Excel Saga

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Excel Saga
Cover of first Excel Saga tankōbon volume
エクセル·サーガ (Ekuseru Sāga)
Genre	Action, Parody, Science Fiction
Manga
Author	Rikdo Koshi
Publisher	Shōnen Gahosha
English publisher	VIZ Media
Other publishers: Kabuto Dynit
Demographic	Seinen
Magazine	Young King OURs
Original run	April 1996 – ongoing
Volumes	23 (List of volumes)
TV anime
Director	Shinichi Watanabe
Studio	J.C.Staff
Licensor	ADV Films
Network	TV Tokyo
English network	Sci-Fi Channel, Rapture TV Anime Network
Other networks: Animax Canal+ MTV Italy SIC Radical, AXN, Animax
Original run	October 7, 1999 – March 30, 2000
Episodes	26 (List of episodes)
Anime and Manga Portal

Excel Saga (エクセル·サーガ, Ekuseru Sāga^?) is an absurdist comedy manga series written and illustrated by Rikdo Koshi. It has been serialized in Young King OURs since the April 1996 issue, with individual chapters collected and published in tankōbon volumes by Shōnen Gahosha. As of November 2008, 21 volumes have been published in Japan. The series follows the attempts of Across, a "secret ideological organization", to conquer the city of Fukuoka as a first step towards world domination. The titular character of the series, Excel, is a key member of the group working towards this goal, while the city is defended by a shadowy government agency led by Dr. Kabapu.

The manga was adapted into an anime television series by Victor Entertainment. Directed by Shinichi Watanabe and featuring animation from J.C.Staff, the series premiered on TV Tokyo on October 7, 1999 where it ran until its conclusion on March 30, 2000. TV Tokyo only aired twenty-five of the series' twenty-six episodes, with the finale having been made (intentionally) too violent and obscene for public broadcast. As such, it was only included in the DVD release of the series, although it has since been broadcast in other markets.

Plot

Believing the World to be corrupt, the secret organisation "Across" plans to conquer the world. The first step in the plan for world domination is to begin by focusing on one city. Across consists of Il Palazzo, leader of the organisation, and officers "Excel" and "Hyatt". Excel and Hyatt live in an apartment building in the city, along with their pet dog "Mince", who is also their emergency food supply. Living in the same apartment building are three friends Iwata, Sumiyoshi and Watanabe, who work for the Department of City Security under Dr Kabapu.

The manga draws mainly from common aspects of Japanese life, from major issues such as troubles in the labor market, the state of health-care, political corruption, and gender equality, to more mundane concerns such as office relations, the hanami flower-viewing custom, and neighborhood trash collection days.

Production

The series was created by Rikdo Koshi and was based on a dojinshi he had previously created named 'Municipal Force Daitenzin. A motivation for the change to Excel Saga was a desire to better develop Excel's character, which he felt remained "undigested" in Daitenzin. Also influential was the state of the world economy at the time, which he describes as "depressed, [with] a pessimistic view of life". He thus wrote Excel Saga as a way "to laugh off that view".^[1] Rikdo also heavily references his hometown of Fukuoka by inserting local sayings "here and there",^[2] and by using the names of major buildings and locations as character and organisation names.^[3] Despite drawing from many sources, the manga contains only modest amounts of outright parody: Kabapu's organization is a take on the sentai genre, and Sekifumi Iwata, the womanizing and medically incompetent doctor, is a spoof of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack.^[2]

Media

Manga

As of January 2007, eleven volumes of the manga have been translated into Italian by Dynit, seven into French by Kabuto, and fifteen into English by VIZ Media; the sixteenth is available as of September 2007. Each volume of the English edition includes a section called "Oubliette," which consists of a "sound effects guide" and notes by the editor and translator. Since its August 2003 release in North America, Excel Saga has been among of the 100 top-selling graphic novels on eight occasions.^[4]

Anime

Shinichi Watanabe dressed in the style of his 'Nabeshin' character.

