|
Narrative
|
Don't let this image fool you, it's far from serious.
— Excel
Anime's answer to surrealism and Dada art.
Having nothing to do with Microsoft Excel (although the software makes a brief appearance in episode 5), Excel Saga tells the story of recent high school graduate Excel Excel, a small-brained but highly energetic Genki Girl who finds her ideal job serving as a minion to the mysterious Lord Il Palazzo, leader of the subversive yet ineffective ideological organization ACROSS. As she undertakes missions intended to unravel the fabric of Japanese society (so that ACROSS can step in and take over), Excel pines for her impressively bishonen, and impressively eccentric boss (who spends most of his time when his minions are out on missions sitting around his headquarters playing dating sims on handheld video games or practicing on his guitar). Ilpalazzo, on the other hand, views Excel as a necessary annoyance who is to be killed as required, or at least dropped through a Trap Door into an oubliette, when she gets out of hand. (If it weren't for the frequent interventions of the Great Will of the Macrocosm, Ilpalazzo would be going through minions like Kleenex.) With her partner Hyatt (a frail, beautiful alien girl given to bouts of coughing up horribly poisonous blood and frequent, brief attacks of death) and their dog/backup meal source Menchi, Excel blasts her way though a series of adventures with gleeful incompetence and a hysterically rapidfire stream of dialogue that makes, at best, only minimal sense.
At the same time, a city official, the mysterious Dr. Kabapu, has hired Excel's next door neighbors to form a counter-insurgency team that will inevitably come into conflict with the forces of ACROSS. Meanwhile, on yet a third plot thread, immigrant laborer Pedro, who dreams of earning enough money to leave Japan and return to his wife and child, dies in a terrible construction accident caused by Excel. He must now roam the world alone as a ghost, at least until the Great Will of the Macrocosm encounters him and decides he's cute. Interleaved into all three plotlines and running along on a fourth one of its own are the adventures of Nabeshin, the Marty Stu / Parody Sue and self-insert character of director Watanabe Shinichi, who can best be described as Shaft reincarnated as an Asian guy. (For the record: He looks exactly the same in real life. Including the red jacket. And the afro.)
Adapted only loosely from the original manga by Koshi Rikdo (who tells us the theme of the week at the beginning of each chapter), each episode skewers a particular genre of anime or manga, inverting and demolishing its cliches and conventions while leaving behind a trail of sight gags, puns and the just plain bizarre. Incredibly, it manages to tell something approaching a coherent storyline at the same time. Hilariously funny and at the same time mind-warpingly strange. As one member of the fan community has said: "Excel Saga — when crack is not enough."
Excel Saga:The MangaThis world, is corrupt!
—Lord Il Palazzo, opening line
Originally written as a way to mock the recession Japan was going through, the manga had many of the same storylines that were later used in the anime, but did not parody media genres as much as it focused on the unusual characters and social satire. Excel and Hyatt would try to fit ACROSS' world domination schemes inbetween their minimum wage part time jobs and fail miserably. Meanwhile, Dr. Kabapu's team would investigate, sometimes inadvertently, ACROSS and not make any progress while trying to cope with the bizarre demands of their lousy government jobs.
The plot has thickened greatly since the beginning, with the introduction of several new characters such as Elgala, the third member of ACROSS, and Miwa and Umi, the mother and cousin (respectively) of resident Lolicon roboticist Dr. Shiouji. Il Palazzo has grown dangerously more competent in his world domination plans, while Kabapu has become more desperate as he loses influence in Fukuoka. And there is an increasingly important and involved backstory involving the origins of Excel, the Shioji family, and an apparent lost civilization that Kabapu and Il Palazzo both belong to. It is still a humorous manga, but it is less wacky and somewhat dark at times.
This show and manga provide examples of:
|
This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
