I’ve always maintained that tone and atmosphere can trump plot given the right author’s touch. This was more or less the case for Chica Umino‘s first manga series, Honey and Clover, which successfully finds the middle ground between subjective narration and a show-don’t-tell approach to character development. It’s an odd but effective style that results in characters that range from translucent to opaque depending on the time of day.

Her follow-up series, March Comes in like a Lion, hereby referred to as Sangatsu no Lion or 3gatsu, is similar. Its plot is a departure from Umino’s previous manga: it follows the life of a teenage Shogi pro who also happens to be an orphan (or the other way around as the story quickly implies). Unexpectedly, the plot is roughly the same as every other slice-of-life or coming-of-age anime, featuring lonely protagonists interacting with an upbeat cast to discover a less lonely world.

Yet 3gatsu differs stylistically: like H&C, it throws in ambiguous, metaphoric, sometimes maudlin pieces of subjective narration to punctuate key moments. Since both stories are fundamentally based on the mundane occurrences of everyday life, the difference between a key plot point and a trip to the zoo is often only made through those essential lines of narration that provide a brief window into the characters’ hearts. No one comes out and says “I’m happy” or “I feel terrible.” Instead we get more poetic phrasings of metaphors that summarize broader ideas–stuff like “the bridge in my town felt long when I first moved here, but it grew shorter as I made friends,” or “Christmas reminds me of the smell of antiseptic from staying with my Mom as she worked as a nurse.” It’s not a special literary device by any means but Umino makes particularly good use of it.

A plot synopsis would lead you to believe that 3gatsu is about Rei’s life as a young Shogi player but the orphan angle is played very hard and very early. As it turns out, the three sisters who unofficially adopt-slash-care-for Rei were also orphaned, and the Obon festival in the first volume draws attention to the rather large hole in their hearts. A shadow looms over the cast. Much like Honey and Clover‘s bittersweet longing for that which can never be, 3gatsu is characterized by a similar sense of distance or emptiness. Rei resembles an exaggerated version of Takemoto before his soul-searching journey, albeit wounded in a much more fundamental way. Even more interesting is the fact that the story seems ambiguous as to how optimistic and idealistic it wants to be. Rei clashes with the question of why he–or anyone for that matter–would want to dedicate their lives to the grueling, competitive world of pro Shogi, but there are no hints that suggest a shounen-esque ending versus a more bittersweet, Fate/stay night Heavens Feel route conclusion.

Sangatsu no Lion is good, at any rate. It probably won’t reach me in the same way that H&C does since I’m naturally weak to love stories, but it’s obvious from the start that it’s dripping with Chica Umino’s melancholic, subjective style. The story is beautifully told from that point of view and I have confidence that she’s capable of reaching further with the themes than the first two volumes suggest. The only factor to lament is the lack of translations.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chica Umino, Honey and Clover, Manga, Sangatsu no Lion

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

There’s a silly webcomic by a guy named Andrew Hussie that you might’ve seen if you spend much time around /co/ or Tumblr. (I don’t, but I’ve heard complaints). It’s called Homestuck and it’s a fascinatingly meta take on RPGs and youth. Though famous more for its formal gimmicks and odd sense of humour, there’s a deliberateness in the structure that points to certain themes. The comic operates well as parody for parody’s sake, but spend tens of hours reading through it and you’ll start to see more. If you’re willing to brave minor spoilers, read on.

First, a summary: Homestuck is about a group of teenaged internet friends playing a video game to save the world. But this isn’t the Matrix–reality and fiction don’t coexist. Logging into the game triggers a downpour of asteroids that destroys the Earth’s population just before the protagonists can escape. Yes, they escape into the game. Their goal is to “beat” the game and find a way to revive their planet.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t become the equivalent of reality. The characters are aware that it’s a game (and that it’s bizarrely structured like a tabletop RPG campaign). The game is still a set of rules, filled with its own ridiculous abstractions: the early chapters dwell on confusing inventory systems and an arbitrary level hierarchy. These gaming abstractions aren’t merely parody material for the reader to laugh at–they’re material for the characters to laugh at. The item synthesis system lets the cast create everything from jetpacks to a Bill Cosby laptop. We know that a Bill Cosby laptop is a ridiculous/awesome idea. So do they. We are watching people play a game.

