Why is it so hard to find a good shojo manga about music?
BB EXPLOSION (Hajikete Bi Bi). by Yasue Imai. First published in 1997 and first published in North America in 2004.
PLOT:
Airi is a small-town girl from Okinawa whose greatest joy is watching Boom Boom, a variety show featuring the star students of a local acting school. She gets her own chance at stardom when the school holds open auditions. Soon enough, Airi is working alongside some of the best students at the school and well on her way to becoming the star she always dreamed of becoming...so long as she can overcome her father's objections and her own doubts.
STORY:
There's nothing wrong with the sort of star-making story formula that BB Explosion follows. It's not a terribly original story idea, but this manga's take on it is perfectly functional. No, my biggest problem with this manga is that Imai doesn't seem to have any faith or strong interest in her own characters and she tries to substitute for this with cheap, disposable drama.
Truth be told, I have a hard time defining Airi as a character. She's kind of moody, I guess? She's vaguely spunky? We're certainly told that she's a song-and-dance wunderkind, although Imai's not so good at demonstrating that part. She's certainly friendly enough with the other kids, but Airi doesn't interact with them very much or in any sort of substantial way. Her friends are about as relevant to the plot as Cesar, the cutesy token mascot critter shisa that only a protagonist those with true talent can see, and he's mostly there for the sake of making bad jokes and inviting unflattering comparisons to Cardcaptor Sakura's Kero-chan. As you might guess, the rest of the cast fares no better than Airi. They are there not to be compelling characters in their own right but to serve one of two purposes: be Airi's boosters or opponents for Airi to win over because she's just that gosh-darn special.
Most of the plot thus far is about reaffirming Airi's specialness and how much people love her, to the point that it already feels kind of pandering. I would probably be a little less salty about it if these challenges weren't so petty or if any of them lasted more than a few pages. Sometimes all it takes to make Airi crumple is one off-handed bit of constructive criticism about needing to focus more on her performance, something that anyone learning a performance art is going to deal with at some point. Still, Imai could have gotten some good character building out of Airi grappling with the sadness or frustration she might feel from that. Alas, that was deemed too much for this manga's young audience (this did run in Ciao, after all), so the moment Airi starts to feel bad they are dismissed with a single speech about friendship or believing in one's self.
You'd think that having something like a disapproving parent would give BB Explosion a little bit of lingering drama, but not even that is allowed to bring things down for too long. It turns out that Airi's dad constant, almost irrational need to forbid Airi from doing anything at school comes from a misplaced fear of failure on her behalf, which just defangs the whole conflict. If Imai truly wanted to make a shojo manga about a star being born, she needed to give her heroine some real roadblocks. Instead all she can offer are dramatic pebbles, mild annoyances that are kicked away almost as soon as they appear.
ART:
Like a lot of shojo manga from Ciao (particularly in this era), the artwork here is very cute and gangly. All of the characters are these skinny little things with enormous, shining eyes and lovingly detailed (and now extremely dated) fashion. Imai's artstyle is rather flat and simple. Curiously, backgrounds are largely absent. Instead of highlighting the subtropical delights of Okinawa, she mostly uses boring, sparkly screentones.
RATING:
This series was published by Viz. This series is complete in Japan with 5 volumes available. All 5 volumes were released; the physical volumes are out of print, but all are available digitally.
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