Tag: anime

Undead Unluck Anime Adaptation Confirmed?

Tiberius1 Comment

An obscure manga may be due for an obscure anime adaptation.

Currently on vacation so this might be a quick post with little detail. The end summary will make all the difference.

In January of 2020 whilst browsing the Shonen Jump section of viz.com, I was introduced to that month’s debut manga called Undead Unluck. It opens with our character Fuuko Izumo finishing a romance manga and then declaring to the public that she will end her own life. Dramatic? Yes, but she does have an explanation for this. When she physically interacts with people, the person who touched her suffers a proportional amount of misfortune depending on how long, how she was touched, and with what. Brushing up against someone while navigating a crowded train might delay service; prolonged skin-to-skin contact meanwhile means unimaginably bad luck from an injury to a life-altering injury to sometimes death. And it can range from coincidentally realistic to balls to deez nuts ridiculous.

During this confrontation, the second of the titular duo, named Andy, strikes up a conversation and is initially repelled by Fuuko with the same hostility she showed to the others in the vicinity. He falls onto an incoming train and his body cracks the window, but he legit walks it off. Yep. Remember in Naruto when the Leaf ninja were sent to dispose of Hidan, but were continually baffled by his refusal to keel over? It was kind of like that, only Andy hasn’t seen the light of Jashin yet.

And this is how the manga begins. Fuuko begins it wishing to end her life and so does Andy, but his problem is he’s basically Hidan or Deadpool with different rules. As the manga goes along, it’s revealed piecemeal that Andy has a lot of baggage from his life, and he hopes to reach his goal of sweet death by wooing Fuuko along the way. The proportionality is no joke. If intimate contact can topple a building without warning, then according to Andy, rounding third base especially with no condoms should bring about the intensity of Fimbulwinter. Basically, they’re both hoping to go out with a bang. No pun intended.

Fuuko’s and Andy’s abilities of misfortune and immortality surprisingly don’t make them all that special as there are others with similar supernatural abilities that are described as a single word but with the prefix Un- in front of it. Undead, unluck, unbreakable, unjust, untruth, unknown, that sort of thing. It’s a bizarre, indescribable manga that’s best experienced by reading it. I recall going to the Viz Media website to read a chapter weekly that year as the pandemic intensified. In the summer of 2021, this became unachievable as my brief experience with Army basic training by nature limited my access to technology, and keeping up with the outside world doesn’t happen during basic training. After returning from that experience, I found trouble keeping up with the manga as I’d missed so much. These days, I tune in a few times to see what’s going on. I’ll be missing context from one or five or an entire volume’s worth of chapters, but it’s still good reading and reading between the lines as well as a summary from the wiki can help.

Fast-forward to January of this year, and I learn that along the horizon, an anime adaptation is on the table.

Normally, when it comes to burgeoning manga that I lay my eyes on, I’m a historically terrible judge of character. Some manga I wanted to succeed get cancelled twenty chapters in, and others I don’t pay much attention to seem to blow up overnight. Everyone knows who Loid, Yor, and Anya all are because Spy x Family is a massive hit with a solid adaptation to boot, but I’m pretty sure only seven people will have ever heard of Black Torch or Time Paradox Ghostwriter, and I’m one of those seven.

It’s one thing to misjudge the success of something, but this one seems to be completely out of left field until you see what studio is said to be captaining the ship. It’s the same one that fixed with A.P.P.P. broke in the 1990s, the one that got a legendary underground manga to go mainstream for the first time in almost 25 years, the same one that copied Hokuto no Ken‘s homework. You know the one.

Yes, if things go as planned and Undead Unluck goes from print to animation cel to pirate streaming site, David Production will take full responsibility for converting more anime onlies to another underground manga. David Pro has a set standard for adaptations. JoJo’s shown above and Fire Force are the only two anime that I know they worked on, but the quality of both speaks for themselves. The adaptation of Part 6 Stone Ocean can be seen as controversial within the JoJo community over the amount of CG in select episodes coupled with Netflix’s outdated batch release formula that may or may not have influenced the direction of the adaptation. The same can be said about Fire Force’s fanservice, but above all, save for a few tweaks and changes from manga panel to animation cel is nearly 1 to 1. And there’s normally an explanation for a change anyway.