So the comic’s postmodern knowingness works out for comedic purposes, but as the pages upon pages of IM chat logs build up (this is how the characters communicate), it’s hard not to wonder if there’s method to the madness. Hints are dropped: John, the first of the four heroes, rambles about his emotionally distant father’s obsession with clown dolls. The man keeps buying them as gifts, John says, thinking he likes them, when in reality they’re ugly and stupid. It’s all just a prank to make him writhe in embarrassment as he’s forced to recall his childhood fascinations. It is later mentioned offhandedly that perhaps Dad is buying presents for his child simply to bridge the gap between father and son.

What makes this suggestion a revelation rather than common sense is the fact that silliness is the standard in Homestuck. The reader is forced to suspend their disbelief within the first five minutes and ends up taking the silliness at face value. Create an elaborate plot to sneak outside and check the mail in search of your brand new game; crawl past your alcoholic mother’s wizard statues that she surely only bought to passive-aggressively irritate you since she knows you hate wizards. It’s funny when you read it, but there are moments when characters offer logical explanations for the chaos. Maybe it’s not just a prank, they realize, thinking back on their parents’ irrational actions. Maybe they see it that way because that’s what they believe.

The comic is ongoing so a central theme hasn’t solidified yet, but the coming-of-age thread continues. Each hero’s adventure begins by fusing household items and miscellaneous organisms to create spirit guides to help them on their quest. John ends up with his dead grandmother (fused with a clown plushie, if I recall correctly); Dave gets his older brother-slash-mentor and Rose gets her deceased cat/best friend. This is important. The spirit guides aren’t arbitrarily assigned: the were friends and mentors in real life. The premise of the game is to use the minerals gained from defeating monsters to build the hero’s house vertically until they can reach a portal in the sky. Every character begins at home–homestuck. The world is gone but your house is still there because it matters to you. Your friends are geographically out of reach–each of you ends up in a different in-game world–but you communicate through IM, just like you did in real life. There are unresolved tensions: John’s Dad’s study, the only part of the house invisible on the mini-map, symbolic of his fatherly elusiveness and mystery. Each character is introduced with a paragraph summarizing their interests based on objects lying around their room. It is not some fantasy RPG abstraction that defines the characters, but rather the posters in their rooms and objects in their houses. Need I say it? Just like real life.

[Paper-Flux]

It reminds me of Harry Potter and a longish article from The New Yorker that basically says that fantasy doesn’t have to take place in a foreign world. Often, especially in young adult stories like Harry Potter, fantasy is a mirror of reality. It’s not the intricacies of the lore and Latin spell incantations that turned the book into an icon–it’s the way Hogwarts mirrors school life. The authoritarian teachers and late-night pranks are exaggerated, of course, but at the end of the day they’re familiar to all of us. The farther I got into Homestuck, the more I felt that it was much the same. Here’s a vague approximation of a quote that pops up somewhere deep in the series: It’s hard being a kid. It’s hard and no one understands. A single sentence in a story of Tsukihime‘s length, yet it sticks. It’s echoed in a later arc when it is revealed that the game is deliberately designed to be played by children entering puberty. Romance is supposed to bubble up and mess with team unity. It’s no coincidence that the cast wrestles with the troubles of youth while trying to save the world.

(Umineko comparisons would be made if it weren’t for spoilers for both series. In a nutshell, both stories have characters playing the role of the reader and analyzing the “real” story for us. In Homestuck’s case, the characters provide meta commentary on their game. It raises the reader’s awareness that everything is deliberate and structured, perhaps for thematic ends.)

So what exactly is this game and why was it made this way? We don’t know yet, but I’ll stick to my theory that it’s a grand, hilarious, brilliantly hyperbolic coming-of-age tale. The whole idea of life being like a tabletop RPG is driven home by the countless allusions, and the few lines of thematic development stick out like a sore thumb (in a good way). This really isn’t The Matrix. It’s middle school life told as a game.

And while this post is more explanatory than evaluative, I should mention that the comic is actually good. What really makes it work in comparison to your average magical girl/YA fantasy coming-of-age narrative is the amount of fun it has with itself. The characters grow on you while you’re busy laughing. The whole story does.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Homestuck, Webcomic

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Hey.

This is a heads-up that I’m going to try anime blogging again. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about the blogosphere, but there are still some great blogs that are worth following and I think I can gain something from this endeavour. Hopefully you can gain something from reading. Unfortunately, this will be a slowblog–post ideas are easy to come by but I don’t watch enough anime to fuel weekly posts. My post rate is likely to eventually drop to once per month.

