Part 3 - Visual Flow I (Natsuki Takaya, FRUITS BASKET)

[telophase]

Continuing the manga layout essays, this time with FRUITS BASKET, where I mostly dwell on the visual flow, because I think this is where Natsuki Takaya excels.

HEAVY image warning in this one, with 3 or 4 that are up to 200K each.



FRUITS BASKET is a classic-style shoujo manga - it's aimed for a teenage girl audience, and stars a teenage girl, Tohru Honda, who through a series of misadventures is now a live-in housekeeper for some members of the Sohma family. Several members of the Sohma are under a curse where they turn into animals from the Chinese zodiac when hugged by a member of the opposite sex or are under stress. Wacky hijinx ensue, along with some more thought-provoking stuff. I won't spoil it any more for you - if you haven't read it, go read it. There's a reason it's currently the #1 manga in the US.

Shoujo manga is characterized by an emphasis on the emotional lives of the characters. There may or may not be any life-threatening action or plot, but if there is the manga genre in and of itself will ensure that these things are as ridiculously over-the-top as possible. Shoujo art and layout is characterized by delicate linework, with less of an emphasis on speedlines to show motion and more of an emphasis on screentone patterns to tell you what the characters are feeling. The panel layout is often wonky, with panels careening crazily across the page and figures breaking panel boundaries left and right, with lots of panels going straight to the edge of the page in full bleeds. There is less emphasis on backgrounds, with them being indicated more sketchily than in other types of manga, especially in scenes that are expected to be familiar with the reader, like classrooms.

That is, of course, a generalization and there are plenty of exceptions - SAIYUKI, for one - but classic shoujo does that, and FRUITS BASKET is classic.

So, without more ado, here's pages 26 and 27 of FRUITS BASKET volume 7. Read the Japanese way, from right to left -- page 26 is the one way over on the right.



Now ... seems confusing at first, huh? But once you started reading it, I expect you got the hang of it fairly quickly. There's a really big reason for that, and it's part of why I think that this manga is the top-selling one in the States right now, but I'll get to that in a minute after I talk about the panel shapes, tones, and the action in the pages.

Panel 1 - Hiro Sohma is grabbing Tohru's bookbag out of her hands, which overbalances her and makes her fall over, prior to ripping off her notebook. This could be taken in a very serious way - it's a somewhat violent criminal act after all - but the mangaka doesn't want to go down that route, because it leads to an entirely different story than the one she's writing. So we have the flower tones filling up the whitespace in the background, and the cartoony shape of Tohru's arms to indicate that she's not seriously hurt - she's probably more shocked and surprised than actually hurt. The tones probably also act like stars and little birds do in cartoons when the toon characters get whacked on the head. The angle of the camera tilt emphasizes the action of Hiro's grabbing, plus leads your eye to the next panel in the sequence. The camera at ground level looking *up* at the characters emphasizes Hiro's dominance over Tohru, even though he's much younger and smaller than she is. The angle of the panel border also ephasizes this movement and makes the page a bit more dynamic.

Next panel - Tohru on the ground, shocked. The camera is at ground-level so we're down there with her, sympathizing. Note how her speech balloons have really thin, wavery lines, much like her voice is at this moment, I expect, and Hiro's have strong, confident lines.

Third panel - Hiro's hand with the notebook he's talking about, from Tohru's point of view, and she's focusing on it. You have a teeny little cartoon of a rice ball with eyes representing Tohru (it's a metaphor that runs through the series and is referred to in the title) next to a speech balloon that shows it's her saying "EH?".

Fourth panel - the biggest one on the page showing what a little snot Hiro is (like we hadn't figured that out already). It's the important panel because it's his intro panel, where we learn his name and that he's one of the Sohmas. The patterns in the background here are darker and heavier than the flowers in panel 1, because he's a threatening, dark character. The camera is looking up at him from Tohru's point of view (POV) - we see what she sees. The upward angle also makes him loom over her in a threatening manner, helped by his dark clothing and the dark tones in the background. You can see that the panel borders are there mostly for formality's sake, to indicate where each panel begins and ends. Boxing the panels in fully would lose some of the emotional effect of the spillage acros the page.

