Review: RIZELMINE

Don't think we're ignoring shonen romance, as here's a wretched little one-shot example from the creator of D.N. Angel.

RIZELMINE (Rizerumain), by Yukiru Sugisaki.  First published in 2001 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Tomonori Iwaki is having a very bad day.  It began when he learned that the teacher he's been crushing on is getting married.  It only got worse when he came home, only to find a tiny, obnoxious little girl named Rizel claiming to be his wife.  Rizel is a secret government experiment, a being who needs to learn about love to further her development, and her "dads" (who are totally not government spooks) easily bribe convince his parents to go along with it.  Rizel loves her new husband, but Tomonori wants nothing to do with her and his rejections come with explosive results.  Things only get more chaotic from there, as some of Tomonori's classmates, an American-made knockoff of Rizel, and a coma threaten to part the unwitting couple.

STORY:

Have you ever read a manga that feels like it should be a parody?  It has the sort of manic comic energy that in theory should be funny, but there's no point to beyond wackiness so it just becomes nothing but a pile of fatuous, annoying noise?  That's the Rizelmine experience.

Maybe that's just my brain trying to cope with Rizel herself.  She's childish, naive to the point of ignorance about everything, focused entirely on domestic duties, and hopelessly chipper even when Tomonori is shoving her into a closet or punching her into the sky Team Rocket-style.  She feels like a parody not just of the magical girlfriends that were littered across anime and manga at the time, but also the moe girls that were just starting to come into vogue.  She's meant to be cute but everything about her is so overdone that she just comes off as pathetic.  It's almost enough to make you sympathize with Tomonori's annoyance with her...almost.

Tomonori himself is also pretty obnoxious.  He's a sullen little brat who thinks he's more mature than his classmates, which is why he's so fixated on crushing on an adult woman.  He spends the entire book pouting over this...at least, when he's not being awful to Rizel.  While I can understand his frustration with her and having this whole, silly situation forced upon him, there's a cruelty to his responses that punctures his attempts at gender-flipped Love Hina-style slapstick.  There's some attempts to introduce other classmates as rival love interest for them both, but none of them make much of an impression.  Sugisaki gets a little more comic material out of Rizel's dads, but not much more.  The whole thing is meant to be zany and high-energy, but without any good jokes to land and such a hateful lead couple that zaniness feels irritating and forced.  Not even the translation, an early work by the Nibley sisters, is enough to save it.

It's clear that Rizelmine did not do well in its original run, which is why its ending is both so sudden and so bad.  Rizel tries to age herself up to please Tomonori, only to end up in a coma that only Tomonori can get her out of.  There are out-of-nowhere revelations and a bit of time-loop weirdness.  It's a bizarrely serious, maudlin turn that comes out of nowhere before the day is saved and the status quo button is pressed once more.  This ending was clearly rushed out the door, bringing this failed experiment of a manga to a merciful end.

ART:

I'll say this much: Sugisaki is not an untalented artist.  There's a curious charm to most of the character designs here, which manage to blend the angularity of late 90s anime/manga design with both the squishy roundness of moe and the rubbery faces of gag characters.  She can get an incredible range of emotion and action out of them.  Note that I said most of the characters - Rizel is the big exception.  Her design is simply too much, from the tops of her baffling little hairclip flaps to the edges of her many, many frills.  That's not even getting into the moments where we see her teddy-bear panties, a detail that's meant to emphasize her childishness which just makes those moments of fanservice all the more awkward.  

The bigger problem is that Sugisaki tries to sell the silliness of it all by cramming every single frame in every single page full of STUFF.  Big faces, poses, speech bubbles, sound effects, all of it is in-your-face at nearly every turn.  This high-energy approach only serves to heighten the obnoxiousness of the material.  A little restraint would gone a long way towards making this manga more tolerable (and possibly extended its lifespan in Japan).

RATING:

Rizel loves Tomonori, but nobody loves Rizelmine.  It's a rightfully forgotten footnote in Yukiru Sugisaki's career, a grating dud of a rom-com that failed on both sides of the Pacific.  

This book was published by Tokyopop.  It is currently out of print.