The TVfication of NINOMIYA Tomoko's ongoing series Nodame Cantabile begins tomorrow night. I don't think I'm going to make it home in time to watch it, but I'm deeply curious to see how they handle the fact that a significant proportion of the punchlines in that comic take the form of "Chiaki [Nodame's love interest] becomes enraged and kicks Nodame across the room."

Ninomiya has the talent to show her characters beating on each other without making things unpleasant. Although the series is set in a nominally "real" world, she is very proficient at using the standard manga cues (and a few of her own invention) to show that a certain image is a stylized representation of an emotion or dynamic, rather than a straight view of the scene.

The poster at Shibuya station (and one of the images that cycles past on the Fuji TV site linked from above) seems to be showing such a scene, in the form of an aggressively cartoony composite. I wonder if the actual scene will be a still frame like that, or if the director has actually found a way to show a real live actor punching a real live actress so hard that she flies into the air and lands several feet away, weeping, and make it work as part of a romantic comedy.