“I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
- Wind Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Wow, a work about holding on to the inner child inside you and never entering the dirty adult world. Where have we seen that before?

Despite the fact that everything Saint-Exupery has written, and especially the Little Prince, is probably better crafted, and despite the fact that Inio Asano writes better, in Solanin or Umibe no Onnanoko for example, about the sheer brutality of trying to live in a bubble-world despite having no backing of real-life pragmatism, and despite the fact that Aku no Hana has a better portrayal of the darkness of the screw-all attitude towards life, and despite the fact that the works of Salinger has better crafted witty and endearing characters (such as the Glass Family members), and despite the fact that, even in its pessimism, a work like Kyoko Okazaki’s Pink is simultaneously more optimistic and more poisonous in its depiction of how to get through the crap life…

Well, I guess Annarasumanara is a very good illusion.

That is, it is technically brilliant and perfectly paced enough to create the sheer oomph of an effect. Like any great Magician’s trick, you know the whole deal is a lot of smoke, mirrors, and flourishes, and yet you still buy yourself into the moment (and hey, that’s even the main theme of the story). You know that everytime something bad happens to the token archetype poor-girl, the mysterious bishounen white-haired Magician will step in and bedazzle. But even when you know this it still does not kill the thrill of how it’s done, mainly because the manhwa artist has synthesized this style that’s like Studio Shaft translated onto comic-book format. The effect, of watching the whole black-and-white world change to colour (which, by the way, is so obviously a ploy done by way too many people… even The Wizard of Oz) is still so magnificent that you’re sucked in. Oyasumi Punpun probably has a better communication of the Fantastic to the Real, even without colour, and yet we can’t expect all artists out there to be as well versed in psychological shorthand as Inio Asano… right?

All sarcasm aside, I think the work is quite endearing, and maybe if it was marketed as a children’s book instead, and created with more focus on the Magic and Metaphor and less of the supposedly ‘real life’ stuff, it may have supplanted the Little Prince as the next big amazing children’s book. But then again it still probably wouldn’t really beat Steven Universe.