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I don't think otaku pandering is generally a bad thing. One of anime's strengths is its instantaneous hook from maximized aesthetic appeal in character design, so wish fulfillment entertainment is simply a natural progression. Nonetheless, there are many ways for an anime rooted in pandering to go wrong, one of which Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san is a pretty good example.

Our protagonist Nakano is afflicted with a general malaise from being overworked by his office job, and Senko plays opposite as a fox spirit who decides to become his housemaid as a means of alleviating his exhaustion. There's nothing especially unique about Nakano. Besides having ... an affinity for Senko's fluffy tail, being an average exploited Japanese salaryman is Nakano's defining characteristic. Neither feel like fully realized characters, rather they act as commensal concepts. Hence, the essence of the show lies in a emotionally fulfilling atmosphere (often described as "healing") enkindled by Senko's caring for him. Nakano exists diegetically to be pampered by Senko; likewise, Senko's main purpose as a character is to care for Nakano. There is another fox spirit, Shiro, who befriends Nakano, but she never really aggressively competes with Senko for his attention, instead functioning like an alternative texture.

Having outlined the mechanics, we can now ascertain how its narrative falls apart in several aspects. Firstly, since Senko has no personal motivation to act as Nakano's housemaid (the canonical explanation that he resembles one of his ancestors who previously had a rapport with Senko means that her interest at first is a matter of happenstance, i.e. any inciting attraction is negligible), there is no real chemistry between the two. This is aggravated further by their strictly platonic interactions, and although there may be sexual/romantic undertones, any development in this direction is repeatedly extinguished by Nakano's inner remarks that Senko both looks too young for his taste and acts too maternal for him. The show falls flat here since it's mostly focused on their relationship, or lack thereof.

Because there is no foundational attraction between the two, the weight of Senko's motivation to nurture falls onto the circumstances surrounding Nakano's unhappiness. This is actually the show's biggest misstep. As the emphasis shifts to Nakano's abuse at work, Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san evolves from flaccid slice of life into something much more sinister.

Japan's work environment is an unignorable cultural dilemma. Extremely long hours, unpaid overtime. and unused vacation days are common realities experienced by Japanese salarymen, often leading to stress, depression, sleep deprivation, and, at its extreme, karōshi (overwork death). "Death marches" and "black companies" are serious issues facing Japan, and the nightmare of actually working as an animator in Japan is pretty well understood by fans. But what does this have to do with the show?

To help illustrate why this is a narrative problem, let me pose a question: Why Nakano? Surely, he isn't the only salaryman suffering as a result of his exploitative company. So where is everyone else's Senko-san? What did Nakano do to get his own fox spirit housemaid? Of course, we know the answer, and we already know it to be facile and convenient. Nakano had no decision in his ancestry, and there is nothing particularly special about his victimization. Thus, the answer the show provides is also its general prescription for the salarymen at large: moe escapism. Instead of identifying a cultural emergency that the government has even been taking action against, Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san sees an opportunity to exploit for its own benefit. Why bother questioning the circumstances of stress, isolation, and disconnection when you can just watch anime like Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san and self-insert yourself into faceless leads like Nakano? This is unintentionally egregiously harmful social commentary, and in a culture in which a man married a Vocaloid character to escape loneliness, this is unacceptable. In the logic of Senko-san, exploitation in the workplace is a necessity for the salarymen to fully embrace a moe lifestyle.

Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san doesn't need to be a show with deep social commentary; the most frustrating thing is that the perfect adaptation already exists in the form of the post-credits "Super Senko-san" scenes. These segments showcase the real spirit of the show stripped down to its essentials. They reimagine the episode without all the fat, without the self-insert character, divorced from any social context, as a first-person POV one-sided dialogue short à la One Room. It's a format that works. But this was not the choice made, and the final product is merely a coddling vulgarity meant to fill a gaping demand in Japanese culture for domestic and emotional sustenance, abetting unethical work-life balance norms like convenience stores selling clean shirts for office workers unable to return home for the night for the sake of its own existence. Maybe this is "wholesome" entertainment for some, but the social implications are too glaring for me to find any iota of worth.

