Taut and tight manifolds, introduced recently by H. Wu, are characterized as follows. Let
D
D
denote the open unit disk in
C
C
. The complex manifold
N
N
is taut iff the set
A
(
D
,
N
)
A(D,N)
of holomorphic maps from
D
D
into
N
N
is a normal family. If
d
d
is a metric inducing the topology on
N
,
(
N
,
d
)
N,(N,d)
is tight iff
A
(
D
,
N
)
A(D,N)
is equicontinuous. It is also shown that every taut manifold is tight in a suitable metric.