Kamikaze Kaitou JeanneFollow

Watching this shoujo classic for the first time. It's disappointing how much different the anime is from the manga. They took a plot heavy, condensed 7 volume series, and turned it into a 44 episode Sailor Moon clone.

Kusakabe Maron is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, who has been conscripted by the Lower Angel Finn Fish to seal demons. Unfortunately, the demons have a habit of hiding in precious works of art, so Maron must become the Holy Thief, Jeanne, in order to do God's work. Her life is complicated by the fact that her best friend is the daughter of the local chief of polite, her next door neighbor Chiaki is a player, and she has a mysterious rival that Finn believes is working for the devil.

(In typical shoujo fashion, things are not what they seem and the series takes a major gut-wrenching plot twist halfway through. In the manga, there is sex, rape, violence, death, and a few other rather adult things. They toned it down waaaaay too much for the anime.)

If you ever want to watch the anime series, do yourself a favor and skip the following episodes:

2-3
6
8
10-11
13-14
18
24-26

That's right. You can skip almost HALF of Season 1 and not miss a thing. They're all anime-only "monster of the week" plots designed to stretched out the first few volumes of the manga into 27 episodes. Only episode #15 came straight from the manga, whole and intact.

In Season 2, they tangled a lot more of the plot into each episode, but still managed to horribly ***** up the manga and leave out all the cool mind-f*cky stuff. And it DOES get really cool. I'm upset I waited this long to read the series! The manga isn't a Sailor Moon clone, unlike the anime...

In fact, skip the anime and just read the manga. The characters in the anime are supposedly 16-17 but the anime was clearly aimed toward selling toys to 7 year old girls.

Edit: Can skip 31-32 in the 2nd season.

Edited, Oct 8th 2010 12:36am by catwho

Yeah, I had a friend who burned the first few books of the manga on a CD for me, like 7 or 8 years ago. I really enjoyed it but never got around to finding the rest of it. I had no idea it got so dark later on. Hell, I didn't even know they made it into an anime either.