[Welcome to the EL Book Introductions series. These posts are all short (<180 words) introductions/reviews of books in the EL library. They focus on telling you what we think will be interesting for you, a college student and English learner, so use them to help you find the right book for you. You can also use the tags to find books about topics you might be interested in.]
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I am sure you have seen the movies My Neighbor Totoro and Castle in the Sky. I don’t need to write about the stories here. Almost everyone likes Studio Ghibli films, so you will probably like reading these full-olor manga versions of the stories, too. So, what is there to say?
I think these books are good for you for a few reasons. First, they are great examples of “learning what you already know.” You already know the story and characters in Japanese, so they should be very easy to understand in English. Because they come from the films, there is also surprisingly little reading. Most of the story is told in pictures, and (unfortunately) all of the onomatopoeia 擬音語・擬態語 are left in Japanese. That does not mean these are bad for language learning—it just means that you can read a whole book in one sitting.
Borrow these books if you are interested in an easy, quick read. These books can motivate you to try something a little more challenging next time.
My two cents: While I recommend you read these, I think they are very interesting objects for thinking about media. All of the art comes directly from the films, so it is a strange translation to manga format and I don’t think it always works very well. Animated films do not have frames(コマ), so a lot of pictures had to be shrunk down or cut up to fit in the manga. Also, the beautiful, dense art for the backgrounds works well for animation, but I think overwhelms the character art in the static manga format. Those are just my thoughts, though—what do you think?
