Mar 4, 2020
“I want to go on adventures, to fray with the unexpected and danger, to have the sun and darkness as neighbors. People lock their doors and windows but I’d rather stay open to the winds. With my car, I can get anywhere I want, whenever I want, like it was a magic carpet”
Sunny Sunny Ann is the second manga of Miki Yamamoto. She started her career with Bakudan no Ribon, a completely silent manga that allowed her to be noticed, and proceeded with this one which allowed her to gain the 2013 Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize as a New Artist.
Just by looking at the
...
cover, it already stands out as a fairly atypical manga. It focuses on Ann, a young woman traveling around the United States in her car, only thirsting for liberty and to discover new landcapes to be close to nature. If she needs money she just sells her body, if she needs to wash, she bathes in the nearest river or simply gets naked in the local gas station. A woman this eccentric doesn’t go unnoticed and her travels will lead her into different strange situations related into 5 different chapters.
Ann is a bad woman and she knows it, she doesn’t hesitate to burn alive the men who raped her or to abduct a child and be her mom for a day. Even while being wanted by the police, she still lives her daily life peacefully without a care in the world and there’s not any big drama related to these events. Things just happens and life continues.
The portrayal of Ann is definitely one of the big highlights of this story, she’s completely at ease with herself and with her body and the art only compliments this aspect, it’s rough but also very sensual, playing a lot with her curves or with her light dress floating against the wind. She smokes, she drinks, she’s a strong woman that doesn’t accept everything that comes at her. It manages to be pretty realist and not fall into the feminist cliché either, Ann almost makes me think of an heroine from a Tarantino movie.
Miki Yamamoto comes from the fine arts and admits being influenced a lot by Kyoko Okazaki and it’s apparent that she belongs with her in the same group of artists that deserve recoginition from presenting very unique and outlandish works.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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