Saturday, August 14, 2010

Get ready to fall in love with a live-action "Koukou Debut (High School Debut)"

by Chris MaGee

There are some manga-to-screen adaptations that are pretty damn intriguing. Here's one that isn't. In the continued strip mining of Japanese comics a screen adaptation of Kazune Kawahara's shojo manga "Koukou Debut (High School Debut)" is in the works. Topkyograph is reporting that an adaptation of the manga, which ran in Bessatsu Margaret magazine from 2003 to 2008, has been green lit although no director has been attached yet and no release date has been scheduled.

Kawahara's original manga tells the story of a teenage girl named Haruna who goes from being a junior high tomboy obsessed with softball to a high schooler with only one thing on her mind - finding the right boy and falling in love! Excuse me. I think I just threw up a little. Haruna meets her Mr. Right, a high school senior who coaches her in softball and... wait for it... Yup, you guessed it - falling in love. Damn, give me Teruo Ishii's screen adaptation of Yoshiharu Tsuge's "Neji-Shiki" instead of this crap.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Oh no! How dare that terrible, inconsequential shojo manga upset your utterly refined aesthetic tastes! Really, it should be classified as a crime against humanity! Forget Charles Taylor; this is the real violation of human rights!

Keyword: shojo manga. Good Lord, what were you expecting? Do you know the reader base for this kind of work? Throwing up in one's mouth should be reserved for truly vile work, like nationalistic pro-war manga propaganda.

If it doesn't appeal to you, don't cover it. Obviously, this kind of thing doesn't appeal to your readership as well. So why bother? An excuse to be snarky and painfully unfunny? You're no more mature than the teenage girls who wallow in pages of Koukou Debut. And inserting an "ooh-avant-garde-manga-adaptation-alert" doesn't help things either.

Back to regular programming, please.