('Tones' is short for 'screentones' and refers to the grey dots and the patterns that shade and fill in the pages. I explain them a bit more in the first SAIYUKI post, earlier in my journal.)

Then we see his feet walking away along the tiled floor.

Note that the camera does not show anything from Hiro's point of view. We are not invited into his head - this scene plays out from Tohru's point of view. We don't hear his thoughts, either - this would be the equivalent of writing prose from a tight-third point of view, where you hear the main character's thoughts but not those of anyone else.

The next page -- this page is all about Tohru, and she dominates it, floating in space there. The first panel is a bit of an establishing shot, showing the hallway she's in, with the perspective lines leading away the way that Hiro has gone, and the little wind-line and 'whooooo' giving the same sense of emptiness that a newspaper blowing across the screen does in the movies. Tohru's words tell us why she's feeling so empty - he's accidentally ripped off her mom's picture with the notebook. Tohru's mom is dead, and she misses her desperately - Tohru is so easygoing and accepting that she wouldn't mind her stuff being stolen because she would think that Hiro was acting out for some reason (that was probably her fault - Tohru blames herself a lot), and she'd just get another one. But the photo of her mom is the one thing she does not make compromises about.

Anway, the camera is looking down on her, so she looks small and lost in the middle of that hallway.

Next panel, if you want to call it a panel. Tohru is kneeling there, her thoughts and words crowding around her and tumbling over and over themselves. The bursts that her thoughts are in symbolize how horrified and upset she is. There's no background at all, because she's so focused inward at this moment.

Next panel - Tohru's face, close-up to emphasize her emotions. It's also faded out with a grey tone which functions like a fade-out in the movies, transitioning to the next panel, which starts from black and using a scratchy tone, fades up to white as Tohru-the-narrator takes over from Tohru's thoughts. The final speech bubble is someone else speaking, which takes us out of Tohru's thoughts and leads us off the page. The speech bubble at the beginning of that panel, with the long exclamation-point thingy, is a standard symbol of something-or-other. [explained by oyceter here in the comments.] I interpret it as wordless emotion. It also serves another purpose - to get you to look at that side of the next-to-last panel and thus your eyes move down to the correct next narration box. If it wasn't there, you'd go from the final "I'M COMING, MOM!" to the box directly beneath it, which is out of sequence. (That's why the I'M COMING MOM burst is cut off by the panel border. More on that in a moment.)

What Natsuki Takaya does so well

Now we get to the bit that I think makes this manga the gateway manga for so many readers:

It's easy to read.

What? Isn't it crowded and confusing? Yup, but it's got a very clear pathway through it that is easy to pick up, unlike other manga. Read the pages without the text:



I bet you automatically knew exactly which balloon was next, which panel was next, and could figure out what was going on in the scene on an emotional level. Why? Take a look at it again:



Look how smooth and easy that path is. You know exactly which one to go to next, because there's only one choice and your eyes are already moving that direction. Balloons break panel borders when you're supposed to follow them, and are broken by panel borders when you're not. And if you look at the characters, you can see they're literally pointing in the direction you're supposed to look. Panel 1 -- Hiro's arms with the bookbag and Tohru's arms, both pointing in the same direction! In the bottom right panel on page 26, Hiro's arm holding the notebook takes you from his body, where the last speech balloon led you, right up to the next one. Then when he's walking away, his foot points directly to the next speech bubble.

On page 27, Tohru does the same. Panel 1, she's leaning in the direction you need to read. When she's floating in midair, the curve of her body echoes the curve of the text, and her legs point directly at the closeup of her face. Then her profile, the dark lines in her eye, and the lines in her fingers lead to the speech bubble that transitions to the final panel on the page. Then the gradient leads you from dark to light, and off the page.

This is something that makes it easy to read these for someone who doesn't know comics and is unfamiliar with the visual language of sequential art, and, I think, precisely why so many new readers are picking it up and reading it - it takes almost no effort to learn how. You can argue about characters and plot and cute animals all you want; I think it's the ease of access that's doing it.