Regardless, anime blogging was an important hobby for me in high school. Now that I’m older and know a thing or two about writing and movies and lit criticism, I want to see if I can do this properly. Enjoy the site.

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Time flies. It’s scary, it really is. One thing I’ve always noted about Honey and Clover–my favourite anime, if you’re new to this blog and don’t know me–is how terrifyingly quickly the years fly by. The fall festival leads to Christmas which blends into the snowy winter months and before you know it you’re watching the cherry blossoms again.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Today is the first of September, which means that this blog has been alive for three years. That’s quite a while. I started this thing at the beginning of my grade 11 year, looking to explore the anime scene and get my name out there like all of the other cool kids on the internet. It’s hard to say where I’ve gone since then. My annual anniversary posts are usually a tad wistful because of the way that they fall at the end up summer and the beginning of a new year. This one is a bit odd in that I’m still in Oxford until Sunday, so I guess I’m celebrating the end of my summer course and the beginning of the school year.

This past year was obviously terrible for my blog but it was fairly productive for me as an anime fan, leading me to learn the basics of fan translation and sharpening my writing skills with my work for The Nihon Review. More importantly, I have a renewed opinion of the anime blogosphere and a much clearer goal of where I want to go within anime fandom and in my career. By this point there’s no doubt in my mind that I have to become a writer when I finish school. I don’t know what I want to write yet but I absolutely have to write something. This sense of clarity, however broad it may be, is helping me to develop what my new blogging style will be. Personal and “update” posts like this will probably stop being written, but I’ll talk about that when I officially return to the blogosphere. My new theme got a bit delayed but it’s being worked on and it can’t stay unfinished forever.

In the meantime, let me thank all of you who kept this dead site in your feed reader for so long. I’ll be back someday. And to those who aren’t reading this: I’ll win you back within a year.

Semicolon-close-parenthesis.

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Anniversary

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

No points for guessing who’s going.

Right. I’ll be at AN as always, though I don’t have anything too exciting planned. If you’re in the Toronto area and you plan on going to the con, feel free to say hi–I have these really tiny 18+ eroge stickers on my bag that no one will ever notice. Helpful, hmm? Itinerary is pretty straightforward, just the usual gaming and hanging around. I might stalk GipFace since he seems to want us to, although I say that every year.

Also, I suppose it’d be odd to write this post out of the blue and not address the fact that my blog is effectively dead. I admit it, first-year university killed my blogging schedule and forced me out of the internet, just as it did to everyone else. That said, I have a plan for the direction I want to take this blog in the future. I’m not expecting to resume writing until September at the latest; blogging is something that you need to incorporate into your daily life to succeed at it, so if I can’t do it during school I shouldn’t be doing it at all. However, I’ll be working on a new design for the site during the summer and I’ll try to clean things up. I’ll have the same address and blog name and everything, but it’ll be a reboot. Memories of Eternity v2.0.

Look forward to it. I’m getting old and bsns is getting srs.

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

[fuyouchu]

Download

Welcome to the first episode of the Memories of Eternity podcast! I believe I’ve mentioned this idea in passing before but it took a little while to get the ball rolling. The format is pretty much stolen straight from wah–each episode will have a (usually different) group of people chatting about whatever issue we decide on in advance, preferrably something topical so that the listeners will be on the same page as us.

Ironically, everyone won’t be on the same page for this one because it was recorded a few weeks ago and it took me a while to find the time to edit it. Regardless, I hope you have fun with it. Do note that this was a new experience for all of us so it may be a little rough around the edges. Feedback is always welcome.

Guests:

• Executive Otaku
• rune_devros
• chronolynx

Songs:

• OP – Taste of Paradise by Eri Kitamura (Onii-chan no Koto Nanka Zenzen Suki Janain Dakara ne!!)
• ED – Magia by Kalafina (Puella Magi Madoka Magica)

Show notes:

• We were using Moetron‘s Winter 2011 chart.
• The post on Behind the Nihon Review I mentioned is this one, written by Kylaran.
• Toshiyuki Kato directed Code-E, Mission-E, and Level E but I don’t think they have anything in common.
• Want to join the OniiKoto drinking game? It’s on the calendar. Also, check my old post for a more coherent explanation of why I think it’s better than it looks.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cardfight!! Vanguard, Fractale, Freezing, Gosick, Haiyoru! Nyaruani: Remember My Love(craft-sensei), Hourou Musuko, IS: Infinite Stratos, Kimi ni Todoke 2nd Season, Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?, Level E, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, Mitsudomoe Zouryouchuu!, Podcast, Rio: Rainbow Gate!, Yumekui Merry

