My main immediate goal for this place is to do a detailed, episode-by-episode comparison between the
Yu Yu Hakusho anime and the original manga. This is mostly an excuse for me to re-read the manga and finally watch through the entire anime in order (as opposed to just random story arcs here and there). I thought of doing this because YYH has a more interesting adaption process than most Shonen Jump manga; the anime version of things isn't just the manga with bits of filler thrown in. Well, there actually is a good deal of "people reacting" filler and whatnot, but there's lots of stuff from the manga that's left out of the anime entirely, or is changed significantly or in small but interesting ways. And there's tons of stuff I never even noticed until directly comparing the two versions. So I thought it'd be worth taking an in-depth look.
Basically, I'm going to be noting every difference that I...find notable, you could say. This includes some pretty minor stuff, but I won't try and include every little last thing, just to keep me halfway sane. Keep in mind that by noting these changes, I'm not complaining about them. I just think they're interesting. Some of them I might complain about, or some I might praise as improving the story, but for the most part I'm just going to present the changes without comment and let you decide what to think of them. Overall I find the manga and anime about on par: there's lots of things I prefer in the manga, but also things I think the anime did better. This is a combination of YYH getting a very good anime adaptation, and Togashi's work on the manga being sometimes hit-or-miss (not that I can blame him, with illness getting in his way).
These comparisons will be between the Japanese manga (using the kanzenban release as a reference) and the Japanese version of the TV show (using Funimation's "Season Set" DVDs). There's a lot of differences between how names and dialogue get translated in Viz's release of the manga, the Funi dub, and the Funi DVD subtitles, but that's all a matter of different approaches to translating and adapting the series from Japanese into English, and has nothing to do with the process of adapting the manga into an anime. Plus, noting all those changes on top of the manga/anime differences would at least double my work. Maybe one day I'll take a detailed look at the Viz translation of the manga or the Funi dub of the TV series, but not now.
That said, during the course of taking these manga/anime notes I have spotted some mistakes in the subtitles on the Funi DVDs, and have mentioned them in the notes to show that in those cases the anime dialogue is really the same as the manga dialogue. I'm not actually trying to spot-check the DVD subtitles, and usually don't pay attention to them, so there might be other mistakes, but these are the ones I noticed. I should say that the Funi DVD subtitles are on the whole very accurate, though perhaps overly literal and stiff (which just goes to show how much importance was placed on them being accurate to the Japanese dialogue). But in a 112 episode series, any translator will make mistakes here and there; it's simply the law of averages.
The naming scheme I'll use here for characters, techniques, place names, and whatnot will just be my own personal one, using whatever translation or spelling I prefer. I will however for the most part just be using the Funi subtitle translations for the episode titles, though I may modify them to match my personal translations of the manga chapter titles (which are often partially recycled for episode titles), or my preferred naming scheme for characters/techniques/etc, or just for the hell of it.
I've already taken notes for almost half the series, but to space things out I'm going to try and post up one story arc a day until Halloween, then do an episode or so a day until the end of the year. There's an index for all currently posted episode notes after the jump.