And here's proof! This is a two-page spread from DESCENDANTS OF DARKNESS, which is a really hard manga to get through if you're not used to it. Not only that, this is literally the spread I first opened it to - I didn't have to search through it to find what I was talking about, because almost every single page is like this. Read from right-to-left, Japanese style:




Why is this so confusing? I bet you're first thinking it's because of the art - the art is so crowded.

Nope. Not it.

Look at the path that the speech bubbles make your eyes follow:





See how much more work there is just to read it? The mangaka relies on the standard reading motion of right-to-left and up-to-down to pull you through the page, and it makes it choppy and confusing, instead of saying "The hell with how you *normally* read, this is how you *need* to read!" like FRUITS BASKET does. The visuals don't help you, either - the characters and the lines don't point the way to the next panel. You manage to read it in spite of the layout, not because of the layout. This is a popular manga in Japan and it has its own rabid fan base here in the States because of the characters and the story, but I think the layout is holding it back from being even more widely read. If the mangaka had just rearranged the speech bubbles to simplify the path, it would be much easier to read and make sense of, and I bet it would be more popular here in the US. As it is, it's the mainlining crack manga you get to after breaking yourself in on FRUITS BASKET.

I leave it as an exercise for the aspiring managaka to decide for themself as to what the pathway *should* look like. I know I've got opinions on it.

This is getting long enough and I've still got a few more things to say about FRUITS BASKET and visual flow, so I'm going to close with a...



TO BE CONTINUED...







Index to the Series

Comments

[chibi-nasu.livejournal.com]

::Applause::

You write these so informatively, yet they hold my attention (I have a tendency to go, "Eh...long block of text... ::skim::", but I had no problem reading through this in its entirity.

The flow of dialogue is an interesting point, and one that would be extremely useful for those who are interested in doing their own manga.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I have no idea why you're not skimming through it; every time I go back my eyes glaze over and I start skimming. XD

The dialogue thing is something I stumbled over recently when I noticed I was automatically reading some sequences backwards from the natural Japanese flow, and that was the way the mangaka wanted you to do it, and I wondered why it was so easy to see which way to read. After I drew a line on it, it was easy to see, and then I wondered why DESCENDANTS OF DARKNESS was so hard to read. Drawing the line on top of that solved that problem right off. :)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

This is FASCINATING! Yeah, YnM is very confusing to read (and the crowded art doesn't help either.) I wonder if Saiyuki also has especially good speech balloon layout? It's worked as a gateway drug for a couple people I know.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

SAIYUKI's pretty good at it - if you go back to the pages I posted and mentally draw the red line through the balloons like I did above, you can see how Minekura leads you through the pages. She relies heavily on the signals of balloons overlapping panel boundaries or being broken by them to let you know which way you're supposed to read. Although sometimes she breaks boundaries to put more emphasis on those words, although she tend to signal which one should be read first by which one is higher than the other in those cases.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

SUDDENLY IT ALL MAKES SENSE.

(Yami no Matsuei was one of the first manga I tried to read. I gave up after the first five pages and didn't go back until, hmm. Years. And I still have trouble with the opening pages of each volume sometimes, where the mangaka is pushing a lot of information at you.)

Love this series.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

XD I like YnM, but it was exhausting to read. I figured at first it was the confusion of art and the massive amounts of information on the page, but after realizing how nicely Furuba was laid out, I figured out that the reading path trhough YnM was really choppy and undirected, and that's what was giving me problems. I don't think the confusion of elements on the page would be a problem if there were an obvious, clear pathway through them.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I so would never have bothered with the YnM manga if I'd never seen the anime.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the anime - I picked it up becaise it was so popular and fandom_wank people made a lot of references to it, and I was intrigued by the whole "on crack" description they gave of it. I enjoy it, especially after I figured out how to read it, but it's not one of my favorites and probably never will be.

Mind you, I don't think anything will replace BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL in my heart of hearts. :)

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Have you taken a look at any of Ai Yazawa's work? She does shoujo, not action, but I was looking at Paradise Kiss yesterday and thinking about what you'd written about crowdedness vs. layout & flow and trying to figure out how her designs seem so clean and uncrowded while packing in an amazing amount of detail.