We finally learn the girl's name after 18 minutes, more than a third of the way in. Not that the main characters' names matter anyway, nor does the plot nor the characters' backgrounds nor really any of the specifics. In this way, California Crisis reminds me of Monte Hellman's sun-baked road movie classic, Two-Lane Blacktop; that is, there is a story, one about a road trip, but that story also happens to be the aspect of least interest. Forget the story, and the focus is now what is being presented on screen. You've got the really striking art style reminscent of Patrick Nagel, with its ... bold colour palette on clean yet detailed line art and two-tone shading that gives a strong sense of directional lighting; the wonderfully '80s boogie soundtrack delivered by city pop singer Miho Fujiwara; the '80s Hollywood movie staples of SoCal, dive bars, diners, and car chases.

But even looking at the plot, certain familiar threads pop up, like the optimistic sci-fi elements tying outer space to the domestic life (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was also released in 1986) or the highly idealized sexual freedom of American women (think of all those provocative coming-of-age sex comedies the '80s is known for). Yet at the core of California Crisis is a novelly foreign critique of the American Dream. Here we have Noera, the male protagonist who claims he cares about his job, his car, his wallet, etc. but whose actions say otherwise; he is barely coerced by a complete stranger to take a road trip to Death Valley and during said trip ends up totaling two cars on unpaid loans. There is no hesitance in this adventure, the brakes never pulled to sit and wonder what the point of it all is, only the impulse to move forward to the next leg. Reflected is an attitude that pervaded America's, and Japan's, economic prospects of the time. During a reunion scene between Noera and his old classmate Jack Varo, his friend unwittingly sums up the mood of the trickle-down era while reminiscing about their high school basketball days: "Those times were great, weren't they? We all just did what we wanted." Still, California Crisis is even more explicit. The trip to Death Valley is initially decided on a whim when, after receiving a vision from the mysterious orb at the diner, Marsha dazedly blurts "American Dream" out of the blue. This tenuous association, along with Marsha's suspicious lack of a past, gives the impression that she's running from, or towards, something. But their arrival at Death Valley is met with a final car chase, after which they end up breaking the "Space Mind" after falling into a river. What's left is a transparent glass ball leaking river water. And then the OVA abruptly ends, their journey as fruitless as the American Dream.

California Crisis is a document of what director Mizuho Nishikubo and his production team saw and felt on their location scouting trip to California. The sum total is a time capsule of a certain era of American pop culture, which is a bit odd coming from a Japanese animation, but the accuracy is undeniable. There's a chase scene set to a neon-lit night club performance whose storyboard could have been taken straight out of a classic '80s action movie (I'm thinking Beverly Hills Cop?). Captured is not just the decade's aesthetic but also the dead-ends of its materialism. And how fitting for this idiosyncratic, Western-facing production, which could only have been born out of the '80s anime boom from a studio that almost immediately went out of business.

The theme of transience is often expressed in Japanese culture as "mono no aware." For the uninitiated, mono no aware is roughly translated as "the pathos of things," a Zen mood essential to several Japanese traditions, such as hanami (cherry blossom viewing). Both Ozu and Shinkai heavily transmit the concept, but one of my favourite examples of mono no aware in cinema is in Edward Yang's Yi Yi. There's a part in which NJ, the father of the Jian family on whom the film focuses, spends a whole 24 hours exploring Tokyo with his ex-lover during a business trip. They walk through a shrine, by ... the beach, on the streets, all the while catching each other up on their lives since they had last been together and, eventually, talking over their past romance, its dissolution, and the resulting emotional trauma. It's a brilliant illustration of mono no aware, as even though the two reflect on the past, they are portrayed in this time as their selves, in the current, in their respective lives, having grown apart. Irozuku attempts to arouse this same wistful projection of the past onto the moment of the now in a very strange, roundabout manner.

The premise of Irozuku is convoluted in the sense that it combines two frameworks, time traveling and school life, as a means to a telos not commonly seen in either. The two employ elements already at odds with each other. Time travel imbues a story with dramatic irony and direction by establishing an ending inherent in the beginning: the audience knows the time traveler must inevitably return to their timeline. School anime tend to be slice of life comedies, which is a genre known for being relaxed and intentionally aimless. Perhaps, when watching Irozuku, you might wonder: "Where is this going?" For most of its run, the show does indeed feel directionless, to the point where the thematic components seem haphazardly stitched together, but by the final episode, it's made apparent that the colour motif, the magical time travel setup, and the aimless pacing all serve a purpose.

