TOILET BOUND HANAKO-KUN is an expensive picture drama (hereafter referred to as "Hanako-kun")

The very first episode of Hanako-kun made me instantly aware that I was not going to have a great time when its animation reminded me a lot of the 1 1/2 episodes of another show I watched, Hakumei and Mikochi. I tried watching that show back in 2018 shortly after it finished airing and while it had quite a lot of beautifully illustrated frames, everything connecting those frames was a grating experience. I have since confirmed that both shows were helmed by studio Lerche and directed by one Masaomi Andou so I felt confident in my first impression.

To not be completely negative right off, I do like some parts of Hanako-kun. I like the bright contrasting colors and cutesy character designs with bold outlines, which feel rare in modern anime. I like stories about characters of wildly different persuasion and experience developing camaraderie and trust with each other. I have no issue watching cute characters experiencing emotional distress. And of course I always appreciate Megumi Ogata when she shows up for voice work.

Character writing is a major priority for me in fiction of any sort. If I like even one major character I will tolerate just about any production shortcomings or writing nonsense to get to hang out with them. The characters in Hanako-kun are, fine. They're cute. I don't feel very strongly about them. I like the moments where the writing threatens to make Hanako a morally complex character. I wish Nene got to have more narrative agency as she's mostly just pulled along for the ride. It's all fairly inoffensive stuff.

Partway through an early episode of Hanako-kun I decided to pop open the first manga volume and find where it was adapting. This was not very hard as I found the panel that looks identicle in composition to the frame I was paused at. I rewatched the scene and was shocked to realize that the whole anime was storyboarded directly out of the manga. Every panel is simplified, colorized, and then gently rigged to suggest a continuity of action between them.

I enjoyed the few chapters of the manga I read and while I do think the visual design of the anime is nice, it doesn't hold a candle to the delicate and lacy linework in the manga. The anime character designs feel almost rubbery in contrast. The manga has all the same gags and developments but paced and prioritized in a way that feels organic and snappy. I could easily read a couple volumes in a sitting and have at least a decent time.

Because of its stationery nature, manga artists have many tools to approximate the experience of a continuity of action with panel size, page layout, abstract visual indicators like smears and action lines. Normally when adapting printed comic media to animation these are replaced or reworked with animation techniques, like, animating the clearly implied action. This is not what Hanako-kun does. It straight up recreates the manga techniques because it is just remaking the panels without regard for their intended meaning. Sure, plenty of anime comedy and parody stuff will do this When It's Funny, the problem is that it is being done for every single shot and in place of properly animating Anything.

The way I understand adaptation is also how I feel about translation. To transmute a story from one form factor to another requires a lot of creative decisions. There is no machine process to create a definitive adaptation. Faithfulness is ultimately a value judgement on the part of the transmuter. You can decide to "directly" translate the literal lines and words on a page and probably end up with something clunky and unnatural, or you can decide that being faithful means seeking to evoke the same feelings of the original with all the tools and techniques that the new language, or medium, enables. There are a lot of decisions that needed to be made so that Hanako-kun could exist as an anime and the majority of them were dictated by a misguided textual faithfulness and the confines of a low slack tv animation production pipeline.

All art has to compromise to exist, commercial art even more so. I have no issue with an animation production using stylized shortcuts to bring down the labor needed to get it finished. I love a lot of the visual effects and abstraction that many studio SHAFT productions utilize to make something that looks impressive but doesn't require a ton of intricate bespoke animation. I love how in classic Anno Gainax productions they play around with the physical medium, KareKano inserts manga pages to craft scenes that feels especially silly and manic. Animation is illusion, and I am always seeking out a well rendered illusion. The issue I take with Hanako-kun is that the entire work is all shortcuts, all compromise. If anything the impressive visual design only further condemns the animation, it would be financially Impossible in the modern tv anime industry to properly animate something that looks like this. It exists in the form that it does out of necessity and misplaced priority.

But as much as the production of the anime holds back its story, it's not really a story that would engage me for very long. I see through its overplayed kids media formula and recognize that Hanako-kun is foremost a muted gag comedy that crams in slivers of mystery, action, drama, romance, and what passes for "shock value" in a kids show and it ultimately does not have the space to do any of these aspects well. There is of course no crime in a kids' show being made to appeal to kids. As an adult, I've watched and greatly enjoyed many animated shows for 11 year olds. I accept their limitations, but I know they can be quite a bit better than this and that children deserve better art.