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

[koi]
(Random picture to catch your attention and stop the post from getting lost on the front page)

As you might have heard on Twitter, I’ve been accepted as a staff member for the fairly reputable review site, The Nihon Review, alongside episodic blogger Shinmaru. This is a fairly big move for me since I’m certain that it’ll help me sharpen my writing abilities, and I’m looking forward to contributing to the site’s impressive archive of entries. You might also see me on the staff blog from time to time, though I’ll have to prioritize this site for editorials.

As for what this means for my posting schedule–well, if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you’d know that I’ve been all over the place since university started. Frankly my life has been all over the place too. As a general rule, my target here is one post per week, and I aim for that regardless of how many other activities vie for my attention. The good news is that I don’t normally write reviews here so my articles over at the NHRV won’t detract from my editorial ideas.

Anyway, please check out the site if you haven’t already done so. I’ve been reading them for a while and I can guarantee that you’ll learn a thing or two if you keep an eye on them. If you’re already a fan, then I hope I can bring a bit of modern-day bishoujo fandom into a blogging style generally considered to be for the stuffy and elitist. Not that that’s a bad thing–moe fans could do to be a bit more discriminating!

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Announcement

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

I avoid writing these subjective, meandering articles whenever I can–if I have nothing of substance to say, why publish a post about it? Still, there are exceptions to every rule, and K-ON!! seems to have forced my hand. I’ve written about it twice (disclaimer: old posts are embarrassing and bad), and in that time I’ve said all that I have to say… yet I can’t leave things hanging.

So, instead of analyzing the narrative (what’s there to analyze?) or digging into the heart of its appeal (it’s pretty self-explanatory if you ask me), I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a story about the rise to fame of the world’s five greatest moeblobs.

In the beginning, there was a legend: a promise in a season preview chart that the renowned Kyoto Animation would be taking on a new project, adapting a fun but ultimately unoriginal 4koma manga series. Having seen the likes of Haruhi Suzumiya and the Key adaptations, anime fandom knew that, like it or not, K-ON was going to be a financial and popular success. As yet another entry in the growing trend of “database”-styled moe shows, it attracted both diehard fans and haters. People knew whether they would like it or not before they even watched it.

Fast forward a few months. K-ON is now more or less a cultural phenomenon, apparently making a direct impact on Japan’s guitar sales. What exactly made the show magical enough to garner this kind of adoration? Frankly, it may not have been magical at all–who would be surprised that a high-budget otaku-targeted KyoAni production would make waves in fandom? Being the shameless bishoujo fan that I am, I loved the show, and I was impressed at how its lightheartedness never drifted into the dangerous realms of boring fluff and forced drama (the moe version of shounen filler).

The second season was much of the same, and I mean that in a good way. I commented a couple of times on how it took an average of less than 5 minutes of an episode for me to start grinning, either at a joke or as a natural reaction to the dialogue. Worst case scenario, the OP would make me smile. It’s like listening to Perfume.

And then something happened. Episode 20–the final school festival.

Graduation drama is a bit of a cheap shot in that it forces you to relate to it, but it usually winds up being hollow. Forced drama at the end of a comedy series is nothing new. The best case scenario would be the likes of Azumanga Daioh, which, if memory serves, ended on a bittersweet high note without attempting to conjure any real emotion.

But that’s not the impact that K-ON had on me. I felt something. I was impressed, too, at the way everything was presented: drawing out the introductions during the concert, setting the climax in the club room, using tears as the first visual cue that the drama was about to hit. I can understand why I enjoyed the scene from a formal perspective, but in reality, it reaches far deeper than that. The dialogue in that scene was poignant in its reflection of the girls’ personalities and the little quirks in their relationships (the mention of lycopene was brilliant), but the scene is really about the dialogue in the entire show. It brings to mind every one of Yui’s silly comments and Mugi’s naive exclamations, the kind of events you think nothing of because you know shows like this never end.

Really, you don’t realize how important something is until you lose it.

I was surprised. Of course I love KyoAni and I liked K-ON since the beginning, but I liked it as a fluffy moe series–the best of its kind. It normally takes a full-fledged drama to get an emotional reaction out of me, and even that can go wrong. What was I thinking, nearly tearing up at the end of the concert? It’s just a moeblob show–the best of its kind!–it’s not the kind of thing to warrant tears. We know it made money so there’s bound to be more of it, as confirmed by the upcoming movie. Heck, the TV series even packaged a couple extra episodes to tide us over and keep it from ending on such a sad note.