Colours, or the concept of, are undoubtedly the selling point of the show as they are the root of Hitomi's internal conflict. With such seemingly obvious symbolism, the gut reaction is immediately to decode it. However, Irozuku is a little shrewd, and the most obvious readings (depression, emotions, love, etc.) are red herrings on closer inspection. Colours don't really "represent" anything in particular; they serve as a visual cue to the audience that Hitomi is unable to experience. Full stop. Her complete achromatopsia severs her from experiencing the phenomenon of the moment. She's so wrapped up in her own preconceptions of her relationships with others that she is unable to see colour (and by extension, she is also unable to produce magic, which is viewed in this universe as a means to help, and thereby connect with, other people). It's a dramatic manifestation of her psyche, but intelligible nonetheless. Theoretically, this show wouldn't have worked as a book, since the visual euphemism is so crucial. During scenes in which we see through Hitomi's eyes, the contrast of the vibrant palette against the monochromatic world enhances the exuberance of the moment by sucking the audience into the graphic instant.

The knowledge that Hitomi must return to the future by the end is kind of a wink to the audience about the ephemerality of youth. We know that Hitomi's time with the Magic Photography Arts Club is limited, which makes the experience much more somber. Yet she ultimately finds meaning in her time with the club, and the fruits of her time traveling emerge in the final episode in which she and her elderly grandmother Kohaku "reminisce" about their shared school days. This uncanny, almost bizarre scene conflates Hitomi's past and present self quite literally; the 60-year-old photos of Hitomi with the Magic Photography Arts Club are skimmed by present day Hitomi, who has only aged a couple of weeks since then. The juxtaposition of Kohaku's genuine nostalgia against Hitomi's newfound awareness for her own "present" evokes plaintive rumination in a manner suggestive of the mono no aware of the aforementioned scene from Yi Yi.

The endgame of catharsis you expect from a show like this isn't really the point, rather the point is that the individual moments matter even though you know there will eventually be an end to them, as youth is in fact fleeting. That's why the banal, slice of life events that actually happen in the show seem like they weren't "going anywhere": they weren't. The romances, the hangouts, the club affairs, none of it really matters in regard to building up to a narrative climax. What matters is that they actually happened so Hitomi had something to look back at sentimentally and feel like she truly enjoyed experiencing.

Unfortunately, the stories comprising Hitomi's experiences in the past aren't very engaging, or at the very least, I'm unable to recall most of them. There were a couple of memorable moments, like the scene in which the club runs across a bridge in an attempt for a photo op with a night cruise, or even some of the mundane shots of some of the characters walking and talking against the streetlit night. But these glimpses into transient youth were few and far between. Most of the vignettes were too goal-oriented and relied too much on tired school cliches, which is a poor decision when the bulk of the narrative relies on such moments. Maybe Irozuku's aimlessness would have felt more justified had it more moments of genuine humanity.

In the planning stage of Mirai no Mirai, significant consideration was put into the designing of the house in which the majority of the movie is set. In fact, director Mamoru Hosoda employed a real architect, Makoto Tanijiri, to design the Oota house. The house is a series of four levels, not quite stories as it were, connected by a series of steps on one side of the house. It's a peculiar layout, as noted in a throwaway comment made by the grandmother at the beginning, designed in-universe by the architect father. A sloped tracking shot near the beginning of the movie, similar to Wolf ... Children's famed lateral tracking shot, moves between each level to show how they are attached. The first level is a den, mainly inhabited by the four-year-old son, Kun, and his train sets and toys. The next level up is a lawn-type outdoor area, followed by the kitchen and living area, then finally the bedrooms. Tanijiri planned the house so that a "child will be able to see the bottom room clearly from the garden, but an adult will only be able to see what's right in front of them." The effect? "The child's view will change as he grows up.”

