Warning! Contains spoilers for Akane-Banashi Chapter 43!
Whenever a great manga debuts in the pages of Shonen Jump readers will begin to speculate about whether it will get an anime adaptation and if so when. But the newcomer Akane-Banashi by Yuki Suenaga and Takamasa Moue is great in ways that will make it impossible to animate. The story follows Akane as she attempts to become a Rakugo master and realize her father’s crushed dream. The manga has shown this multiple times this year, easily becoming one of the best new manga of 2022. But the best example of this comes in its most recent chapter.
In Chapter 43, Akane watches the performance of a Rakugo phenom named Rokuro, who has been christened “The Wonder Child”. His performance makes it clear why. Rokuro perfectly matches his tone and cadence to that of a Coltrane jazz performance, bringing to mind a band of instruments using solely his voice. But suddenly, he gets aggressive, turning his words into an attack that barrages the audience with an overwhelming display of force. The manga depicts this expertly by having his words scroll out of his mouth like the opening credits of a Star Wars movie and actually extending beyond the confines of the panels. It is a creative visual trick that only really works in the context of a manga page, which would make it incredibly hard for an anime adaptation to capture. But his performance also hints at another aspect of Akane-Banashi that would be difficult to translate to screen.
Rakugo is a Japanese performance art that consists of a lone performer telling a traditional story without props. It is a very difficult art form to master, as the performer must conjure up a story for their audience using solely their voice and body language. In Akane-Banashi, this is illustrated through visual metaphors representing a given performer’s unique qualities and techniques. In a way, the fact that the reader can’t actually hear the performances themselves helps them get more invested in the story as it is easier to suspend their disbelief and imagine that the performances truly are as good as the manga claims. An Akane-Banashi anime would have a more difficult time with this.
Akane-Banashi's Rakugo Performances Are Impossible to Animate
In the anime adaptation of Rokuro’s performance, the voice actor portraying him would have to match their vocal patterns to the musical metaphor the manga describes. This is not impossible, but it does introduce another element that could take the audience out of the story. If a viewer doesn’t think Rokuro’s voice actor actually lives up to how Akane-Banashi describes him, then the entire scene could be ruined for them. And the subtle touches that work so well in the manga, like Rokuro’s speech being presented as a wall of text would have to be absent as they would be impossible to adapt to screen. All this makes this chapter almost impossible to adapt well in an anime.
All this isn’t to say that an anime adaptation of the series would automatically be terrible. Akane-Banashi's overall story is superb and there is no shortage of talented voice actors in Japan who could play the Rakugo performers. But Akane-Banashi’s Rakugo performances themselves will likely never be able to live up to the high standard of excellence the Shonen Jump series has set, making the manga the best way to consume its story.
Akane-Banashi is available to read from Viz Media.