Paradise Kiss is the only one that's out in English right now, and it's very good--but I also have scanlations of Nana, which is just extraordinary. Although I'm judging the writing there; I'm not sure if the art has quite a huge leap in quality, which I don't mean in a derogatory fashion--it's just that the art in Paradise Kiss is very, very good.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That was absolutely the first thing I noticed about Yami no Matsuei-- perfectly splendid art, no sense of panel layout. I had not, however, noticed how *good* Furuba is at that, and the specific mechanics of the ways the panels lead into each other. Thank you for these posts.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! I plan on studying Furuba quite closely for the dialogue layout, since I think that's part of my problem.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Ironically, as YnM goes on, the mangaka abandons that style of art (really her greatest strength by...oh, a whole lot) in favor of something not half as pretty. It's tragic.

[oyceter]

coffee_and_ink pointed me this way, and I am quite happy!

Wow, I read a lot of manga (or used to), but I never really sat down and bothered to think about it like this! I now want to flip through Angel Sanctuary and see if the panel structure is as confusing as I remember.

The exclamation point thingy is like a dash in English.. it goes that way because Japanese is vertical, and it serves a lot like a non-reaction. It actually reminds me a bit of the "shi--------------n" sound effect, and also resembles it visually, since mangaka often take out all the extra "iiiiiiii"s and put in the long dash (vertically or horizontally). I am still incredibly amused that there is a sound effect for silence!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :) I havne't read Angel Sanctuary yet. I'll have to flip trhoug it and take a look at the layout. :)

And thanks for the explantion - I've linked down to this comment for anyone interested. :)

The Japanese get all the cool sound effects. I wish English had more -in some manga I read, they translated them off to the side of teh Japanese one, and you got things like "patpat" and "think" and "sigh" and stuff that didn't really have much of an effect.

[oyceter]

Oh man, I love the sound effects! And I wish I had looked more closely, but there's some sort of contrast between when they use hiragana and katakana (the two different Japanese scripts) for sound effects and for dialogue, but I never could figure out a definite pattern. I think katakana was used more for "harsher" sounds, because it's so much more angular than hiragana. I think in dialogue, sometimes the artist will use katakana to end the sentences (esp. "yo," which is a stronger sentence ending than the more feminine "ne"). Or sometimes they use katakana to "spell" out kanji. I haven't paid too much attention, but I suspect that the katakana use is more prevalent when guy characters are speaking, just as it's used for harsher sounds.

I also haven't read much translated-into-English manga at all (mostly I've read stuff in Chinese and Japanese), so I can't really comment on how the translators use font, but there's also a lot of visual variation in the font in a page layout.

Normal dialogue font is in a typeface that looks a lot like something used for a very large, easy-to-read kids book. There's a lot of variation in the strokes, much like written Japanese, and it's very black and easy to look at. Thoughts that are usually not in dialogue bubbles (just lines of text on a panel) are usually in this font that for some reason I think of as sans serif, even though Japanese doesn't have serifs! There isn't that variation in the strokes, and it's much more stylized. Then usually in the intros and endings of chapters, there's a much more formal font that looks more like the Japanese you would see in a novel or something. And my favorite bits are the little handwritten scribblies in the sides, when characters or the author is making little asides to the reader or something.

Oh dear. I have gone on for quite a bit, I'm sorry!

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I remember panel layout/direction being fairly confusing in Angel Sanctuary, although I've passed on my copies and can't verify this easily. I think directionality in manga/comics is one of the few things I am somewhat sensitized to visually. Part of this might be that Korean reads as naturally left-to-right (I suspect this is due to American influence; the older books I've seen were printed vertically) as top-down. This is convenient for book-titles on spines :-) but it also means that in certain instances (billboards of restaurant menus out on the street, that kind of thing) you have to rely on cues or your 1337 knowledge of the language (I lack the latter) to see whether you're supposed to go vertically or horizontally. Part of it might be my obsession with computer/web interface design, which sort of deals with similar problems of how to guide the user through something? And figuring out the lines of direction--the Fruits Basket pages are actually rather awe-inspiring in that regard. It looks so natural, and you can see how you're being led from point to point.