No matter how much I think about it, though, nothing can change the fact that it reached me. My emotional reaction to fiction usually revolves around events: a death, a disappearance, a breakup. Sadness resulting from nothing but a little drama at the end of a moe comedy series is new to me. Even so, I felt something for K-ON, a show with no plot or depth of narrative, a show with nothing but amusing characters. At what point did that amusement turn into genuine depth? I’m not sure.

If there’s anything I can say about K-ON in the end, it’s that I underestimated it. I praised it since day one, but I underestimated it. I would’ve never thought that the characters whom I once deemed to be the epitome of the good kind of archetypal shallowness would become this whole and emotionally affecting.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: K-ON, Kakifly, Kyoto Animation

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

In dire need of an imouto route.

Contrary to what some believe (possibly even the popular belief), dating sims are an intricate art. They’re not about the (nonexistent) ero-scenes or other forms of sexual titillation, and they demand more depth from their characters–even if it’s an illusion of depth–than your average moege. They are, after all, referred to as “romance simulation” in Japanese. Much like a good moe series that puts its own spin on the tried-and-true archetypes, good dating sims demand immersive writing that doesn’t rely on plot.

Judging from AIC’s adaptation, Amagami is indeed a good dating sim. I was underwhelmed at first since the show opened with perhaps the least realistic arc, but it quickly became evident that, despite the absence of Kenichi Kasai’s rather liberal interpretation, I was enjoying the series as much as KimiKiss.

My opinion of Amagami has always been more or less positive, but the turning point for me was Sae’s arc. It wasn’t really about anything per se, but wasn’t it sweet to see her struggle against her exaggerated fear of social interaction, all the while slowly falling for her mentor? She’s not much more than a mess of overdone tropes, but I fell for her all the same. It didn’t matter that I saw the ending from a mile away or that I consciously realized that her personality archetype is simplified and that a similar scenario would be impossible in real life.

…In other words, I fell right into the show’s trap. That’s exactly the reaction that dating sims coerce from you.

Looking back, all it took for Amagami‘s neatly woven fantasies to sink in was an encounter with my chosen heroine’s route. It’s telling that I loved her arc even though her story was one of the most bland–some might call that shallow, but it’s more a testament to the writing than anything else. In most cases, four episodes of utterly transparent (and let’s face it, childish) romance would be literally painful to sit through, but here, it works. It didn’t surprise me at all when I found myself enjoying Sexhair Kaoru’s and Tsukasa’s arcs just as much, despite my lack of emotional involvement with the characters.

Best scene in the show, and it wasn’t even from my favourite character or arc.

Specifics are tricky in a subjective genre like this, but I did notice a few things while viewing the series. One key scene that every (or at least almost every) arc features is the moment in which each girl realizes their feelings for Junichi. It’s only a matter of seconds, but those little third-person interjections in the narrative make a world of difference. In fact, most of them stand out in my memory: Haruka talking to her friend on the phone, blushing and kicking her feet; Kaoru brooding in the bath, Ayatsuji going deredere as she realizes that she enjoys Junichi’s company. Nothing is more effective in a romance series than those subtle moments–and in a dating sim, they double as a moment of victory.

The show is also very stylized, both in terms of presentation and plot. I don’t mean it in the sense of “following convention”; rather, I’m referring to the way it goes along with unrealistic clichés or events for the sake of telling a better story. Case in point: Ai’s kiss scene on the swings. The scene was as cheesy as something out of a shoujo manga, but it works. Same with dressing Sae in that frilly lolita outfit for the final episode of her arc–all the writers did was hang a flimsy lampshade on it, but it works because it’s all part of the fun. Even the unbelievable triumph that was Haruka’s arc looks good in retrospect as it embodies a completely different dynamic.

In other words, Amagami is both plausible and implausible where it counts. The little scenes that need an extra stylistic flare are bolstered by a bit of dating sim magic, but it isn’t enough to shake the viewer’s suspension of disbelief created by the core of the story, which is simply a series of well-written love stories that make you forget just how impossible they are.