Actually, changes in continuity aren’t all that uncommon or interesting when it comes to an adaptation of anything. It mostly only matters if the adaptation and the source material are on different wavelengths. For Undead Unluck, I can expect the anime to be as faithful to the manga as possible with a few changes here and there. As of writing this, YouTube and Google feed me articles and teasers with short scenes and demos of the anime to come with no real word on the adaptation to speak of in any significant detail. This can be understandable or suspicious depending on several factors. In the gaming-sphere, all the scrutiny goes to the studio and its leadership if all their hard work is shown in a pre-rendered trailer that fakes the intensity of an upcoming video game.

But anime is more or less forgiven considering how dungeon-esque working conditions can look for animators, as well as studios being notoriously tightlipped about the quality of scenes who draws them all. It’s no secret that the folks at Wit, SHAFT, Aniplex, MAPPA, Pierrot, et al outsource some of their work to Good Korea, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, but whether your favorite arc is being drawn by Saigonese Gustav Klimt or the water buffalo filling in for him while he battles a case of ligma is up in the air. r/Boruto just found out why the anime’s been getting a glow up in recent episodes and it’s not just because Eida is a sexy she-devil. If what they say is true, then the Boruto anime might’ve been used for trainees from other studios.

But as I stated before, David Pro is on the case and living up to their goal of being like their biblical namesake, I don’t expect them to miss a beat. I’ll try my best to keep an eye out for more news on Unkillable + Unfortunate.

Boruto: Timeskip Prospects

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The sequel series with a ginormous precedent to live up to

I was originally going to speculate on what the timeskip in the Boruto series would entail, but thanks to leaks provided by Twitter user @Abdul_S17, which have also been passed onto r/Boruto on reddit, this may be a brief post with not as much to say about what happens going forward, or rather, the unpredictable nature of the series makes this very hard, so I’ll try my best with the informaton given. Though I think there’s a few elephants to address regarding the Boruto series. In support of the sequel to Naruto, there’s loads of details that Naruto fans often forget or throw by the wayside. When the Boruto anime debuted in 2017, I recalled a detail that was mentioned in passing, but nonetheless mentioned the death of a major character, and so when it came to it, binging all of Naruto and Shippuden up until that point provided as much context as I could need to make sense of this seemingly unimportant line. This probably gives me the best understanding of the Narutoverse as a whole, the internal politics therein, etc., etc.

That being said, it’s not like Boruto doesn’t have it’s criticisms, and picking apart the worthless drivel from the valid points, Talk no Jutsu or not, if it was Naruto becoming Hokage instead of Konohamaru under the hood of a Transformation Jutsu, rest assured the Orange Hokage would’ve had a way more heartfelt ceremony. Also, regardless of all the money that comes with being affiliated with Naruto, if the Boruto manga was planned better, there probably would’ve been less filler even if the writers can magic it into the plot all the same. The showrunners seem to have fallen for one of the few things that can happen when a manga and anime run concurrent, as explained by a genius in the link below:

A problem inherited by Naruto and other anime adaptations beginning in the early to mid-2000s. And the worst case scenario would be what happened with the Fate franchise, but at least the Big Three have a consistent timeline.

Anyway, the Boruto manga’s next chapter is scheduled for release on February 20, and the leaks tell us how Boruto got the scar that his older self will have in the big brawl against Kawaki. All that’s missing now is the cloak and the sword. If you’ve been reading or watching or both, you know that Boruto has become Sasuke’s pupil and over time gets his old scratched headband as a memento. During the story, a mission to transport a Leaf village scientist to a research facility changes halfway and the new Team 7 is rerouted to assist with a zeppelin crash in the forest transporting autonomous puppets. As it turns out, this was the property of the dangerous group known as Kara and a couple members were sent to intercept.

A familiar face shows himself to keep the secrets from getting out. When that fails, Boruto, Sarada, and Mitsuki, learn that amongst the precious cargo was a boy known as Kawaki whom Kara planned on using as a vital tool. Now that he’s in Leaf Village hands, he’s under the sworn protection of the Hokage, and the troubled kid becomes utterly attached to Naruto, enough that the immediate threat of the Ohtsutsuki clan and its still living members is still felt even close to home.

Multiple attempts and failures to retrieve Kawaki become progressively destructive. Meanwhile, the karma seal on both Kawaki’s and Boruto’s palms begins to resonate and even strengthen at imprecise moments. The flashback in the beginning show that they can both activate it on command, but Boruto as a kid isn’t there yet. The more recent chapters show that whenever Boruto spends most of his chakra or loses control, his karma seal which has the memories of the Ohtsutsuki that Boruto defeated, Momoshiki, activates and Momo’s memories take over his body. Kawaki attempted to remedy this condition with entropy, but Momo, not content on losing his vessel, repairs Boruto’s body.

