This Is Growing Up

An adaptation that feels more like a continued conversation.

THE STORY OF SCOTT PILGRIM HAS always existed in a strange little pocket of time, one that seems perpetually on the brink of techno-modernity, and this continues to be true in its latest incarnation. In the new anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the world has spun on and the cultural references have been updated, but computers are still loud, blocky, charming things. Grimy music venues and video-rental spaces remain present in Scott’s Toronto, though you do feel a greater sense of their precarity. The future is encroaching, but he doesn’t care. After all, he’s still dating a high-schooler when he meets the girl of his dreams.

Published by Oni Press across the aughts, the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels bottled a vibrant feeling of being young and wayward in that cuspy Gen-X era. Written and illustrated by Bryan Lee O’Malley (with later rereleases inked by colorist Nathan Fairbairn), the books followed the journey of a sweet but self-centered 20-something dirtbag who falls in love with the effortlessly cool Ramona Flowers and ends up having to fight her seven evil exes. Along the way, he learns to see beyond himself or at least in that general direction. The stickiness of Scott Pilgrim has a lot to do with how the series captures the mess of being in your 20s, but its je ne sais quoi lies in the texture of its setting, a mundane Toronto that’s cut with literalizations of video-game and manga references. Despite possessing the lanky frame of an indie bassist, Scott happens to be a great fighter who’s constantly getting into scuffles straight out of Dragon Ball. Defeated antagonists explode into a mist of video-game coins. Ramona is a Rollerblading courier who uses Scott’s subconscious as an extradimensional superhighway to shorten delivery times.