BRAIN POWERED (Buren Pawado), based on the story by Yoshiyuki Tomino with art by Yukiru Sugisaki. First published in 1998 and first published in North America in 2003.
PLOT:
The earth is under attack as massive, strange discs rise from the bottom of the ocean, bringing destruction in their wake along with the strange organic robots inside them. A mysterious group known as Orphan is gathering as many of these plates and robots as possible, to study them for reasons known only to their leaders. Yu Isami doesn't care about any of that, though. His parents may run Orphan, but he just tries his best to keep his head low and do what he's told.
When his beliefs are confronted by a mysterious pilot named Hime Utsumiya, he choses to defect and joins her on the giant floating fortress called Novis Noah. There they nurture the robots (known as "Powereds") like children, working in partnership with them like parent and child to oppose Orphan.
STORY:
I have dreaded talking about this particular manga. It's not because of the manga itself so much as its source material, considered by many to be one of the worst anime of the 90s and one of Yoshiyuki Tomino's most baffling creations. The only reason it's not considered his worst work is because Garzey's Wing came just before it. That's not even getting into the fact that it's Yukiru Sugisaki adapting it, a mangaka with a decidedly spotty history of her own.
Thus, you might be surprised to learn that Brain Powerd (not a typo - that's just the original anime's title) makes the transition to manga pretty well. I'm not going to claim it's the most graceful adaptation, as it's still pretty front-loaded with Proper Names without a ton of explanations for them. Hell, after reading this volume I'm still not sure on what the difference between a Grand Cher and a Brain Powered is beyond the fact that the Orphan side uses the former term for their robots and the Novis Noah crowd uses the latter for theirs. It also doesn't help that she keeps showing us the same events from both Yu and Hime's perspectives. She's clearly doing this as a way to economically introduce the many, many subplots going on in this story but it makes the whole book feel like it's always taking two steps forward and one step back.
At the very least, this manga adaptation takes the time to explain the premise of the show right off the bat, which is more than the show ever manages. It's also forced to explain things in clear modern dialogue instead of using the obtuse, stagey dialogue typical of Tomino shows. That being said, Ross Ritchie's adaptation of the translation may be a little too slang-heavy for its own good. I know that a certain degree of looseness is to be expected with an early 2000s Tokyopop release and for the most part the dialogue is fine, but when you have characters saying things like "she's gone cheese and crackers" or calling someone "you wench!," then maybe he should have considered punching the dialogue down a little instead of up.
Maybe he felt this was necessary because the cast is a little lacking in personality. Yu is a total blank slate of a boy, so perhaps it's no surprise that he could be swayed so easily by one lecture from a cute girl (even if it apparently took a whole year to sink in). Meanwhile, Hime is very much the motherly sort of teen girl that Tomino loves to stick in his works, going all the way back to Frau Bow in Mobile Suit Gundam. She's got her bossy side, but when she's not literally mothering an orphan trio she's piloting her robot by literally talking to it like a small child. The funny thing is this is just another instance of Tomino ripping himself off, as Yu and Hime's first meeting reminded me strongly of 1983's Aura Battler Dunbine, another original Tomino anime where a blank slate protagonist boy switches sides primarily because a pretty red-headed girl yelled at him in the middle of a fight.
Still, there's still only so much that both Sugisaku and the localization team can do to make this story better. Whenever Yuu and Hime are together, all they do is argue at one another while clumsily dropping exposition, undercutting what is clearly meant to be the emotional heart of the story. The Novis Noah crew just shows up midway through the book without as much as a how-do-you-do, expecting to reader to pick up on everything about them purely through context. They can't hide how much of this story is just riffing on ideas from Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's still a struggle to read, it's just less of a struggle than the anime.
ART:
One of the few positives about Brain Powerd are the charming character designs by the late Mutsumi Inomata and the mechanical designs by Five Star Stories creator Mamoru Nagano. Sugisaku doesn't mess too much with the former, doing her best to bring some life to them (even if she struggles with drawing the older folks). The latter...not so much. I won't hold it against her too much, knowing that Nagano tends to favor odd, elaborate designs that even the show's animators struggled with to some degree. Still, it's kind of funny how much Sugisaku goes out of her way to avoid showing them from the outside.
Indeed, action in general doesn't seem to be her forte. On the rare occasion there is a conflict that goes beyond robot pilots yelling at one another, she tends to rush through it. She mostly communicates it through lots of small panels focusing on a single part, such as a face or a hand. Together with the excessive amounts of speed lines, it's clearly meant to communicate the swiftness of these battles but I don't think it quite works out that way on the page.
RATING:
This manga was published by Tokyopop. This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes available. All 4 volumes were released and are currently out of print.
No comments:
Post a Comment