A cryptic message he gave to Hokage’s son about his blue eyes taking everything he cherished from him starts to come true. At the same time, one of Kara’s worst members, Code, is hellbent on living up to the Ohtsutsuki name by carrying on the will of its old leader Jigen, who was really the vessel of Isshiki Ohtsutsuki. So to summarize it: Code is in one corner hoping to become an Ohtsutsuki with all that comes with it, Kawaki seeks to destroy all Ohtsutsuki, and Boruto wants to get rid of the karma seal on his hand, and these goals all stand in the way of each other with progressively destructive consequences to boot.

I remember being floored by the destruction showcased in the first episode flashforward scene. Until we see the extent of the damage, it’s likely not on the same level as Pain’s Almighty Push.

Then again, them being the only two in the scene on the destroyed Hokage faces says quite a lot doesn’t it.

Now that the scene is set, I want to get a few predictions for what might happen. Spoiler for the leaks shared online, Kawaki gifts Boruto the scar, and is apprehended by Sasuke, Mitsuki, and Konohamaru. After that, I can expect Kakashi to come by as he too lost his eye in his youth and was given a teammate’s notorious Kekkei Genkai lost in the aftermath of the Fourth Ninja War.

In this case, the same may be true for Boruto as he has an ability known as the Jougan. It was originally meant to be the Byakugan, but Kishimoto forgot about that even though there’s a sketch of him with the Hyuga clan’s signature eyes. In the world of Naruto, when a nonmember of a specific clan’s Kekkei Genkai, it’s active for good. There’s no way to turn it off whatsoever, else Kakashi and Danzo wouldn’t have had to make use of eyepatches when they both had theirs.

The jougan activates immediately and the last page shows a glimpse of Momo taking another W for his predictions coming true. Going forward, extra training from Sasuke with some of Kakashi’s input can be expected as both do or used to live with only one normal functioning eye. One thing I didn’t mention was Kawaki trapping Naruto and Hinata in another dimension so that they don’t stand in his way when goes for Boruto again. Soon after being placed under the strictest detention possible, most likely at the behest of Shikamaru, the Leaf Village is gonna demand he release Naruto and Hinata and then keep him under wraps while they deal with Code, and two more Kara members, Eida and her brother Daemon.

As for Boruto, if Kawaki doesn’t comply, then it might fall on Boruto to do so and with less experience than his adoptive brother. The extra training might be signs of a timeskip, but with Kara showing off it’s most overpowered members and keeping them around for a fair bit, it might result in something different. Maybe another flashforward is in order, but again, can’t really tell all that well.

That aside, I recall that Boruto claimed he wanted to be a ninja like Sasuke is in the sense that he protects the village from afar while the Hokage spot goes to Sarada in the future. He seems to be turning into his idol though of course not precisely. Scarred headband, special eye jutsu, currently missing his parents, bearing a curse mark awarded by a pale-skinned enemy, and also under his possession at times, and set to gain a cloak and sword. Holy shit, Boruto is becoming his idol. Let’s have a look.

Of course, Boruto will still have both of his arms, but my point stands: Boruto, by accident or intent, is going to turn into Sasuke, a different type of Shippuden Sasuke. At least that’s what I see, and if it turns out to be true, then awesome. If not, then I’ll wait for Ikemoto and Kishimoto to keep going while I eat a bag of Ligma.

This week’s channel recommendation is TheAlmightyLoli. If you’re looking for a pop culture reviewer with a slice of edge coupled with a passioned understanding of the material at hand look no further. Loli’s style of reviewing and comedy can hit you in the mouth, and his style is an acquired taste, but for those who stick by, there’s never a dull moment. This channel dedicated hours of content to recounting Berserk in honor of Kentaro Miura who sadly died before he could finish the work, though one of his assistant’s, Koji Mori, is picking up where Miura left off at.

If you can sit through days’ worth of content on a single dark fantasy manga that continues to influence the industry to this day, sprinkled in with some other stuff, TheAlmightyLoli’s YouTube channel is linked down below along with the ways to support him on his about section.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheAlmightyLoli/featured