In a 2008
About.com poll,
Red Colored Elegy was voted Best "Artsy/Quirky", and 7th best new classic or reissued manga.
Publishers Weekly named
Red Colored Elegy as the third best manga of 2008. In 2009, the manga was nominated for the
Harvey Award in the Best American Edition of Foreign Material category.
Red Colored Elegy was selected as part of
Paul Gravett's list of "PG Rated Manga".
Reviews The Comics Reporter's David Welsh commends the
manga artist's approach to the story, saying "Hayashi's approach is very restrained and conscientious, particularly in its ability to convey the unspoken. Since communication is the crux of Ichiro and Sachiko's problems, the ability to convey the inability to express is essential." Another The Comics Reporter review comments on how "very simple cartooning can be taken in bold new directions through something other than a prodigious display of old-school craft."
The Japan Timess David Cozy commends Hayashi's art, commenting "Hayashi shows us Ichiro struggling, but it is the spatters that bring the struggle home." The
comics artist and
cartoonist Eddie Campbell described it as a good read, "a long strip cartoon about the stuff of life" and back to 1971 context would have been an inspirational work. He also replied to a reviewer complaining not able to make sense of it by linking the
Red Colored Elegy and the '60s
French New Wave cinema movement and describing today's reader as accustomed to linear read, concluding by if readers are occasionally confused then "welcome to 1970". Chris Lanier expressed a similar view in the January 2009 issue of
The Believer describing Hayashi's work as an attempt to import "the disjunctive innovations of French new-wave cinema to the comics page" resulting "a condensed visual poetry that still feels avant-garde nearly forty years later".
Red Colored Elegy was reviewed in issue #292 of
The Comics Journal by Bill Randall, who provided additional notes on his blog and expressed his disappointment towards the online reviews of what he considers as "one of the most important of all manga translated in English". Adam Stephanides, another contributor to
The Comics Journal, wrote an earlier review of the Japanese edition describing the storytelling as apparently simple at first but actually quite complex and elliptical, with a great deal left unsaid. Stephanides compared it to the works of artist
Jaime Hernandez, as well as the outputs of '70s American
underground comix artists, stating that no underground artist was doing anything nearly as ambitious as this at the time. Stephanides criticized
Drawn & Quarterly's edition for "rearranging the panels on each page so that the page (and the book) reads left-to-right, but not flipping the original panels." Tom Devlin, creative director at Drawn & Quarterly, answered that it was done so to reach the widest audience as possible. Devlin described a parallel between this choice and putting subtitles on a foreign film, saying that both clearly alter the work and yet are the only way for many to access it. He also commends "Hayashi's almost shapeless human figures convey emotion and vulnerability in every line".
Animation reception Red Colored Elegy OVA was recommended by the jury at the 2007
Japan Media Arts Festival in the animation division. ==References==