This is how you adapt a manga — My Dress-up Darling — Anime 2022 #017

Gokou is a shy loner, obsessed with making Hina dolls. Marin is an outgoing gyraru who loves cosplay but is hopeless at sewing. With his sewing skills and her enthusiasm, they make the perfect combo. It all started when Marin found him using the school’s sewing machine to make clothes for his Hina doll and immediately asked him for advice on her own costume. Bonding through cosplay, they became friends as Gojou helped Marin cosplay her favourite characters while she gently led him into the world of heavy duty otakudom, leading to situations like this, from chapter 36 of the original manga:

What makes the anime version Sono Bisque Doll Wa Koi Wo Suru/My Dress-Up Darling so good is that it takes an already excellent manga and improves on it. Well, maybe not so much improves as adapts to the strengths of another medium. There’s an art to adapting manga into anime and this series is at the peak of it, starting from the character design. You may think is a simple question of copying the manga’s designs and make them move, but especially that can be difficult. How do the characters look in motion, in colour and how do you keep the art style of the original mangaka and make it work in anime? And what about the voice actors? Do they capture the voices of the characters as you imagined them? There have been manga that I’ve been looking forward to seeing in anime form which failed at this, the result too flat or too ordinary to do justice to the original. Take e.g. Kono Oto Tomare: gorgeous as a manga, so-so as an anime. It failed to capture the spirit, the life of the original and fell flat as a result. Not so with My Dress-Up Darling: the same care and attention to detail is given in the series as Fukuda Shinichi, the original mangaka put into the manga. As you can see from this scene from episode 11, which adapts page 9-24 of chapter 36 of the manga.

What’s a full page close-up on Marin’s face at the end in the manga, with lots of sound effects and blushing as she realised what happened, becomes 10 seconds of her hidden in half darkness of the room, trying to get her breathing under control. Both are intense emotional scenes, both make full use of the medium. That’s what makes the anime version of My Dress-Up Darling stand out to me, because it made the story fresh again. The manga is on chapter 78 or so and this season got to chapter forty or thereabouts, so it may take some time for a second season, but I sure hope we’ll get one soon with the same quality.