[larryhammer]

It reminds me of speech balloons with " ... " or " ! " in them. Which I think I first noticed in Pogo, of all places.

---L.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'd seen the "!!" speech balloons in comics before, but hadn't ever twigged to the existence of the "..." until I encountered manga, whereupon I decided I loved its ability to show someone actively not saying something, and how often you can guess exactly what the character's thinking at the time.

[jofpgallagher.livejournal.com]

Excellent....However, I disagree when you say that Fruits Basket is "easy" to read...it's actually hard, for beginners in Manga reading. When I loan my books to some friends because I think FB is the best thing ever, then they return it to me very confused...they don't get the plot right..they focus on secondary plots rather than in the beautifulness of the messages Takaya leaves in every page.
I enjoyed your analysis...Very interesting indeed, and I have never imagines all the things I didn't know about the visual effects in mangas. ^_^

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying it's easy, period, I'm saying it's easy to read compared with other manga. If someone doesn't know the visual language of manga, and they're not used to reading backwards from what they normally expect, *any* manga is going to be a challenge until they learn how to read it. Furuba is basically a primer in how to learn that language, because of all the helpful bits pointing you along, but if someone doesn't know even a bit to start with - like if they're not comics readers - or if they don't understand that there is a visual language to learn, they're going to be confused as hell.

Give them a copy of Furuba and a copy of Descendants of Darkness, Gravitation, or The Demon Ororon and ask them which was was easier to read. I know, I'm stacking the deck because all three of those are fairly complicated visually - Gravitation less so than the other two - but you'll see that in comparison Furuba is easier, and I think that's exactly why it's the gateway drug manga, and is the bestselling manga in the US right now.

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

*sneeeaaaaks in a month later* Gosh, I love your manga analysis. Just discovered them via an odd link you left in F_W. I've been pondering doing a manga of my own (me and every kid on the block, yes), and things like these are great to figure out the finger points on what works and what doesn't. Thanks for putting them up. :D

[(Anonymous)]

*Sneaks in MONTHS later*
LOVED it. I already knew how to read manga, sure, but it was great.

[fuuringo.livejournal.com]

All aspiring mangakas would benefit from your essays I think. Thank you for breaking things down, it's very fascinating, I didn't think there were so many aspects to drawing manga apart from the art itself. ^^

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've had an editor tell me that these things are more important than the art, because the nature of any sort of comic is that it's sequential art which tells a story, and thus the art has to remain in service to the story.

[errantimpulses.livejournal.com]

I love these posts - I'm just discovering them now, sorry for these comments from really old posts....

But I have to disagree with this post.

I tried to read both pages flat and then compared it to your red lines showing me how I was supposed to read it. I got FB wrong, but the second one right. Fruits Basket is a MESS, a chaotic mess. A natural flow of that first page really brings your eye from the fifth speech balloon to the ninth. The ninth balloon is much closer to the fifth balloon than the sixth one, furthermore the lower line from the first panel draws your eye down and to the left, back to the ninth balloon. So that's TWO things bringing you to the ninth balloon. And now, when you're there, it really is a bit up in the air as to when you go next.

The second one is full of speech bubbles, but they tend to take a much regular path, right to left down a column. The right page has two columns, admittedly, but it's not much different than reading a newspaper - sometimes the columns are narrow and numerous, sometimes they are wide and less numerous. Bottom line, the flow is SO much more natural. The one exception, I think, would be the eighth speech bubble. I think if you removed that you would see your red lines became much smoother, but luckily that bubble by itself is not actually important. If you go from seven to nine, you still get the information, and the transition is still smooth and you can continue on your way. In FB, though, if you go from five to nine you are now lost, because here are four speech bubbles left on the page and you don't know which ones to go to.

Again, I love these articles - you're so much more knowledgeable than me, but these are my observations as a manga reader as opposed to an analyst. :-)