Victor Entertainment solicited Shōnen Gahosha about adapting Excel Saga into an anime, and the two companies approached him.^[1][5] To balance the removal of Rikdo's original material, Watanabe added his own alter ego, Nabeshin, and expanded several elements, including Pedro and the Great Will. He says that the Great Will in the manga was "conveyed just as words,"^[6] and he himself developed its appearance, eventually settling on the "swirling, talking cosmos." He also increased Pedro's role in the story from a single frame in the manga. Watanabe says he was pleased with that aspect of his work, noting that "Pedro's situation was considered unsuitable for broadcast in Japan." Victor Entertainment's Shigeru Kitayama explains that Pedro's role was "a bit dicey" because it could have been interpreted "that foreign workers are looked down upon".^{[citation needed]} Nevertheless, Watanabe made it a mission in doing Excel Saga "to find the borderline when things got too much" for TV Tokyo.^{[citation needed]}

In accordance with Rikdo's wishes that the series have a different story, the Excel Saga anime is primarily thematically centred on the lampooning of different genres of film and television.^{[citation needed]} Each episode of the series tackles a different genre, from science-fiction to horror to animation itself, in the process spoofing many specific works; thesentai genre is perhaps most frequently mocked, Fist of the North Star and the works of Leiji Matsumoto each receive an episode's worth of parody, while Aliens, Gundam, Rose of Versailles, Dragon Ball, and Sailor Moon all are lampooned in extended sequences.^{[citation needed]} Tied into this is the running metafictional gag of the show's pre-title "authorization scenes," in which an animated representation of Rikdo gives (or is forced to give) permission for the series to "experimentally" switch genres away from his original intention in this fashion, with the attempts at doing so using being declared failures just before the end credits. Although Watanabe feels fans of these works were "really happy" with Excel Saga's parodies, Kitayama notes that the creators of the works "certainly got mad."^[6][7]. In later episodes, the animated avatars of Rikudo and Watanabe come to blows over plot and character development in what one reviewer calls a "knowing satire on the real-life struggles that often arise between writer and director."^[8]

The vocal cast includes several prominent voice actors, such as Kotono Mitsuishi as Excel, Takehito Koyasu as Ilpalazzo, and Satsuki Yukino as Ropponmatsu Unit 1. Rikdo recalls that he was "wired up" to see his favorite voice actors and actresses read lines of his work in front of him.^[1] Despite this, he was unprepared for hearing Excel's voice the first time, and found it an uncomfortable experience. Watanabe himself was impressed with Mitsuishi's rapid delivery of her lines, saying that "she really pushed herself to the limit and beyond."^[6] He also says, "at times she was too fast, and there was plenty of time left to [match the lip-synch]" (insertion in the original). In such cases, either he would add new material or have Mitsuishi ad-lib.

In addition to providing overall production for the series, Victor Entertainment also produced the music of Excel Saga, which was composed and arranged by Toshio Masuda, and directed by Keiichi Nozaki. Director Shinichi Watanabe wrote the lyrics for the opening and closing themes, which were performed by the "Excel♥Girls" (Yumiko Kobayashi and Mikako Takahashi), and he claims to have written the opening's lyrics "on the train, five minutes before the deadline."^[6]

ADV Films produced the English-language version of the anime (including the final episode) and released it on DVD in North America and the United Kingdom. Anime Network later broadcast the series in the former, and Rapture TV will air it beginning January 3, 2007 in the latter. The English adaptation initially starred Jessica Calvello, with Larissa Wolcott taking over the role after episode thirteen after Calvello had damaged her voice during production. The ADV release features interview transcripts, games, and "Vid-Notes" as commentary. It is distributed in Australia by Madman Entertainment.

"Going Too Far"

Extreme violence depicted in episode twenty-six, Going Too Far.

