When a manga becomes successful, there are usually a couple of common reasons why: the author publishes new work frequently to keep fans invested, and the characters and premise are unique and dynamic. That popularity is increased exponentially if said manga is given an anime. Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&! (pronounced Yotsuba-to!) is the definitive exception to that rule.
In spite of a sluggish and inconsistent production schedule, its decidedly normal characters and setting, and its total lack of alternative media, Yotsuba&! has remained consistently popular worldwide since its 2003 debut. To understand why it's important first to look at the series itself and its origins.
The Joy of Childhood
Yotsuba&! had a relatively obscure beginning. From 1998 to 2001, Azuma had experimented with a precursor series, Try! Try! Try!, which took the form of a one-shot and two webcomics. In the meantime, he found success with his first major hit, Azumanga Daioh, a 4-koma manga about a group of girls attending high school. Azumanga Daioh received a 26-episode anime, and is still loved by anime fans the world over.
Having finished Azumanga in 2002, Azuma reworked Try! Try! Try! into Yotsuba&!, which has been his sole major work since. Yotsuba&! follows the eponymous Yotsuba Koiwai, a green-haired five-year-old who lives with her adopted father in an unnamed town. Yotsuba is excessively curious, energetic and creative. She spends her days discovering new things with an ensemble cast that includes her neighbors, relatives, and a few of her father's friends.
Young kids naturally make big impressions; because they lack the verbal and behavioral filter we set for ourselves as we grow, they are totally uninhibited in how they interact with the world. For adults, this can be adorable, hilarious, exhausting, and occasionally cringe-worthy. Yotsuba embodies that principle to a tee. If Azumanga Daioh is dedicated to capturing the inherent comedy of daily high school life, Yotsuba&! does the same with early childhood. Readers are expected to derive entertainment from seeing often mundane facets of everyday life through a little girl's eyes, and hopefully reignite a sense of their own childlike wonder along the way. If that's indeed the goal, Yostuba&! exceeds it by a mile.
Both Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&! fall into the slice-of-life genre but there are some important differences. Yotsuba&! differs in that all of its humor comes organically from its situations instead of deliberate jokes and punchlines. Additionally, all of Azumanga's characters fall into familiar manga tropes while Yotsuba&!'s ensemble cast, by contrast, is a lot more subdued. Whether it's the three Ayase sisters and their mother, Yotsuba's father Yousuke, Yousuke's friend Jumbo, or the rest of the cast, they all seem like people who could exist in real life. Azuma expertly toes the line between keeping these characters substantive while letting Yotsuba drive the comedy forward.
The result is a slice-of-life series that avoids the clichés and stereotypes endemic to the genre, and instead chooses to hew as close to reality as it can. Rather than seeking to jazz-up or otherwise subvert normal life, Yotsuba&! celebrates it, which not only makes it unique but helps to explain its unlikely success.
Why no Anime?
19 years and 15 volumes in, there remains no indication that Yotsuba&! will ever get an anime like Azumanga Daioh did. Azuma has gone out of his way to state that this isn't due to his animosity towards Azumanga's anime team, but rather that it's an issue of adaptation from the original source material.
Yotsuba&! would be an exceptionally difficult manga to adapt for a few reasons. Firstly, techniques like using multiple panels with no activity to address the passage of time are not easily rendered into anime. Azuma seems to believe that his product was made specifically to be a manga, and that its quality would suffer if it was given an anime. Along those lines, there's also the legitimate fear that newcomers may opt to skip the manga in favor of the anime, a phenomenon which is especially common in the west.
Adding to this, Azuma churns out new volumes of Yotsuba&! at an extremely slow rate. Volumes came out once or twice a year up until the early 2010s. Since then, production has slowed to the extent that Volume 15, released in February 2021, came out nearly 3 years after Volume 14 released in April 2018. Aside from Yoshihiro Togashi's Hunter x Hunter, which has endured repeated hiatuses due to Togashi's poor health, Yotsuba&! has one of the slowest production schedules for a manga that is officially ongoing.
Those waiting for Yotsuba&! to receive an anime should cut their losses and read the manga instead. Yotsuba&! is too good to miss simply because it isn't animated, and stands out not only among manga but media as a whole in its ability to evoke nostalgia in its readers.
Source: Anime News Network