A few notes before I begin.
First of all, I have indeed seen the B-Train production of the TRC anime -- I've seen it from start to finish. Having read all of the TRC manga then out in English, I was hungry for more; and so I hung on through the entire thing even after it became apparent to me, for reasons I will detail below, that it really was as bad as I'd been warned.
I DON'T intend this essay to be an attack on anyone who likes the TRC anime, or even prefers it to the manga. The anime does have its good points, which I'll go into at the end; and ultimately, whatever its other flaws, it has a great core story. I applaud anyone who can see the shining gem of a great story hidden within its other problems.
I've been in fandoms with a manga-anime divide before, and I understand how frustrating and exasperating it can be to have other fans, the very ones who should share your likes and interests, sneer at you for your taste in media.That's not what I'm trying to do here. (For comparison's sake, you might check out my Ten Reasons Why the Fullmetal Alchemist Anime Rocks.) If anything, I intend this essay as a bridge -- a more critical analysis that will help anime watchers understand WHY people have such antipathy towards the animated adaptation.
For fans of the manga who have not seen the anime: rejoice, I watched it so you don't have to. If anyone ever asks you why you don't like it, or don't want to see it, or why they should bother to read the manga rather than just Netflixing it, and you don't want to take the time or effort to articulate yourself, point them to this article:
I am not the sort of viewer who demands that an adaptation be exactly the same in every detail as the original. Indeed, I find such rigorous adaptations to be pretty boring; if I love a series, I want more of what I love, not merely a rehash of the same. While I greatly enjoyed, for example, the OAVs which were later created to illustrate the Tokyo and Nihon arcs, they were so closely scripted as to be boring. Just to illustrate this fact: I am not a fluent speaker of Japanese. And yet, I watched the OAVs in the raw, without subtitles, and I was able to follow the action and understand what was going on at every moment because I had just read the manga, and every single line was the same. All I required was an occasional keyword that I recognized, and I could remember precisely what the line was from the manga. Apart from the voice acting performances (which were superb,) the OAVs did not bring anything new to the Tsubasa experience for me.
But many of the changes and additions to the B-Train adaptation were either nonsensical (they changed it for no reason, since the changed version added nothing) or just outright bad (they changed it, and the change actively detracted from the story.) There were a few changes and added elements that I liked, and some that I thought actively improved the TRC experience. But the vast majority of them were simply bad.
And even if the B-Train anime had made NO changes whatsoever to the plot, dialog, story structure or characterization, it would still be a bad anime, simply on technicals, such as:
( 1. -The animation quality. )2. -The music. Yes, the music. The gorgeous, innovative soundtrack by the lovely and talented Yuki Kajiura, composer of so many amazing soundtracks. The music I have downloaded to my computer and am listening to on iTunes even as I speak. How, you ask, could I possibly object to the music?
The answer is the exact same objection to the music in .hack//SIGN, by the same studio, and by the same composer. It's good music, but it's badly used. The music which should be background is played too loud. The musical focus pieces are repeated too often, to the point where even the exciting, gorgeous music gets repetitive and boring. Most importantly, the music is used instead of any kind of action or advancement in the series itself. There were more instances I could count where minutes of onscreen time were wasted by watching a slow pan of a still screen across a character's face, while an exciting Yuki Kajiura musical piece played in the background; punctuated every sixty seconds or so by the characters saying one or two words. (Exceptions: There were a few instances when the music was used in-universe to marvelous effect. For example, during the Outo arc, there was one scene (not in the manga) where the singer Oruha came to the Cats' Eye Cafe in order to interrogate Sakura about her purpose and motives. She used the music of a piano to hypnotize Sakura, and caused her to sing a beautiful song about a lost lover. This was a very entrancing scene, and a great use of Oruha's character.)
You might be able to get away with this sort of excessive focus and reliance on the music in a very artistic, atmosphere-based series (like, for example, Noir.) But this is an adventure-romance series. We don't turn on our TVs to watch a still pan over background music. There were even cases where music with strong vocals was being played while characters were talking, loudly enough that it interfered with their lines of dialog. This should never happen, no matter how unimpressed one might be with...
( 3. -The voice acting. )4. -The character design. While I'm perfectly willing to admit that CLAMP's current aesthetic -- commonly referred to as the "noodle people" school of character design -- is not the best of all possible worlds, B-Train's character design was no improvement. The new designs look almost cartoonishly rounded, with ears that stick out so much it's very difficult not to notice them. More importantly, each character seems to have been assigned one single expression, and are never shown with any other: goofy vapidity for Fai, doe-eyed anxiety for Sakura, stoic determination for Syaoran, and dyspeptic annoyance for Kurogane. (Okay, maybe that last one is fair.) The characters ARE capable of other emotional states, but they certainly don't ever reflect on their faces. Which nicely leads into the next point, which is...
( 5. -The characters never show any development. )
6a. -The pacing within each episode. The episodes themselves drag on far longer than necessary. There are excruciatingly long sequences in which nothing happens; the characters are merely standing around staring at each other, or regarding a static and slowly panning landscape, with brief moments of dialog but otherwise silent except for the above-mentioned background music. This got worse as the series went on; it got to the point where I was watching the series with my finger on the 2x fast-forward button, pressing 'play' when the action resumed. After a while I stopped even bothering to press 'play'.
( 6b. -The pacing between episodes. )7. -Arbitrary filler episodes. I don't object to new storylines being added as filler when they tell their own stories, but I do have a problem with filler episodes being inserted which contribute nothing to any story at all. I am not sympathetic to the consideration that they had to drag limited content out over a set number of episodes, considering that they ended up making fifty-two episodes and did not even bother to include all the content, with the last ten or so episodes being invented out of thin air.
For example: in the Hanshin arc, there is a truly bizarre episode where Sakura -- who at this point in the story is completely comatose -- inexplicably wakes up, tries on a bunch of clothes (okay, I'll give them that, THAT was in keeping with the mood of the series) and then wanders out into the city and gets lost, panicking her companions who must divert from searching for the feather to search for her. She wanders around befriending people (despite not being able to talk or... do anything) and then walks off a piece of scaffolding, flies to the ground, and falls asleep again. All without having accomplished a single thing. Why? Why? Not only was this episode pointless and failed to accomplish a single meaningful thing, but it blatantly disregards the principle of the entire story: that without her memories, Sakura is reduced to a breathing corpse. Which leads nicely into our next problem, which is...
( 8. -The anime did not respect the basic rules of the manga. )9. -The anime bent the plot around to make Syaoran the only hero.
It became pretty clear early on that B-Train were trying to make a cutesy, fluffy shounen adventure show, with Syaoran as the boy hero protagonist. If so, they really ought to have done their research and picked another manga. It's annoying, although not a deal-breaker, that they removed all the alcohol in the show and replaced it with fizzy water; or that they refused to show not only any kind of blood but indeed any sort of injury at all (leading to a very confusing sequence in the Koryo arc with a lake of acid that apparently dissolved only clothing without touching skin, and Syaoran limping around on an 'injured' leg that appeared perfectly fine.)
But the need to turn this into "The Syaoran Show" meant that the other characters were reshuffled and marginalized in order to let Syaoran have the spotlight, even in episodes where he was not necessarily the driving force in the plot. A common plot device (admittedly, CLAMP started it in Koryo, but it got very tiresome on repetition) would be for the heroes to face waves of mooks: Kurogane and Fai would remain behind to deal with lesser opponents, while Syaoran went on to face and defeat the big boss by himself, even in situations where it would have made much more sense to let the far more powerful and competent Kurogane take on those opponents.
There were even cases where Kurogane would be defeated by an opponent in battle, and then the fight would default to Syaoran, who would win by Sheer Force Of Will. Which is ridiculous; Kurogane is far more skilled and powerful than Syaoran in any kind of martial arts, and not one iota less strong-willed. It also misses the point of Kurogane's backstory, which shows us that Kurogane's exceptional strength came at the cost of his life being destroyed around him and spending the next ten years completely shutting out his humanity in order to become stronger. The whole point of Kurogane's role in the manga is that he has to learn how to be less violently awesome; that he has to learn to form relationships with other people so that he can use his incredible strength to protect those he loves.
Sakura, of course, is never given any role at all, except to swoon in Syaoran's arms with a disturbingly orgasm-like moan when he returns another feather to her. And, of course, both the decision to eliminate all blood and violence and the attempt to make Syaoran the sole hero and focus of the show became an unworkable crisis when the plot of the manga reached...
( 10. -The Tokyo Arc )10. -The Tokyo Arc
This was it. This was the big one. The deal-breaker.
This was the point where the anime stopped following the manga, and went off into never-never land. This was when the characters stopped growing, the plot stopped developing, all story coherency was thrown out the window, and the B-Train development team started making shit up out of thin air. This was where the anime stopped being Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles and started being... well, not anything, really.
In marketing terms, of course, it's understandable. They had made this show for a younger demographic, marketed it for a light tone and daytime TV slot. None of the events which took place in or after the Tokyo arc were suitable for this audience at all; there'd be no way you could get through the Tokyo Arc without showing blood, or with continuing to portray Syaoran as the hero. Faced with the decision of breaking with the manga or having to radically change their anime midstream, the developers made the decision to abandon ship.
But this change in tone was not an arbitrary mood change of CLAMPs. This was what the story had been building towards from the beginning. Breaking from the storyline, and thus abandoning all of the events that happen in the latter half of Tsubasa, didn't just mean they had to write their own ending; it meant that none of what had happened before made any sense. Fei Wong Reed was now completely pointless as a villain, since his grand plan would never come to fruition. Syaoran's dreams of his other self were completely meaningless and indeed, were never mentioned again. Fai's past is not so much as given a blip on screen. And Sakura never comes into her own. She remains a mindless doll, a quest item repository and focus for Syaoran's affections, until the very end.
This is the number one reason why the fans of the manga reject the animated series (and why they love the OAVs, which pick up the manga storyline precisely where the B-Train anime leaves off.) Everything after this is filler and nonsense; it may be fluffy, funny, and fun to watch... but it isn't Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles any more.
In conclusion:
The Bee Train Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle series is a bad anime, and a bad adaptation of the source work. However, it did have its good points. Some changes or additions actually added to the atmosphere and gave a deeper understanding of the plot and settings. For instance, during the Jade arc of the anime, Mr. Grossum (the misunderstood philanthropist) explains that among the older-fashioned people in the country, it was considered bad luck to talk about a good thing openly or to write it down, lest the spirits get jealous of your good fortune. This had a nicely realistic feel, as well as working to explain why the town records portrayed such a warped version of Princess Emerald's work on behalf of the children.
Other changes they made were quite innovative and fitting with the theme of the series; such as the Oruha musical example mentioned above, or an action sequence added into the Piffle Dragonfly race where the gang must track down and thwart the villain who's been interfering with the race. Several times filler episodes were created that served to go back and re-examine a world they'd already been to once, like the episode revisiting Koryo. Some ideas presented in the new material -- like the concept of 'false feathers' that would then implant fake memories in Sakura's mind -- were very interesting, even if they weren't all that well handled. And some filler episodes that were made up whole cloth, despite their irrelevance to the series, were just plain hilarious and awesome, like the one with Mokona and Kero-chan, or the one where Mokona writes TRC fanfic and it somehow becomes real.
Even some changes to the canon characterization were not all bad. For example, the anime version of Kurogane shows himself several times to be a natural leader; when placed in a fighting unit or work group with other men, he quickly asserts his dominance and soon has the others doing his bidding. This is in contrast to the manga Kurogane, who's much more of a lone wolf, but it's enjoyable to watch nonetheless. And I will never get over the second anime ending credits, which provided us with an image of a teenage Fai, floating above a green meadow with a rainbow in the distance, communing with fairy animals (0:50.) So for all these things, B-Train, I thank you; to that extent my life and fandom experience has been enriched by your existence.
But I still want those twenty hours of my life back.
First of all, I have indeed seen the B-Train production of the TRC anime -- I've seen it from start to finish. Having read all of the TRC manga then out in English, I was hungry for more; and so I hung on through the entire thing even after it became apparent to me, for reasons I will detail below, that it really was as bad as I'd been warned.
I DON'T intend this essay to be an attack on anyone who likes the TRC anime, or even prefers it to the manga. The anime does have its good points, which I'll go into at the end; and ultimately, whatever its other flaws, it has a great core story. I applaud anyone who can see the shining gem of a great story hidden within its other problems.
I've been in fandoms with a manga-anime divide before, and I understand how frustrating and exasperating it can be to have other fans, the very ones who should share your likes and interests, sneer at you for your taste in media.That's not what I'm trying to do here. (For comparison's sake, you might check out my Ten Reasons Why the Fullmetal Alchemist Anime Rocks.) If anything, I intend this essay as a bridge -- a more critical analysis that will help anime watchers understand WHY people have such antipathy towards the animated adaptation.
For fans of the manga who have not seen the anime: rejoice, I watched it so you don't have to. If anyone ever asks you why you don't like it, or don't want to see it, or why they should bother to read the manga rather than just Netflixing it, and you don't want to take the time or effort to articulate yourself, point them to this article:
Ten Reasons Why The
B-Train 'Tsubasa' Anime
Really Is As
TERRIBLE
As People Say It Is
I am not the sort of viewer who demands that an adaptation be exactly the same in every detail as the original. Indeed, I find such rigorous adaptations to be pretty boring; if I love a series, I want more of what I love, not merely a rehash of the same. While I greatly enjoyed, for example, the OAVs which were later created to illustrate the Tokyo and Nihon arcs, they were so closely scripted as to be boring. Just to illustrate this fact: I am not a fluent speaker of Japanese. And yet, I watched the OAVs in the raw, without subtitles, and I was able to follow the action and understand what was going on at every moment because I had just read the manga, and every single line was the same. All I required was an occasional keyword that I recognized, and I could remember precisely what the line was from the manga. Apart from the voice acting performances (which were superb,) the OAVs did not bring anything new to the Tsubasa experience for me.
But many of the changes and additions to the B-Train adaptation were either nonsensical (they changed it for no reason, since the changed version added nothing) or just outright bad (they changed it, and the change actively detracted from the story.) There were a few changes and added elements that I liked, and some that I thought actively improved the TRC experience. But the vast majority of them were simply bad.
And even if the B-Train anime had made NO changes whatsoever to the plot, dialog, story structure or characterization, it would still be a bad anime, simply on technicals, such as:
( 1. -The animation quality. )2. -The music. Yes, the music. The gorgeous, innovative soundtrack by the lovely and talented Yuki Kajiura, composer of so many amazing soundtracks. The music I have downloaded to my computer and am listening to on iTunes even as I speak. How, you ask, could I possibly object to the music?
The answer is the exact same objection to the music in .hack//SIGN, by the same studio, and by the same composer. It's good music, but it's badly used. The music which should be background is played too loud. The musical focus pieces are repeated too often, to the point where even the exciting, gorgeous music gets repetitive and boring. Most importantly, the music is used instead of any kind of action or advancement in the series itself. There were more instances I could count where minutes of onscreen time were wasted by watching a slow pan of a still screen across a character's face, while an exciting Yuki Kajiura musical piece played in the background; punctuated every sixty seconds or so by the characters saying one or two words. (Exceptions: There were a few instances when the music was used in-universe to marvelous effect. For example, during the Outo arc, there was one scene (not in the manga) where the singer Oruha came to the Cats' Eye Cafe in order to interrogate Sakura about her purpose and motives. She used the music of a piano to hypnotize Sakura, and caused her to sing a beautiful song about a lost lover. This was a very entrancing scene, and a great use of Oruha's character.)
You might be able to get away with this sort of excessive focus and reliance on the music in a very artistic, atmosphere-based series (like, for example, Noir.) But this is an adventure-romance series. We don't turn on our TVs to watch a still pan over background music. There were even cases where music with strong vocals was being played while characters were talking, loudly enough that it interfered with their lines of dialog. This should never happen, no matter how unimpressed one might be with...
( 3. -The voice acting. )4. -The character design. While I'm perfectly willing to admit that CLAMP's current aesthetic -- commonly referred to as the "noodle people" school of character design -- is not the best of all possible worlds, B-Train's character design was no improvement. The new designs look almost cartoonishly rounded, with ears that stick out so much it's very difficult not to notice them. More importantly, each character seems to have been assigned one single expression, and are never shown with any other: goofy vapidity for Fai, doe-eyed anxiety for Sakura, stoic determination for Syaoran, and dyspeptic annoyance for Kurogane. (Okay, maybe that last one is fair.) The characters ARE capable of other emotional states, but they certainly don't ever reflect on their faces. Which nicely leads into the next point, which is...
( 5. -The characters never show any development. )
6a. -The pacing within each episode. The episodes themselves drag on far longer than necessary. There are excruciatingly long sequences in which nothing happens; the characters are merely standing around staring at each other, or regarding a static and slowly panning landscape, with brief moments of dialog but otherwise silent except for the above-mentioned background music. This got worse as the series went on; it got to the point where I was watching the series with my finger on the 2x fast-forward button, pressing 'play' when the action resumed. After a while I stopped even bothering to press 'play'.
( 6b. -The pacing between episodes. )7. -Arbitrary filler episodes. I don't object to new storylines being added as filler when they tell their own stories, but I do have a problem with filler episodes being inserted which contribute nothing to any story at all. I am not sympathetic to the consideration that they had to drag limited content out over a set number of episodes, considering that they ended up making fifty-two episodes and did not even bother to include all the content, with the last ten or so episodes being invented out of thin air.
For example: in the Hanshin arc, there is a truly bizarre episode where Sakura -- who at this point in the story is completely comatose -- inexplicably wakes up, tries on a bunch of clothes (okay, I'll give them that, THAT was in keeping with the mood of the series) and then wanders out into the city and gets lost, panicking her companions who must divert from searching for the feather to search for her. She wanders around befriending people (despite not being able to talk or... do anything) and then walks off a piece of scaffolding, flies to the ground, and falls asleep again. All without having accomplished a single thing. Why? Why? Not only was this episode pointless and failed to accomplish a single meaningful thing, but it blatantly disregards the principle of the entire story: that without her memories, Sakura is reduced to a breathing corpse. Which leads nicely into our next problem, which is...
( 8. -The anime did not respect the basic rules of the manga. )9. -The anime bent the plot around to make Syaoran the only hero.
It became pretty clear early on that B-Train were trying to make a cutesy, fluffy shounen adventure show, with Syaoran as the boy hero protagonist. If so, they really ought to have done their research and picked another manga. It's annoying, although not a deal-breaker, that they removed all the alcohol in the show and replaced it with fizzy water; or that they refused to show not only any kind of blood but indeed any sort of injury at all (leading to a very confusing sequence in the Koryo arc with a lake of acid that apparently dissolved only clothing without touching skin, and Syaoran limping around on an 'injured' leg that appeared perfectly fine.)
But the need to turn this into "The Syaoran Show" meant that the other characters were reshuffled and marginalized in order to let Syaoran have the spotlight, even in episodes where he was not necessarily the driving force in the plot. A common plot device (admittedly, CLAMP started it in Koryo, but it got very tiresome on repetition) would be for the heroes to face waves of mooks: Kurogane and Fai would remain behind to deal with lesser opponents, while Syaoran went on to face and defeat the big boss by himself, even in situations where it would have made much more sense to let the far more powerful and competent Kurogane take on those opponents.
There were even cases where Kurogane would be defeated by an opponent in battle, and then the fight would default to Syaoran, who would win by Sheer Force Of Will. Which is ridiculous; Kurogane is far more skilled and powerful than Syaoran in any kind of martial arts, and not one iota less strong-willed. It also misses the point of Kurogane's backstory, which shows us that Kurogane's exceptional strength came at the cost of his life being destroyed around him and spending the next ten years completely shutting out his humanity in order to become stronger. The whole point of Kurogane's role in the manga is that he has to learn how to be less violently awesome; that he has to learn to form relationships with other people so that he can use his incredible strength to protect those he loves.
Sakura, of course, is never given any role at all, except to swoon in Syaoran's arms with a disturbingly orgasm-like moan when he returns another feather to her. And, of course, both the decision to eliminate all blood and violence and the attempt to make Syaoran the sole hero and focus of the show became an unworkable crisis when the plot of the manga reached...
( 10. -The Tokyo Arc )10. -The Tokyo Arc
This was it. This was the big one. The deal-breaker.
This was the point where the anime stopped following the manga, and went off into never-never land. This was when the characters stopped growing, the plot stopped developing, all story coherency was thrown out the window, and the B-Train development team started making shit up out of thin air. This was where the anime stopped being Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles and started being... well, not anything, really.
In marketing terms, of course, it's understandable. They had made this show for a younger demographic, marketed it for a light tone and daytime TV slot. None of the events which took place in or after the Tokyo arc were suitable for this audience at all; there'd be no way you could get through the Tokyo Arc without showing blood, or with continuing to portray Syaoran as the hero. Faced with the decision of breaking with the manga or having to radically change their anime midstream, the developers made the decision to abandon ship.
But this change in tone was not an arbitrary mood change of CLAMPs. This was what the story had been building towards from the beginning. Breaking from the storyline, and thus abandoning all of the events that happen in the latter half of Tsubasa, didn't just mean they had to write their own ending; it meant that none of what had happened before made any sense. Fei Wong Reed was now completely pointless as a villain, since his grand plan would never come to fruition. Syaoran's dreams of his other self were completely meaningless and indeed, were never mentioned again. Fai's past is not so much as given a blip on screen. And Sakura never comes into her own. She remains a mindless doll, a quest item repository and focus for Syaoran's affections, until the very end.
This is the number one reason why the fans of the manga reject the animated series (and why they love the OAVs, which pick up the manga storyline precisely where the B-Train anime leaves off.) Everything after this is filler and nonsense; it may be fluffy, funny, and fun to watch... but it isn't Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles any more.
In conclusion:
The Bee Train Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle series is a bad anime, and a bad adaptation of the source work. However, it did have its good points. Some changes or additions actually added to the atmosphere and gave a deeper understanding of the plot and settings. For instance, during the Jade arc of the anime, Mr. Grossum (the misunderstood philanthropist) explains that among the older-fashioned people in the country, it was considered bad luck to talk about a good thing openly or to write it down, lest the spirits get jealous of your good fortune. This had a nicely realistic feel, as well as working to explain why the town records portrayed such a warped version of Princess Emerald's work on behalf of the children.
Other changes they made were quite innovative and fitting with the theme of the series; such as the Oruha musical example mentioned above, or an action sequence added into the Piffle Dragonfly race where the gang must track down and thwart the villain who's been interfering with the race. Several times filler episodes were created that served to go back and re-examine a world they'd already been to once, like the episode revisiting Koryo. Some ideas presented in the new material -- like the concept of 'false feathers' that would then implant fake memories in Sakura's mind -- were very interesting, even if they weren't all that well handled. And some filler episodes that were made up whole cloth, despite their irrelevance to the series, were just plain hilarious and awesome, like the one with Mokona and Kero-chan, or the one where Mokona writes TRC fanfic and it somehow becomes real.
Even some changes to the canon characterization were not all bad. For example, the anime version of Kurogane shows himself several times to be a natural leader; when placed in a fighting unit or work group with other men, he quickly asserts his dominance and soon has the others doing his bidding. This is in contrast to the manga Kurogane, who's much more of a lone wolf, but it's enjoyable to watch nonetheless. And I will never get over the second anime ending credits, which provided us with an image of a teenage Fai, floating above a green meadow with a rainbow in the distance, communing with fairy animals (0:50.) So for all these things, B-Train, I thank you; to that extent my life and fandom experience has been enriched by your existence.
But I still want those twenty hours of my life back.
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