“In the future, boys will be boys and girls will be robots!”
“A story of love, dreams, and perseverance.”
“Slowly, Satou comes out of his reclusive shell, and his hilarious journey begins, filled with mistaken identity, Lolita complexes—and an ultimate quest to create the greatest hentai game ever!”
The above quotes are taken from an ad for Chobits, an ad for The Story of Saiunkoku, and the official synopsis of Welcome to the NHK, respectively. And while they’ve all got a certain catchiness or punch to them, anyone who’s seen these shows will tell you that, while the words in each are on some level true, they don’t really convey the complete appeal or feel of their stories.
I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this, other than the general sense that companies advertise their own anime and manga poorly, but maybe that’s merely by my own standards. I do fear that there is always a very real chance that because of the misleading advertising that it might lead some people to miss a show they might otherwise watch, or might lead to misunderstandings when a show doesn’t do well. To use a non-anime example, Avatar: The Last Airbender was marketed as if it were for young kids, but the story was sophisticated enough that it would at the very least be more suitable for young adult viewers. And, surprise, that’s where a lot of its hardcore fanbase is. First Gundam also had a similar problem where its initial run in Japan was not successful but when it caught the attention of older (as in older than 10) viewers, it picked up steam.
Is it all right to, in some sense, trick people into reading your book or watching your show? Is it simply a case that if you told most people that Saiunkoku was like, political shoujo, that it would turn most people away? Is this why Honey and Clover appears in Shoujo Beat when it’s targeted towards older female readers?
In that respect, does this sort of thing actually work? Is it actually pulling in new people who would be turned away from these works normally? Or is it perhaps turning people away who would otherwise be interested in reading the somewhat depressing story of a drug-abusing shut-in who feels his life is all but worthless?
OGIUE MANIAX 
[i]Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou[/i] — a post-apocalyptic tale of lesbian biker robots with guns.
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Speaking as someone who’s worked in marketing– it is REALLY REALLY HARD to convey anything remotely meaningful about a series in one short, catchy sentence.
It is also completely, vitally important…because if you can grab the reader, you can get them to read on and get more info. (Or in some cases, get ’em to buy it without reading on, but eh.)
Anyone who’s ever twittered knows how hard it is to convey anything significant in a very limited space, and also knows how incredibly approachable something quick and catchy can be.
So, yeah…it’s an eternal struggle. Some people are better at it than others…that Saiunkoku one, sorry to say, is incredibly boring. Show me a story that DOESN’T involve love, dreams, and/or perseverence. It’s basically meaningless.
The first one is cute; that kind of kitschy line can draw some, but repel others. When I worked at animeOnline, Rob Bricken and I would throw headlines back and forth at each other. He favored lines taken from famous quotes, titles, and sayings and the like and altered…said if it doesn’t make you groan aloud or outright cry, it wasn’t worth using. Not always my personal standard, but it’s a theory that’s done well for him. ;)
As for NHK…I assume that’s not their shortest one-liner? But the editorial description on Amazon is a bit more appropriate; if that’s on the box too, then I personally don’t find it too misleading. But if that line is the ONLY (or most in-depth) thing on the box, then yeah, that’s mildly bait-and-switch.
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It works because they tell themselves it works. It works because the people who make those choices talk to each other and nobody is going to say “OH, GOD why did we market it that way? it TOTALLY tanked!”. It’s an infection of arrogance that has mo merit, I think.
And don’t discount that the marketing department might be totally disconnected from the creation aspect, and both run by someone who blindly trusts what Marketing says because they have the degrees, after all.
And yes, both sides of the pacific.
Sometimes it does work. sometimes the product just finds its people regardless.
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Nothing new to this. Back years ago when I was reading more science fiction, I noticed the same thing. The promotional text on the back of the paperback told you very little about the actual story, and the cover illustration art usually had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the story.
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Steve Harrison: You might be surprised at what works, on the mainstream level. On the other hand, I don’t think the anime and manga companies are spending a ton of money on extensive market/consumer research for anime and manga in particular…being that they don’t have much these days.
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Mushishi gets the worst of it here – Del Rey and Funi couldn’t think of anything else to say about it, so they just decided to market as horror. Maybe that works for one volume?
As long as everyone buys this stuff over the internet, they might as well not put anything on the back. It’d save me from reading their horrible pretentious writing on anything vaguely arty (even on the individual DVDs in the Kino thinpack).
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Written by the legendary Kazuo Koike, creator of Lone Wolf and Cub, and illustrated by the incomparable Ryoichi Ikegami, Crying Freeman is adult manga at its most challenging: dark, violent, morally complex, erotically chaged, and regarded worldwide as a masterpiece of adult graphic fiction.
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Yuuchi reconnects with his cute cousin… but my, how she’s grown!
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There’s not much else you can say, really.
Chobits is about robot girls and the boys who fall in love with them.
The average reader isn’t into the allegory stated in Chobits or the irony in NHK, they want a laugh riot as they sit in Barnes and Noble.
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jp: that’s why I wubs Kanon.
I would say more, and it’s going into a blog post.
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I think there’s just a lot of mismarketing these days, period. Misleading author quotes with…more…ellipses…than…words notwithstanding, some things just get blatantly marketed wrong, and not just anime/manga either. The jacket descriptions on otherwise entertaining books spend way too much time telling you how deep and meaningful the book is and how important it is to our modern-day society (you know, like the other eighty zillion books released in a year), forget to actually tell you that the content might actually be the dreaded word Entertaining, and get summarily ignored by someone who just wants a good read (meaning optional). The back of a Mike Hammer omnibus, meanwhile, touts its author’s gritty literary style.
You find Haruki Murakami and Yasutaka Tsutsui in the Fiction section, whilst Zaregoto and Twelve Kingdoms novels languish in the manga section and Moribito novels jam it up in the Young Adult section. Sony Pictures seems to be trying to make The Sky Crawlers look like AN ACTION PACKED EXTRAVAGANZA! judging from the DVD art I’ve seen.
The end result is that sometimes it really seems as if all these dollars are poured into marketing and copywriting and taglines that everyone summarily ignores, or falls victim to and develops a hatred for that which tricked them: never the marketer, but the marketed work.
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I think this is more like there is only enough information to convey a superficial message rather than an essential one. These quotes do render the superficial, birds-eye view, first impression viewpoint. If you go all philosophical and say that it’s (NHK) about escaping nihilism of activity, nobody is going to be interested and you’re already selling the plot short.
Maybe the cover should resign in being superficial and admit that it is indeed just the cover.
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First things that popped up in my mind were ADV’s “What is anime” commercials and a webcomic that had a character named “Bandai Man” who’s shtick would be making nonsensical plot synopses based on the title of the anime he was covering.
I’d say that it’s hard to take up summaries relating to anime at face value. Partly because it is hard to boil shows down into an essence, and I’d like to think that part of it is also to get more people to check out products by those descriptions. I think that the anime/manga industry in the US is worse off with this than other mediums because of the general perception of it being for kids or super edgy. Unconscious reinforcement?
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As an aside, I would totally map “a story of love, dreams, and perseverance” with Saiunkoku. At least if a random man were to watch that show, he would very likely miss/ignore the reverse harem aspect largely.
Besides the obvious, conflict-of-various-factors at work, it’s really no big deal though.
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