DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

• 

  Togentokyo

  85/100
  A beautiful journey of the ones who we always neglect, overcoming those inequalities.

  This is my second work from Taiyo Matsumoto and so far he has been absolutely stellar to keep up with as a mangaka, my feelings on Matsumoto have definitely brightened far higher than I could have imagined so alas, this will be my note on the manga "Sunny" by Taiyo Matsumoto. If there was one word to describe sunny then it would be "melancholic". The manga is about the journey of a group of children inside a chaotic family home and just one little Sunny 1200 at the centre of it all. The lives that permeate inside this rustic home are souls that were lost behind, discarded, by the ones society expects to nurture them into respectful individuals ultimately left to rot, fending for their very own existence. This is the world that "Sunny" thrusts you into, blaring itself into chaotic disarray from each panel onward entrusting you the purpose of finding maturity in such a disarray'd state of being. Now, let's meet each of the souls that inhabit the claustrophobic, yet merry home.

  The first is Harou, he is a bratty child who causes large ruckuses and began instituting a terrible name for all his other "family-mates". He classifies himself as and all his fellow family-mates as "dumped" children who are simply a casualty of the undesirable of society. Though, this nihilistic outlook on life is a simple little lie formed by a deeply distraught boy. Through this inattentive persona, cracks begin to form displaying a truly proper image of him; a boy desperate for his family to re-unite once again, trying to shed tied with the ones he has currently. That is his truth, his instincts for his family is given a personified material in the form of the Nivea cream that his mother gave him. That animalistic instinct to re-unite with the ones who don't even want you is what makes this manga so deeply heart-wrenching. His character conclusion is so fitting for an individual who finds semblance in dis-semblance.

  Our second main character is Sei, the newest child to join this foster family. His affection towards books and academia make him an inspiring figure who soon realizes that life is not just about the presence of persisting into greater heights through the world of academics. Sei is desperate to go back to his only known method of life, always being discouraged by Harou, who begins to comprehend the absolute state of their existence; that they were dumped. A beautiful bond arises through the perilous challenges they conceive due to their social standards. Once the two who hate each other, begin to find heartwarming brotherly love through their odds with such a tilted society that views them as "hopeless". Yet sei never stops, he still searches for his family, trying inconceivably hard to have that life he wanted, hating the comfort provided by his family home knowing fully that nothing, not even his parents can cast such an affectionate shine.

  Lastly, we meet Kenji, the final of the three main characters who we are confronted to in this narrative. He is a bright young boy, filled with tenacity hoping to be able to reach higher peaks in life, unfortunately, muddled down to the depths of despair because of his alcoholic father and inattentive mother. The consequences of being born and setting aspirations become an unfortunate obsession to him, he thinks "why was I like this? Couldn't I have been a fucking sushi chef?". Here we begin a descending into anarchy as he begins to imbue his slothful father to raise himself up, yet always failing to do so. His story, while not as tumultuous as some of the lesser side characters, is significantly harder to ignore. In the end, Kenji is my second favourite character in the series right behind Harou.

  Those are the three main characters but the manga masterfully uses the lives of all the characters to draw connections to the themes of: loneliness, negligence, disorientation, dis-satisfaction and escapism. About the artwork, I was definitely put-off by the wacky character designs and unequal facial structures but it begins to grow on you. The almost "watercolour" texture of Matsumoto's artwork permeates through the volume artwork and intricately woven single panel layouts that often depict landscapes. Unlike the recent work, "The climber" by Shinchi Sakomoto which is intended on generating harrowing portraits of the human and mountains In order to stay realistic, Matsumoto uses a far different art style accomplishing a fascinatingly similar affect. The claustrophobic panels and chaotic spreads breathe life into the realistic tales of all these individuals utilizing a completely unrealistic art style.

  

  Lastly, the term for whence the manga's name comes from, the "Sunny". The "Sunny" for all these tattered individuals holds a beautiful value. For Harou, it's to enact adrenaline-filled action sequences, to Sei it's an eloquent method to practice the route back to his parents so the he never fails to remember the route for his "paradise", to Mugumu it's a gentle reminder of the car her parents owned before their unfortunate death, to Junsuke it's an escape to seek self-pleasure through porn magazines and lastly to Kenji it's a silent escape from this discriminatory society. That is what the sunny reminds all these people and that is the world which we view them, beautifully cathartic in all it's presentation, Matsumoto knocks it out of the park once again.

