Navigating through Neo Venezia once again, Akari and friends discover more of their city of wonders.
Creative Staff
Writer/Artist: Kozue Amano
Translation: Elina Ishikawa
Adaptation: Nikhil Burman
What They Say
Spring has come again and Akari now welcomes the start of her second year on Aqua. In the spirit of new beginnings, Akari sees a mysterious woman with a spectacular voice while helping the company president run some errands. Who is this person and what does she have to do with Alice? A fateful encounter, perhaps?
The Review!
Content:
In the normal course of receiving review materials from TOKYOPOP, we rarely used to get anything past first volumes. That changed recently and we've gotten some books mid series, including Aria. Having watched the anime that's available, I decided to give this a whirl to see how it is. Having the familiarity of the anime series certainly makes this easy to get into, but that familiarity is a double edged sword as well because it's so well adapted that very little here is actually new.
The world of Aria is one of slow and simple examination of the small things in life. This volume spreads its focus across a couple of the characters, but primarily with Akari. Her training is continuing apace and she has some very nice stories here that get her and the reader all the more familiar with Neo Venezia. One story involves her doing her daily solo practice with the mailman working with her as his gondola is being serviced. Since it's not a job she's performing, she can get away with it, and through it we get to see more parts of the city and realize the power and importance of a written letter over email and other instant communication methods. It pushes the important idea of taking time to smell the roses, but in a writing format.
Another tale that I liked a lot has Akari spending time waiting for Alicia who is in a gondola meeting. She settles into a little outdoor cafe in San Marco square and soaks up the atmosphere, which includes meeting an older man who knows just about everything about the area. What's interesting and amusing about the square is that there's a focus on avoiding the shadows that fall on the customers there as there is an old tradition about how it affects the wine. Akari spends the day there, drinking quite a few lattes, but she stays true to her view of the world by enjoying every quiet moment and learning more about her adopted city and its history. It's a story that really enhances the quality of Neo Venezia in a fascinating way.
If there's a tale in here that's not quite up to the same speed, it's the one that involves Alice. I don't dislike Alice, but some of her slightly surly personality annoys me at times. She and Akari end up staying at Alice's place in the Orange Planet Company where she meets her roommate, one of the Three Fairies known as Athena. Athena has a different personality than Alice but she has the same effect with me in that she's unapproachable, which is quite different from the other Fairies. The two chapters that deal with Alice and Athena and the extra training that Akari gets through the Orange Planet Company are weak pieces here because those characters aren't easy to connect with because of how they have a certain distance from everyone.
The best character in the book continues to be the city of Neo Venezia itself. Having fallen in love with it in the anime, I really wanted to see how detailed the manga version is. There's an incredible amount of detail in this book with so many scenes featuring rich backgrounds. The world the characters inhabit is filled with little things that makes it look lived in, but the exteriors are just as rich as well. It has such a sense of place and self that it's a city you can easily imagine living in and seeing everything in the book there in reality and just as detailed. Some of the larger panels of the city exterior feel hampered at times, where Amano provides only the top half of a double page spread for something, when you would want to see it take up an entire double page spread so as to slow you down to really soak it in. Instead, you end up drawn to the panels below it to follow the dialogue and story.
In Summary:
Aria is an utterly charming show and I was really curious to see how the manga was. Going into the book, which is largely made up of unconnected chapters for the most part, reflects much of what I found in the anime series and it's very obvious the anime adapted it well. The manga does have a very strong charm of its own, but I can't help but to feel that the series really would make out better in its original magazine with larger pages and easier to spread double page segments. The lack of color pages hurts here as well since there's a soft look to those areas, but it's to be expected. In the end, this book has five very good chapters of the young women trying to become Undines and doing all that they can while soaking in the beautiful city they live in.
And yes, TOKYOPOP, I demand Aria plushies as Amano discusses in the extras in this volume. I can only imagine the twenty five of them as talked about in a row...
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