Ichigo Mashimaro makes me feel so guilty. But anyway, I started watching the anime and it’s better than I thought. The seiyuu were all very good, although I think there are more suitable candidates for Nobue and Ana, which is not to say that I don’t like Hitomi Nabatame and Mamiko Noto (Yakumo FTW!). Also, it kind of annoys me how they changed Nobue from a 16-year-old high school girl to a 20-year-old college student. Her being a chain smoker just doesn’t seem as funny now that she’s legal.
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But more importantly, something has been bothering me since forever. What exactly is the joke with Ana’s last name? The manga didn’t explain it, so I assume that it must be something really obvious to a Japanese. I tried searching dictionaries and googling for “コッãƒãƒ©”, but I can’t find any possible explanations. The Japanese Wikipedia entry isn’t very helpful either. In the anime, Miu-chan gives Ana the nickname “穴骨洞” (anakoppora) and the English Wikipedia entry took that to be the joke, but it can’t be because it’s not in the manga! Also, “穴骨洞” (formed out of the kanji for “hole”, “bones” and “cave”) is not a real word, so it’s not something that everyone would immediately associate with her name, which means that it makes no sense for the girls (excluding Miu) to react weirdly when they hear it.
Therefore, there must be some other reason why the name “Coppola” is humourous in Japanese. Something that is immediately obvious to any Japanese, such that the manga does not need to explicitly explain the joke. Someone suggested to me that maybe it sounds like koppura, which is short for cup ramen. That’s the most likely explanation I’ve heard so far, but then again, “Coppola” is written as koppora and not koppura.
My other theory is that it’s either a slant for swearing or a sexual reference. This would explain why the anime handled the joke quite differently from the manga (just look at what censorship did to Nobue). In that case, it’s still weird that WWWJDIC doesn’t have the word, since it contains quite a lot of informal entries.
This question is driving me nuts! Just what the hell is so funny about Ana’s last name!?
