The anime had that shot of Otose earlier on, dialogue-less. In the scene itself they replaced it with a birds-eye view of Gintoki and Jirochou. I can perfectly understand the reasoning: We have already seen Otose, we don’t need to see her again, but what we do need to see, is how exactly Gintoki and Jirochou stand in relation to each other.
The order of last two shots got shuffled too. Probably because the shot right after that is Gintoki swinging his sword, which nicely breaks up the peace of Jirochou smoking his pipe.
Both methods of showing the action are effective for their respective mediums.
In this case, nothing can rival the detail of the manga version. Not even eye close-ups.
Here the anime diverges a bit and slightly extends the fight. The reason is the fact that the mediums of anime and manga are fundamentally different. Fights in manga are not about fight choreography (the pages are static, the characters aren’t actually moving, and a comic is not a storyboard for an anime), not about showing off fluid animation, and definitely not about common sense.
When a character blocks a punch in a comic, it’s not because that punch just so happened to be easy to block, but because the author needed to evoke a specific reaction from the reader, and so that punch had to be blocked. And when a punch lands on target, it happens not because it was a good punch, but because it had to land to evoke a particular reaction from the audience. And this is true for every single move in a fight. Fights in comics are short, but they always seem so much longer, because every punch and every kick means something, and provokes an emotional reaction. Anime, on the other hand, can go off on useless tangents and let the viewers enjoy the movement of the characters and the camera.
I like the bit where Jirochou charges at Gintoki. A good example of the anime improving on the manga.
The build-up of the anime version makes the scene more suspenseful, more dramatic, and much more effective. In the manga, with that panel squeezed into a corner, the breaking of Gintoki’s sword seems almost trivial, while the anime milks the scene for all it’s worth.
The manga version is almost hilarious with Jirochou’s lack of reaction to being stabbed. In the anime, on other hand, it’s DRAMA TIME! Anime also has a much better choice of a camera angle.
The manga version has a serious build-up-deficit. May have something to do with the fact that the author rarely draws serious action scenes.
I prefer the anime’s more up-close-and-personal approach. Also, the manga author constantly does the mistake of assuming that you can only use one panel to show one thing. Not so. You can show one thing by using as many panels as needed.
Generally, the anime of Gintama will always inevitably be an improvement on the manga, because even though Sorachi is a really good writer, he’s not a very good artist. That’s especially visible with his really bad use of sfx, which tend to be so prominent in the panels, they distract from the drawings themselves, which also tend to be quite confusing.
Some people read manga and end up coming out with an impression that manga fights are always a difficult thing to figure out, but the thing is, if the reader finds it difficult to follow the action, then it’s not the fault of the medium, it’s the fault of the author. The fights in Gintama manga make my head spin, but I never had any trouble figuring things out when reading Bleach, for example. Kubo may not draw backgrounds, but he knows how to draw a sword-fight right.
So what is it that Sorachi is doing so wrong? If we ignore the anatomy mistakes, the frequent lack of build-up and the intrusive sfx, then it’s probably the fact that his panels lack a sense of movement and flow. Funnily enough, another mangaka who is a better writer than artist, the author of Historie, also has the same problem. It’s this movement and flow that Kubo gets right in Bleach, his characters are static drawings on a page, but they are always drawn in a manner so full of force, they almost seem to be moving, and you don’t need to try to figure anything out, it’s all clearly visible on the page.
Another shounen author good at this sort of thing is Toriyama, except that he goes up to the next level, and some of the panels in Dragon Ball are pretty much visual poetry: you don’t just understand in which direction a character is swirling in the air, but they almost seem to be taking you with themselves. Vinland Saga has even more of that sort of thing than Dragon Ball.
Anyway, I’ve been watching this fight over and over, rewinding and rewinding it, but now that I took all those screen-shots and did a comparison with the manga, all the magic is gone for me. This is totally the last time I’m doing this sort of thing.
<- Here’s an example of a panel that is closed off from all sides, and a panel that “bleeds off” to the bottom of the page.