The twenty-sixth episode, "Going Too Far", never aired in Excel Saga's original run on TV Tokyo because it was purposefully too violent and obscene for broadcast in Japan.^[6] The opening sequence is altered to contain pixelated nudity and more blood, and the closing presents the translator on fours, wearing a collar, and singing the "Bolero", as Menchi translates into her own language. The episode itself, in addition to much more violence, blood, and gore, includes situations containing nudity, lesbianism, apparent paedophilia, soaplands, and a love hotel—in several instances involving minors. The episode obliquely refers to the 1995 sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway by including sarin attacks as a method of exterminating enemies. The director himself remarks that it "felt good to go past the limits of a TV series", although he thinks it "is not something that you should do too often".^[5]

Reception

The English-language reviews of the Excel Saga anime were broadly positive and even enthusiastic. Mike Crandol of Anime News Network puts it in the same class as Airplane!, National Lampoon, Tex Avery, and Monty Python,^[9] adding that the "combination of character-based humor, outrageous slapstick farce, and a plot that is engaging if only for how weird it is make for a thoroughly enjoyable comedic experience." Serdar Yegulalp at TheGline says it succeeds both as "a brutally savage parody of every conceivable anime genre and convention, and as the kind of post-modern self-criticism found in the works of Takashi Miike, Thornton Wilder, Pirandello" (emphasis in the original). A contrary opinion is expressed by Joel Pearce from DVD Verdict, who says the series is "occasionally clever and funny," but that "much of it is gratingly obnoxious."^[10] A concern several reviewers express is that the quantity of obscure jokes and cultural references might limit the show's appeal.^[11] Many reviewers express displeasure with middle and later episodes, saying they were "more of the same,"^[10] that they had "stale" humor,^[12] that they were "tiresome,"or even "painfully unfunny."^[13] Episodes fourteen through sixteen, starring the Ropponmatsus, bear the brunt of this criticism, but several reviewers consider episode seventeen, "Animation USA," to be one of the best.^{[10][13][14][15]}

Reviewers also agree that the series suffers from too much "filler" in its later episodes, with Crandol describing the show as "spinning its wheels."^[16] The production staff's reliance on a second summary episode—recapping the Pedro-Nabeshin subplot—particularly displeased reviewers.^[10][12][17] Crandol alone seems to have enjoyed it, calling the episode "delightfully stupid" and one of the series' "most entertaining installments."^[16] Yegulalp reserves his harshest words for the unaired "Going Too Far," calling it "pure, idiotic, wretched excess." He goes on to say that the episode has "the feeling of trying to deliberately enrage the audience by resorting to the only tactics left: genuinely offensive subject matter." Joel Cunningham at Digitally Obsessed disagrees, saying that the episode succeeds just in time, "with one of the series' funnier sight gags,"^[18] and Anime Boredom's John Huxley considers it "too light hearted to take offense" and "a complete success."^[19]

The series generally receives high marks for technical aspects. Cunningham feels the animation is "flat-out gorgeous,"^[20] but Crandol considers it merely above average. In the latter's opinion, its quality wanes as the series progresses and increasingly relies on super-deforming the characters for comedic effect.^[13] ADV's release earned praise for the quality of the video transfer and the DVD extras (particularly the Vid-Notes).^[9][18] Reviewers especially appreciated the English voice acting: Crandol calls it "brilliant,"^[9] and several note that Calvello and Wolcott were each able to capture Mitsuishi's Excel.^[13][15] Pearce, in contrast, found the English cast to be "pretty bad" and its Excel to be "dental drill" shrill.^[10]

Akadot's reviewer of the manga writes that "some of the strange events go on a little too long and do not have the impact that they do animated," but that Rikdo's Excel Saga is "graced with fantastic visuals and a hilarious story," and that the English edition is "a masterpiece of the translator's skill."^[21] Barb Lien-Cooper from Comic World News concurs that the manga cannot keep pace with the anime, but she finds Excel herself to be wittier in the manga and that the manga's plots "make more sense" than the anime's.^[22] A reviewer of the French edition also praises Rikdo's work, noting that it is an "...easy read without problems of clarity."^[23]

References

External links

• Official manga website of Viz Media
• Official anime website of Madman Entertainment
• Excel Saga (manga) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
• Excel Saga (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia