Saint☆Young Men

Saint☆Young Men (2013)

聖☆おにいさん

Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha, the founders of Christianity and Buddhism, are living together as roommates in a Tokyo apartment while taking a vacation on Earth. The comedy often involves jokes about Christianity, Buddhism, and all things related, as well as the main characters' attempts to hide their identities and understand modern society in Japan.

Date of release
2013-05-09
TMDB
7.7 / 10 (101)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Animation, Comedy
Director
Noriko Takao

Casting

Interesting facts

Saint Young Men is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hikaru Nakamura. Its plot involves Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha, who are living as roommates in an apartment in Tokyo. It has been serialized by Kodansha in the monthly seinen manga magazine Morning Two since September 2006, with chapters collected in twenty-two tankōbon volumes as of July 2025. Kodansha USA has been publishing the series in English in an omnibus edition since December 2019. A-1 Pictures adapted the manga series into two original animation DVDs (OADs) and an anime film which was released on May 10, 2013. It also inspired a ten-episode live-action web series in 2018.

Production

Before writing Saint Young Men, Hikaru Nakamura was working on Arakawa Under the Bridge, which began serialization on December 3, 2004, in the first issue of Square Enix's manga magazine Young Gangan. It attracted the attention of an editor of the magazine Weekly Morning, who wanted Nakamura to publish a series for the magazine.

Nakamura envisioned a comedy manga in which the protagonist would be a "very very powerful character", and realized a divine character would fit this premise. She first planned Jesus to be a character in the series, but to make the gags work well, Buddha was added to the series. Their opposing personalities were inspired by Nakamura's sister and her sister's husband; by observing their relationship, she saw some amusing situations.

Despite the religious references in the series, Nakamura stated she used only her personal knowledge and some aspects of modern society, such as yakuza and blogging, which were not intended to be critical but were added because they fit the story. Similarly, secondary characters were only introduced in the series if a chapter needed a new character to introduce a topic. The themes of the chapters were created before the situations and jokes.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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