The Light Novel Quality Boom
I’ve noticed that recently a significant majority of the anime series I’ve enjoyed most are based on light novels—Spice and Wolf, Baccano!, and Toradora, to name a few (the first two of those were both winners of the Dengeki Novel Prize, in fact). Novel-based anime is nothing new—Vampire Hunter D and The Dirty Pair are both based on novels. But, when I look at older stuff, a much larger percentage seems to be based on manga than is the case now. And even if the ratio hasn’t changed, I can say for sure that the proportion of good prose-based anime to bad is markedly better than that of good manga-based anime.
Which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense; assuming most up-and-coming manga artists write their own material (which seems to be generally if not universally true of Japanese mangaka), someone who is a good artist but mediocre storyteller is a whole lot more likely to get published than someone who’s a good storyteller but mediocre artist. In contrast, if you’re a novelist, the only thing you’ve got to be good at is spinning a yarn.
So, since most anime draws from either manga or novels as source material, the anime that draws from manga is, on average, going to be drawing from a pool with a significant percentage of things that got popular due to what they look like more than their story. Novel-based anime, however, is almost by definition going to be based on something with a worthy story. And, since you’re going to have a team of professional artists working on the anime either way, the novel-based material is going to have the upper hand in everything but a foundation in visual storytelling. Light novels are an additional advantage versus “heavy” novels, in that they tend to be shorter and less intellectual, which is going to translate more readily into a TV format. They also have accompanying illustrations already extant, so there is some visual identity to build off of.
Obviously there are plenty of great manga-based anime series, and novel-based duds (say, Kanokon), but on average it makes sense to me that novel-based anime has the statistical upper hand when it comes to telling a compelling story. Which is why I’m glad to see more and more anime based on light novels—bodes well for the future of the medium, and industry.
In terms of hard numbers, skimming through my personal list of five-star anime, I see four based on manga, six original concepts, and  a whopping eight based on novels of one sort or another. That compares to zero based on novels in the 2-star range. My personal top ten contains two novel adaptations, three manga adaptations, and the remainder are anime originals—less impressive, but still skewed heavily away from manga.
As an aside, what the heck is a “light novel,” anyway? The page count and physical size isn’t significantly different from “heavy” novels, and it’s not that unusual for Japanese novels to have a few illustrations, so I suppose it has more to do with the general style of a series of shorter stories spread across a number of books, as opposed to single, tightly-packed, standalone stories. You could also make the argument that light novels are targeted at a demographic and style usually served by anime and manga, but that’s a little unfair to the medium (not to mention rather meaningless, if you factor in josei and seinen adult-targeted manga—all you’ve ruled out as an audience are old-timers). The genre is probably most closely paralleled by the Borders category “young adult” fiction, though it’s not a perfect match.
If you believe the US publisher of the Boogiepop novels, Boogiepop is what got the light novel trend started back in 1998, and even if not there’s another great series based on novels rather than manga. That date also aligns with the increase in such novels and their anime spinoffs since.
October 28th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Some time ago,I read a light novel called “A Wind Named Amnesia.” It was written by a man whose name I can’t spell. I’d seen the anime and it felt a little like the novel. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about,the story’s about a guy that wanders through a world where everyone has lost their memories about civilization. In effect,they’ve reverted to cavemen.
Here’s the strange thing. Both the novel and anime are set in the United States. One question I have is why? Why did the author set his story in this country? He could have just as easily set it in Japan. Why America? I don’t know and I wish that someone would tell me why.
October 29th, 2010 at 11:53 am
I haven’t read any comments by the writer with a definitive answer, so I’m of course just speculating, but the reason seems pretty obvious–America is very large and a lot more sparsely populated.
Given that Japan is a small country–roughly similar to the state of California–is mountainous, and doesn’t have a great diversity of climates, a similar story involving a lengthy journey would have been restricted to traversing the main island at best. The readers would also be familiar with the geography, so the author would be under more pressure to have the locales match up with real places.
In the US you can have sequences of driving hundreds of miles across the great plains–which Japan has nothing remotely equivalent to–and arbitrary cities without worrying too much that the intended audience has any idea where this stuff is. Even US readers who don’t live in the midwest wouldn’t have trouble mentally filling in random cities without thinking about it. There’s also the fact that the US is a lot more likely to have been the cause of humanity getting “reset” by aliens like that than Japan, so that’s where the observer would be, and most people wouldn’t believe that Japan had developed robotic killing machines that have gone rogue and stalk the countryside. Having it in the US also gives it more of a feeling of it being the world at large that’s been affected, since from Japan’s perspective the US is roughly equal to “everywhere else.”
Were I writing a similar story I’d set it in either the US, Russia, or China, and both of the latter choices are worse on account of having their populations heavily concentrated in the west and east, respectively.