What seems like a small detail of the movie is in fact the most important, as it sets up the entire thematic structure. In contrast to Hosoda's previous grand cinematic declarations on family and life, underlying the superficial coming-of-age story of Mirai is a focused meditation on the architecture of time. Of course, true to his nature, Hosoda interprets time and space as relative to our family histories. For Hosoda, time does not move laterally, rather it flows back and forth through the levels of the family tree, just as the aforementioned tracking shot shifts repeatedly between the levels of the house. Each generation experiences time on their own distinct level, yet the time of their ancestors and descendants are always within reach.

In Mirai, this platitudinous reading of time isn't a reading at all; it's the extraordinary reality of the movie. The expanse of the narrative finds Kun, in the garden of the house, drifting through time to meet anachronistic versions of family members he currently knows. The first instance of time-travelling antics (though not the first scene of garden fantasies) delivers Hosoda's vision the best. Kun, frustrated with his parents doting on the newly born Mirai, runs into the future, middle school-aged version of his sister, along with their anthropomorphic dog. The scene is filled with Marx Brothers-styled hijinks and light exploration into the logistics of Mirai's time traveling. But the scientific implications are quickly abandoned because time travel isn't really the point. Kun goes on to meet the past versions of his parents, and then their parents, learning a lesson or two from each encounter, and these subsequent scenes are more mired in heart tugging magical realism than heart pounding sci-fi. Some may find the episodic structure to be off-putting, but given the design of the house, a matching series of seemingly contained yet faintly connected stories appears to be more than appropriate.

The kicker is that pretty much the entirety of the movie, time traveling and all, takes place inside the Oota house, in the garden, in the present. And this seems to be Hosoda's insinuation: the past and the future are united in the present via the family tree, a statement he articulates in the wonderfully directed climax in which present-day Kun and future Mirai witness landmark events from their relatives' pasts, including a deeply touching famed race mentioned by the grandparents earlier in the movie.

At certain points, Mirai no Mirai offers glimpses of Hosoda at his compulsive, unrestrained worst. Pregnancy fetish and furry scenes can be checked off the "obligatory Hosoda-isms" checklist within the first act, and his penchant for exploring enclosed dimensions, seen in his earlier works, returns in full masturbatory force during the worst scene in the movie, the lead-up to the climax. Animated mostly in (decent) CGI, it's visually incongruous with the rest of the movie's style and thematically divorced as it has little to do with the nature of time or family. It's full of those (POV travelling?) shots he employed so daintily in Wolf Children, but instead of snowy knolls and forests, it's ugly, repetitive train tunnels. It also lingers for far too long, almost ruining the climax. But these pockmarks are minimal and eclipsed by moments of Hosoda at his most honed, absolute best.

It’s useless to discuss what FLCL “was about” and what Progressive “should have been” as this is an exercise in fanboyism and nostalgia. The majority of the fans in the West watched FLCL at an age where FLCL’s messages hit the most, and given the near two decade gap between the original and the sequel, there was no way Progressive was going to have the same effect. This much is obvious. Nor is it worth comparing the production (in terms of art and animation) between the two. They were made in different eras of anime by different staffs for different reasons (the original being a ... meticulously crafted OVA and the sequel(s) co-produced by Adult Swim as a TV series specifically with the fanbase in mind). However, there is value in looking at what FLCL did right fundamentally to have so much staying power, as evidenced by the lingering interest in the dilatory sequel (and the fact that both Pillows shows near me were sold out within a couple days), as a comparison for Progressive’s utter failures.

