting them and forbidding them to do what they want. I found her the most intriguing character of all. She made me cry many times. She was hated by her mother and has this insane fear of being alone. As she is "god", all the cursed family members have a bond or connection with her. She has an overwhelming fear of being left by them all and, in trying to keep them with her, actually drives almost all of them away. I found her story sad and, probably, the most interesting of all characters.
The romance in the manga is a million times more satisfying. Tohru and Kyo have an adorable romance. Kyo changes to be a better person because of her and I think she does change too. Kyo realises he loves her long before she has the epiphany and they finally get together in the end and move away. The last chapter was so bittersweet it made me cry. Somehow, I'm not really sure, the curse was broken. Akito said, "Goodbye" and everyone felt that they no longer had that crippling connection with her. About 75% of characters were getting together with someone and Kyo and Tohru were packing to move away. All Sohma members thought about how much they had changed and how much their lives had improved since they had met Tohru and, even though it was cheesy as hell, I felt so sad because I guess I had almost felt like I had lived with them because, I too, had seen the changes Tohru had made in them. Very good ending.
The one other thing that bugged me about the anime&manga was that the anime doesn't show all of the 13 cursed Sohmas. There were only two that they didn't introduce in the anime, one of which was very important and a really good character in the manga. I didn't like the other one and he was boring so whatever. Anyway, there were many boring, slow, confusing parts and several chapters that felt like "fillers", but overrall, I loved the manga. I think the ending was wonderful but many bits in the middle were not so great.
I do recommend this anime and manga to well, anyone. But, if you are to read the manga, find yourself a professionally done translation so you aren't all WTH like I was :D
I shall now leave you with some random images taken from the anime, because my manga pictures weren't in the right file :( :
Akito :)
From left to right from the top-
First row- Ayame, Ahigure, Hatori, Kureno
Second row- Hiro, Momiji, Kisa, Hatsuharu, Rin
Front Row- Isuzu, Yuki, Tohru, Kyo, Kagura
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