  Overall, should you read "Sunny"? You should, this story is about a rare spotlight on the individuals we discard in society, the ones who silently face so many inequalities and having no figure in their life to share their inconceivably tough lives. Taiyo Matsumoto is a master at character dramas, being able to evoke some of the most human images to ever be illustrated on the pages of manga, yet what can he not do? Please read this manga, it's quite great.

  Rating: 8.5

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• 

  MattSweatshirT

  100/100
  The Empathy Owed to the Impressionable

  __The Empathy Owed to the Impressionable__

  Sunny, like many of Matsumoto’s works, strikes a balance between an endearing comedy and a pervasively somber character drama. It is probably the most concentrated of his works in combining these two aspects, and it uses them to aid each other the most effectively. Ping pong is more thematically concerned, exploring the idea of coming of age from a variety of perspectives. Tekkonkinkreet is focused more on the setting it takes place in, exploring the ecosystems of treasure town and its effect on the people living within it. Sunny’s sole focus is the characters themselves, and their stories. It takes an extensive look into the worlds of each of the children living at the Star Kids Home. It crafts many incredibly realistic characters who have been made who they are due to their tragic family circumstances. It is particularly concerned with illustrating the impressionability of children and the dynamics of their interactions with adults and each other. Matsumoto takes a hard stance on the side of the kids, relentlessly critiquing the actions and inactions of the adults around them.

  

  “Haruo makes trouble, but he’s not a bad kid.” This line captures the conclusion of Haruo’s character arc in the series. Haruo bullies other kids, he acts out at every adult he comes across, he steals, but he isn’t doing these things because he has some intrinsic impulse to do bad things—he has been shaped by his environment. He was lied to by his mother and left at the Star Kids Home where he was bullied endlessly, forcing him to become tough. We get a small but extremely telling glimpse at how his mother is when he gets to visit her. She acts cold and uncaring, asking him to call her by her name rather than “mom”, revealing a part of her that wishes he didn’t exist and she didn’t have to be his mother. At times she acts as if she cares, doing things like buying a ton of nivea cream for him because she knows he likes it—but we can tell these actions are coming from a place of herself not wanting to feel bad, instead of a place of actual empathy. If she had real empathy for Haruo she would understand the reason he likes the nivea cream is because it reminds him of her and in the same way she is hardly in his life, he only has a small amount of the cream that he savors. Having an abundance of the cream is not a substitute for almost never being able to see his own mother. She tells Haruo at one point that she won’t listen to him when he’s yelling at her, but she doesn’t really listen anyway, and she fails to understand why he feels the need to yell. Haruo does bad things because of how he is made to feel. He is also a kid just like any other. He plays in the Sunny car all of the time, imagining tons of childish situations. He’s obsessed with Kenji’s glasses because he thinks they look cool. The way he idolizes Makio as an elder brother figure is captured perfectly. He has a childish, naive idea about all kinds of things—like “being spoiled”, which he deems a bad thing and therefore thinks he should be incredibly harsh and mean to the new kid Sei. His naive understanding of this idea is so spot on for something a kid would hear about and internalize from an adult at some point in their life, which would then contribute to shaping how they see the world around them.

  

  The statement “Haruo makes trouble, but he’s not a bad kid” can be extended to all of the kids in the Star Kids Home in a variety of ways. They are all victims of circumstance.

  Megumu is around Haruo’s age, but she is much more mature. She doesn’t have any parents as they died when she was very young. So, the Star Kids Home is the only home she has. Early on we get a glimpse into some of Megumu’s insecurities when Haruo comes across her at a bank looking down into the river where there’s a dead cat. She wants to give the cat a funeral. She then asks Haruo if it’ll be like this when she dies. Alone in a river with no one who cares enough to find her because she’s an orphan. Megumu has a unique relationship with the other kids and the Star Kids Home because she doesn’t have parents anymore. She reveals a selfish thought she has that she doesn’t want any of the other kids to go back to their parents because she wants them to stay with her, and she thinks that makes her a bad person. She has the maturity to identify that selfishness within her, but she retains a childishness in her inability to accept it and her naive prescription that it makes her a bad person, because she doesn’t know any better. Later in the story, Megumu’s aunt and uncle come to visit her, who she has never met before. She interacts with these relatives of hers with a childish resistance. She feels awkward having them buy her food and take her to the movies, because she doesn’t feel as though they are her family. Throughout the day she spends with them she fights their kindness and refuses to accept them as the well-meaning people they are, because in her mind she is an orphan, and this isn’t how orphans are treated. However, when they realize she forgot her umbrella, go all the way back to the theatre, and awkwardly inconvenience people already watching another movie all to get her umbrella back, she is finally able to see their sincerity and accept them. She doesn’t want them to go through so much trouble for her, they aren’t her parents, but they do anyway, and it makes her burst into tears. At the end of the series, when she is about to move in with them, she says to Kiko that she has decided to love them.

