Review: ALL PURPOSE CULTURAL CAT GIRL NUKU NUKU

This is a manga release I suspect most of you didn't even know existed.  As we'll see, maybe there's a good reason for that.

ALL PURPOSE CULTURAL CAT GIRL NUKU NUKU (Banno Bunka Nekomusume), by Yuzo Takada and Yuji Moriyama.  First published in 1998 and first published in North America in 2004.

PLOT:

Late one Christmas Eve, young Ryunosuke and his scientist father Kyusaku discover an injured cat.  Ryunosuke begs his father to save the cat, which Kyusaku does by implanting its brain into a prototype android body.  Now she is Nuku Nuku, a teen girl with the strength of a robot and the instincts of a cat.  All she wants to do is please her newfound family, even if it means dealing with school trips, alien cats, and Kyusaku's ex-wife.

STORY:

To call this version of Nuku Nuku a manga feels a little overly generous to me.  That's not to say that there are NO comics - there are 4 chapters' worth of them.  It's just that their content is slight and their connection to the OVA they were meant to promote is tenuous.

If you're looking for a comic version of the original OVA, you're looking in the wrong place.  Takada's chapters make an extremely brief effort at covering the backstory of Nuku Nuku herself, but that's pretty much where it stops.  Most of those chapters are simple, silly little misunderstandings that mostly wrap back around to how much Nuku Nuku loves her "family" and how attractive she's meant to be.  

The exception is Yuji Moriyama's chapter, which is a far more farcical thing about Nuku Nuku encountering an alien cat.  That one is also notable for being the only chapter to feature Ryunosuke's mother and her corporate henchwomen, all of whom feature more prominently in the OVA.  I guess that's fitting since Moriyama was the only person involved who actually worked on said OVA (as character designer).  It's certainly the closest anything in this book gets to being anything more than a glorified advertisement.

ART:

That's not to say that these chapters don't look good.  I might not have been that impressed with the story of 3X3 Eyes, but much of what they brought to the art of that is present here as well: compact but well-assembled panels and pages, good reaction faces, all of it wearing his Rumiko Takahashi influence on its sleeve.  I particularly liked the first chapter not so much because of the content but because it's in full color.  Who knew Takada was so good with watercolors?  I wish his other chapters had been done in the same fashion.  In comparison, Moriyama's looks more like cel art, with bolder colors, more shadows, even wilder takes, bigger panels, and a polish that makes the whole chapter feel like screencaps from an OVA episode that was never made.

PRESENTATION:

As noted, this is a pretty slim volume, so much so that a third of its short length is taken up by postcards.  I'm sure they're neat collectables if you're into Nuku Nuku, as they feature color promo art by both of the featured artists.  Indeed, one of them was even used as the cover art for the Discotek release of the series. 

RATING:

The All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku manga is more of a neat collectable for pre-existing fans than it is an introduction for newcomers.  I guess it's nice that these chapters got collected into a book at all, but it's about as inessential as manga gets.

This manga was published by ADV Manga.  It is currently out of print.