[haitaka]

Amagami‘s appeal is naturally subjective and so it’s a difficult thing to articulate, but I believe the show’s heart lies in its dialogue. Plotless romance is a hard thing to do right, but these guys can do it, apparently. There isn’t much textual evidence I can bring up short of quoting random conversations (and I’d be quoting fansubs at that), but we all know that romance writing can’t be pinned down that easily.

It’s a more general thing about how the stories capture all of the awkwardness and hesitance and eventual thrill of first love. Every key conversation resonates with realism, even if the scenarios are implausible, and the characters are just transparent enough for us to enjoy watching them fall in love. Each relationship has a completely different dynamic, too, and Junichi ranges from playing the persistent would-be loser to the oblivious childhood friend. He’s a great guy, Junichi Tachibana–the only thing generic and uninspiring about him is his character design (and I have nothing but respect for that purple turtleneck).

Amagami impressed me more than I expected, and that’s saying something since I expected a lot. Part of me still thinks that the romanticized love polyhedron of KimiKiss will always be superior since it’s a spectacular adaptation, but Amagami proves that the real heart of both stories is in the source material’s writing. I applaud the staff at AIC for putting together an anime in which 4 episode arcs are enough to capture the naive bliss of a full-length dating sim.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AIC, Amagami, Amagami SS, Enterbrain

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Tamayura turned a few heads when it was released toward the end of 2010, though most of those heads belonged to viewers who already adored director Junichi Sato’s work on the Aria franchise. The two anime are similar in the ways that count for the genre–Sato manages to build an aura of magic and childlike wonder around his settings, and he explores them at a laid-back pace. Tamayura’s presentation isn’t spectacular or particularly memorable but something about it reached me more effectively than Aria did.

I should preface this post by telling (reminding?) you that, against all odds, I am not a fan of the iyashi-kei subgenre. While I adore some plotless atmospheric shows from time to time, straight-up “healing anime” has always put me to sleep. Admittedly, I couldn’t make it through an hour of Tamayura without nodding off, but the experience was more touching than your average hour of aimless stress relief (note than I’m referring to literal stress relief and not the ubiquitous J-List innuendo).

This, of course, says more about me than the show itself–the genre certainly didn’t bend its rules to meet my expectations. I suspect the plot had something to do with it. I find the device of photography and old photos to be strangely romantic, perhaps figuratively, perhaps literally. There’s an air of mystery surrounding Fu’s father; he no longer exists in the world, and yet he’s immortalized by a single photograph. It’s such a powerful symbol, and it’s used in all forms of fiction for good reason. The same dynamic applies to Fu’s search for the location of the picture her brother drew–by finding the “truth” to every photo, every record of the real world, it’s as if she can relive the past.

Perhaps it’s more notable that Fu’s picture-taking habit in itself is the perfect metaphor for the whole aim of the iyashi-kei genre and Sato’s work on this title and Aria. It’s about exploring the world around you, finding beauty in the most everyday things. Whether it’s the fantastic Neo-Venezia or a more down-to-earth town in Japan, the importance of atmosphere and setting shines through. It’s almost the opposite of the world building of high fantasy and sci-fi–instead of developing the internal mechanics of a universe, Sato fleshes out the aesthetics of his worlds in order to create a living, breathing atmosphere. Not to downplay the important element of character interaction, but it’s no wonder that viewers are enthralled by watching a cast of Undines or middle schoolers explore their vibrant world like curious children.

It’s vague, it’s abstract, but I don’t believe it’s possible to concretely pin down the appeal of shows like Tamayura. It’s not about the thinly veiled symbolism of Fu’s photos representing her appreciation of the world, one shot at a time; it’s not really about her relationship with her friends and family. It’s something less tangible than that.

It’s about forging a narrative which gives you characters to relate to but doesn’t pull you down with threads of rehashed plot. It’s about breathing life into a fictional setting with countless hours spent on visual production to choose soft colours for the background and to animate the girls’ reactions in all their bubbly glory. It’s about taking the time to draw the long shots, to repeat the photography motif by showing us the world through Fu’s lens.

It’s about doing a lot of little things that add up to something beautiful. Tamayura still belongs to a genre that I’ll never be fond of and it was an ultimately forgettable experience for me, but it’s a solid endeavour on Hal Film Maker’s part that showed me how Junichi Sato works his magic and reminded me of what makes his magic magical in the first place.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

©2012 Memories of Eternity. All Rights Reserved.

© eternal for Memories of Eternity, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Aria, Hal Film Maker, Junichi Sato, Tamayura

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh