Boys Be...

Boys Be... (ボーイズ・ビー Bōizu Bī?) is a manga created and written by Masahiro Itabashi and illustrated by Hiroyuki Tamakoshi, which was in 2000 adapted into a 13 episode anime series by Hal Film Maker.

Three different Boys Be... manga series were serialized by Kodansha in Shukan Shōnen Magazine. In 2009 Kodansha announced a fourth series, starting in the November 2009 issue of Magazine Special. The second manga series is licensed in North America by Tokyopop and the anime is licensed by The Right Stuf International. The anime, first aired on WOWOW (with a matching fanline email address courtesy of Lycos Japan), is licensed in Singapore by Odex. The first DVD volume of the series was released in North America on February 28, 2006.

The anime focuses upon the ups and downs, joys and sorrows of first love and teenage romance. Six students struggle to find the perfect partner and their adolescent limitations. While several characters are taken from stories in the manga, the story of the anime is unrelated to the manga.

Each episode begins and ends with a philosophical quote which sums up the episode's content. Boys Be…, while centered on Kyoichi and Chiharu, revolves around seven or eight main characters and their love lives.

Tropes used in Boys Be... include:

Beach Episode
Bland-Name Product
Cannot Spit It Out: Yeah, back that truckload right in there...
Nuclear Weapons Taboo: A dream sequence involving the end of the world involves explosions that are nuclear-ESQUE, but very definitely not nuclear, being rapidly-expanding blackish domes of some sort instead.
Plot-Based Voice Cancellation: Car horns *are* loud, though, so Justified Trope?
Rule Thirty Six: In the manga, there's a recurring segment in which three teenage losers talk about the many and sundry things that get them off--elbows, sofa cushions... seawater enemas...
Soundtrack Dissonance: The opening song is beautiful, light, happy pop, entitled "Daijobu" (trans: It's Okay). Sung by, apparently, an angel (Aki Maeda's wonderful voice would certainly bear this out). On its own, this is all well and good. Watching the background, however, will reveal that she is singing this song over a freaking Nuclear Holocaust, and the song ends with a desolate playground, littered with calcified bones and a bit of sand blowing over the annihilated remains of humanity and quite probably the Earth itself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6591H3ViEA&feature=related Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it. Seriously, this may even stray into Nightmare Fuel, as in one episode, one of the girls has a dream of the end of the world, with huge black dome-shaped explosions... hmmmm. Meaning that this horrible, desolate wasteland could well be one future of the series, and those bones would consequently belong to *the main characters*, who have died horribly just as they find love and happiness. You can go cry yourself to sleep now.
Literary Allusion Title: The title is a truncated version of Writer/Teacher Lafcadio Hearn's farewell address to his students "Boys be ambitious."