  

  Sei is a character with a less layered but particularly poignant arc. He is the stereotypical smart kid with glasses and everything. However, he is fairly well characterized for this role. Everything down to the vocabulary and phrasing of what he says come together to create an exceedingly believable and fleshed out character, such as how he remarks about how he likes to “observe” clouds sometimes. This depth of characterization is present for essentially every character in the series. Sei’s character arc begins with his insistence that he isn’t going to stay at the star kids home for long and his mom is going to come get him soon. At a certain point, this insistence of his stops being something he truly believes and becomes a front—a mask he hides behind to both hide his grief about the situation and hide his plan going forward. We get hints of his plan as early as chapter 1, where we see him sitting in the sunny imagining the route back to his father’s workplace and mothers house. Sei, as the intelligent and careful kid he is, extensively plans how he is going to get back to his parents on his own. This smart, mature planning for something so naive and childish encapsulates Sei’s character perfectly. On the outside he appears to be far more mature than any of the other kids, and he makes the adults think so as well. But ultimately, he is still a kid who misses his parents, keeping that pain all to himself and acting out because of that pain in a childish display which leads to him wrecking Mr. Adachi’s car.

  Junsuke doesn’t have too significant of a character arc or exploration for him in general, but he is probably my second favorite character in the series. He has a lot of quirks and details about him that bring his character together and he is simply hilarious, he’s the kind of kid you can’t help but love. The opening panel of the series is a colored page of Junsuke playing his harmonica, no doubt horribly, with snot dripping out of his nose, and without a care in the world. His carrying around of an umbrella which he refers to as his home as well as his obsession with shiny things are incredibly endearing details that also provide deeper implications for his character. His and Shosuke’s collecting of clovers because they believe it will help their mother who is in the hospital as well as his connection to the mall because of the time he had to spend in them waiting for his mother and uncle round out his character beyond just comedic relief while still being in my opinion one of the funniest characters in anime and manga.

  

  Understanding of these kids' situations brings with it an empathy we ought to treat them with. It brings a realization that speaking to and treating them in certain ways are not justified and will only make any existing issues worse. The helpless and the broken do not deserve to be pushed down further, they deserve to be cared for.

  Sections like the one below feel like Matsumoto reaching across the pages and speaking directly to the audience about this issue--within them, an implicit call to do better.

  

  Matsumoto‘s art-style is something not everyone will enjoy. In a technical sense it is a bit ugly and even amateurish at times. However, it has a distinctive charm that I believe adds a lot to his series. It helps deliver the comedy a lot of the time with the characters’ different facial expressions and motion throughout the panels. It is also able to create a particular emotional depth and subtlety as well through those expressions and the paneling in general.

  

  The impressionability of children is a delicate and complex thing that Sunny sets out to explore thoroughly. Putting the reader in kids’ shoes allows us to see the intricacies of how they interact with each other as well as with adults. You can see the reasoning behind each and every of their actions and the way they phrase things. This along with the incredibly endearing personalities of the kids creates an emotional attachment to their journeys. The series shows us how certain kinds of behavior from adults regarding kids are not okay. Adults have the responsibility to be emotionally mature and empathetic to their effect on the kids around them. When we see other kids’ parents not even refer to Haruo as a kid, but as a “problem”, it’s infuriating. This is the kind of thing that causes him to act out. Even an adult like Mr. Adachi, who is a great guy and takes care of the kids very well, is subtly criticized throughout the series. When reflecting on Haruo’s past and the way he acts with Makio, he swears that he will take care of and be there for him no matter what. Makio then questions Adachi on this, asking if that statement from him is coming purely from a place of care, or if it’s coming from selfishness as well. By the end of the series, without a word about it said, Adachi moves past his selfishness and sends Haruo to the orphanage in the city, where he would fit in and be taken care of better.

  Matsumoto stresses how we ought to be more empathetic towards those with problems and those cast out by society—we aren’t problem-free ourselves. Kids in particular are owed a certain amount of respect and empathy in the way we interact with them, as it can shape their lives going forward.

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• 

  chain

  80/100
  Sunny displays a unique vision and deftly navigates strong emotions, but falls short of something greater.

  If there is anything I have noticed while reading many stories, it's that authors often struggle to really flesh out any sort of younger character. I'm sure the annoying and shallowly written kid is a familiar trope for most people, which feels strange considering we all once were children after all.

  Taiyō Matsumoto's Sunny does not have this problem at all, which rather subverted my expectations as almost the entire cast of characters is children. The foster family of the Star kids is not only not frustrating, but extremely likable and often very emotionally relatable. There are a few reasons why this works so well. A big one is that Matsumoto is extremely skilled at representing emotions in a realistic way, especially for children. He does a great job by leaving a lot unstated and instead using many different ways of showing facial expressions, sometimes having pure and palpable silence between characters, and showing them doing things with their hands like playing with toys or writing. Haruo is a great example of this usually. We see him try to be cool and tough like his favorite manga characters and professional wrestlers around the other kids, tilting his head back and always wearing sunglasses. Then there is an intentional shift when he is around his mom, with his sunglasses being off and him constantly being engaged and actively looking up. He smiles while playing with his action figures, and when alone in the Sunny he goes from having impenetrable thoughts to imagining a whimsical fantasy world around him. It's these subtle ways of telling us about the characters where Matsumoto really allows us to get a sense of how their personalities are.

  Of course, establishing these characters has an important purpose for showing the situations each one of them is in. Matsumoto uniquely only uses the perspective of children to frame different backgrounds, issues, and experiences. Every character expresses their feelings in the way a child realistically would and it leads to them being surprisingly complex. Going back to Haruo, we are shown the impact of not having his mom in his life by the way he acts around others. He often gets in trouble, and acts out for attention while struggling to show gratitude out of what seems to be both fear of letting go of his mother and trying to not show weakness to others. He often is smelling a can of Nivea to remind himself of her, expressing his feelings of missing her in a very simple but effective and realistic way. This connects to how we often associate memories or people to smells, particularly as children incapable of expressing complex emotions. Megumu and Kiko show the value of befriending people despite them not always being in the same socioeconomic group as you through simple school interactions, along with showing the struggles of being different than one's classmates. Similarly, we see how Junsuke and Shosuke handle having a parent that is very ill, dealing with a pain that is difficult for them to comprehend by convincing themsleves that the magical powers of clovers can heal their mother. Junsuke in particular has a lot of great imaginative moments shown. One highlight is when he is sick, showing the familiar combination of childlike creativity and a fever-addled brain:

  

  Now would be a good time to mention the art. The characters that Matsumoto draws are probably a bit weird to look for first time viewers of his style, but they quickly prove to be very good at showing distinct faces and emotions with their simplicity while also making every character look very unique and memorable. This is contrasted well with the detailed but clean art elsewhere and he knows how to raise and lower the scaling of the world depending on the character's perspective.

  Impressive as it is, Matsumoto writing these characters well does not come as too much of a surpise. He has said in interviews surrounding the manga that he himself spent time at a similar group home as a child and it gave him inspiration for the series and a factual basis for many of the events. It's easy to see the passion he had for this as well as the insight he had into writing these vignettes. Unfortunately, the structure of these vignettes would be the first complaint for me. It feels very choppy most of the time, even by slice of life standards. It can be difficult to feel a consistent flow with the characters when the perspective is shifting around a lot and every other character that isn't being followed at that time is suddenly thrown into the background. It's not horrible but I think it definitely harmed the story sometimes. Kenji, being an older POV character, has more complex emotions than the rest but they start to fly all over the place with the constant cuts to where it felt strangely hard to follow what his personality was like.

  Ultimately though, the biggest disappointment was the ending for me. There just feels like a real rush to wrap it up, like at least a few chapters between the last and second-to-last were left out. Sei is a blank slate character for most of the story who starts to get some plot development and we are seeing the culmination of Haruo's arc at the end but both of them are left out to dry and are resolved in between chapters. In general while we see some character's conclusions it really sucks that we didn't get to see what the emotional process to get there was. The ending is probably meant to be more punchy than it actually ends up being but there just needed to be some more development here to really elevate it to a story instead of just an experience.

  While I would be lying to say I was full of satisfaction after finishing, Sunny still left me feeling pretty content. Even if it's just an experience, it was still an enjoyable one that really served as a testament to the author's personal experiences and ability to write characters that are compelling and likable in a unique, subtle way.

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