Launching 15 years ago with the purposeful aim of only putting out unique content, the Madhouse animated Paradise Kiss anime adaptation was the only the second show to ever premiere on its block! The first was fellow not quite shojo not quite josei Honey & Clover, which made Parakiss a perfect fit for the block’s newly established tone.
PARADISE KISS TV
The Fuji TV Niotamina animation block very thankfully continues to this day being, perhaps, the most reliable purveyor of actually interesting anime that buck the mold like Psycho-Pass and Erased, just to name a few. Bordering on a Shojo and Josei cusp, Yazawa successfully portrayed the experience of the former with the perspective of the latter with beautiful inksmanship to boot. Would be a generic premise, but what separated Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss from the thousands of other girls comics was its willingness to portray being young and in love as an often painful and idiotic thing to do. Of course, the actual risk comes in the form of her getting romantically involved with the handsome and enigmatic group leader George who’ll quickly become an unforgettable character in her life, for better or worse. Unfortunately for Momma Hayasaka, Yukari meets a group of miscreant young clothing designers who wish for her to sin in the form of her being their model. Yukari Hayasaka is your perfect scholarly high school student who would never do anything to disappoint her overbearing mother and is beginning to prepare for the hellish Japanese college entrance exams. The Legacies Of Paradise Kiss and Noitamina Only on very rare occasion does an Anime surpass its original manga, but 15 years later we still hold this possibly controversial opinion. That’s one reason why the Paradise Kiss anime is such a treasure It was able to present Ai Yazawa’s story exactly as she ever wrote it, but with some additional nuance and depth that elevated the already great source material into something even more profound. However! Yazawa was working on it and the best selling Nana at the same time though and while Paradise Kiss got the visual mastery, it’s our honest belief Nana got the better writing, and sales numbers reflect on it being the stronger work overall. Huge in Japan of course and an early Tokyopop release stateside, if you read girls comics in the early 2000s there’s no way you weren’t at least aware of it. That’s totally understandable! Manga artist Ai Yazawa is a genuine master of her is craft and few comics are as gorgeous as Parakiss is to this day. When it comes to Paradise Kiss, the manga is certainly the most remembered iteration of the series.