It’s often much easier to know whether a manga, or an anime based on a manga, is written by a man or a woman than it is to describe why, even when they’re generally action-oriented. It’s difficult to say that female mangakas tend to make ardent friendships central to their story and resolve tension with melodramatic speeches while men tend to focus on striving for a goal and solving problems with fights when you have, for example, Naruto and Sasuke’s deep friendship in a very male comic indeed (though it’s true that Naruto makes more concessions to its female fanbase than most shounen manga) on one hand and the dramatic fights of Rozen Maiden on the other.
But sometimes you get shows on very familiar turf that are a little bit different because of gender differences. Gakuen Alice is about a little girl who follows her best friend to a privileged school, only for it to turn out that all the children there have super-powers known as ‘Alices’. But while the premise is very X-men, the tone of the show turns out to be far more Harry Potter – and I mean before it got ‘dark’.
Pretty much every male character is waifish, pretty and sexually ambiguous. Girls tend to have crushes and get themselves into embarrassing situations that make them blush. There are darker themes, kidnappings and forced child labour, but really, the problems never seem very threatening, and there’s never much real sense of danger. Kids may be tied up and dumped in a warehouse one week, but soon after they’re happily watching boys cross-dress in school plays. (Now there’s something typical to female writers!) No combating galactic perils here, only threats to a way of life, and problems that can be resolved by having a tearful talk with the opponents. And of course, the show is cute, cute, cute, cute, cute!
The heroine of the piece is Mikan, an earnest little girl who isn’t too smart but who always tries hard, voiced by Ueda Kana (Yumi from Marimite, to whom Mikan bears some resemblance) with such a strong Osaka-ben accent that when she tries to speak English, she calls herself ‘House’! Mikan’s best friend is the spacey, rather cold Hotaru, voiced by Kugimiya Rie in a role very far from Alphonse Elric in Hagaren, which is amusing because Paku Romi voices Natsume, the dark, brooding boy with a painful past who of course starts to open up to kind-hearted Mikan, with a voice very similar to the one she used for Edward Elric. Natsume’s best friend is Ruka, who can talk to animals, and while the two are together with suspicious frequency, they might just both have a crush on Mikan. All these characters are adorable kids, with very cute character designs and archetypical anime personalities. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing incredibly gripping, but it’s very sweet and makes for compulsive viewing.
But it is undeniably girly, with a lot of cute and not much cool – and what cool there is neatly packaged into understandable categories. Which is fine, for a nice, light series. There’s nothing epic about Gakuen Alice – except for how long it took to get subtitled: I started watching this show in 2004 and the last eps were released yesterday!
(originally written 22.5.07)
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