If FLCL is a story of the confusing mess that is puberty, then Progressive is a story about strange things happening to teens alongside the awkwardness of puberty. The quirky sci-fi concepts and weird imagery in the original were affectations of the metanarrative, i.e. they were the products of its creators attempting to tell a visual story. How these symbols affect and reflect in the viewer were weighted more heavily than their relevance to the characters or the plot. The lore, arguably even the story, was never important; the grand ideas seemingly communicated through them were. This is why the original is so memorable — not because it was “random” or “wacky” but because of the artifice of deeper meaning.
Progressive's obsession with mythology is the reverse of the effect that the writers wanted to emulate; it is the distillation of the abstraction from existing art into imagery that performs solely on a diegetic level. The constant expository dialogue about shit like N.O. waves, being run over by vehicles, and the Medical Mechanica factory and their consistent (i.e. predictable) usage formalizes them into discernible elements of the story's universe, stripping them of their symbolic potential. The way the writing heavily depends on previously established symbols results in too much explication, demystifying them into nothing but what they are, which is sometimes stated straight up in the dialogue. An entity ejecting from some kid’s forehead is no longer the creators trying to portray pubescent intensity with their own idiosyncratic visual lexicon, it’s just something that happens to teens that “overflow” in Progressive. Vintage guitars are intergalactic weapons employed to interact with and manipulate N.O. waves and their manifestations — nothing more, nothing less. Big battles happen at the end of every episode because this is FLCL, and what’s FLCL without action scene sakuga bullshit, right? Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but there is then no point in borrowing FLCL’s imagery, for it is meaningless and at worst perfunctory fanservice (while the actual, traditional fanservice no longer even plays a metanarrative purpose). That isn’t to say Progressive doesn’t attempt to introduce its own symbols, but these range from flaccid and unfulfilling (zombification/flesh eating) to forcefully aborted by dialogue (those fucking cat-eared headphones). [Note: If I’m missing or misinterpreted details about the sci-fi lore, it’s not because I don’t really care, it’s more that Progressive does a terrible job worldbuilding.]

And while I'm on the topic, the dialogue is another point of divergence between the original and its sequel. Too often is the dialogue in Progressive relegated to pure exposition. One of FLCL’s strengths is its use of dialogue in developing characters without relying too much on exposition. Many of the conversations are very private (often obtuse) and don’t have much literal content yet manage to colour in the characters speaking. Director Tsurumaki has confessed to cutting a lot of fat from the dialogue. In an interview for Mynavi, he recalls: “The scriptwriter Enokido-san talked about how ‘If we say that dialogue flows from 1 to 10, there’s no need to present it in this order.’ After going past 1, 2 and 3, we can just skip 4 and move straight onto 5 with the next line. As people expect that we’ll go to 6 after 5, we’ll make the next line 7.” Lines were deliberately left out, resulting in almost Hemingwayesque dialogue.
Arguably the weakest character in the original, Commander Amarao, is the one who somehow knows and understands what is going on and therefore explains it all. He comes off as a sort of narrative concession, as if the creators admit they were being a little too Dada (Tsurumaki in the aforementioned interview: “We also left out any details of the SF setting that we thought were unimportant...”), and offer the viewers some expository respite in the second half of the show (“...Well, looking back maybe we could have been a bit kinder”). However, for FLCL, omniscience is a curse rather than a boon, and narrative clarity only hurts the show’s pacing and takes a bit of the punch out of the eccentricity.

As if the writers didn’t glean this from Commander Amarao, Progressive is chock full of characters whose sole purpose is exposition. Take Julia Jinyu, who spends all of her screen time talking about her mission (Episode 3 — Hidomi asks, “Jinyu, what do you want?” Cue backstory monologue.) Or Eyepatch and Aiko’s dad, who exclusively discuss lore shit to “move the plot forward.” They have a whole conversation about N.O. waves in Episode 4 and spend at least two minutes of Episode 5 talking about a flower pot, as if everyone was watching for the intrigue and conspiracy. Who are they, Team Rocket? Get the fuck on with the show.
Even the main characters are just as susceptible to imprudent, talky monologues. There’s a scene in Episode 4 (by far the worst offender of info dumping) where Hidomi gives Ide an unsolicited explanation of her parental situation. She prattles on about her absentee father as if this is supposed to be some sort of revelatory moment for Ide (and, thus, the viewer) instead of lazy writing. If you want to know what the plot is actually about but don’t want to invest two and a half hours into watching this, skip to the final episode because it might as well just have been an interview with the writers in which they very openly discuss each of the characters’ motivations and arcs. There’s no ounce of subtly since the sheer weight of exposition in the dialogue is so pronounced. Scenes often end up feeling bloated because supposedly what the characters are discussing is very important. Case in point: the climax of Episode 4. Starting from the shot that establishes that Haruko has won the battle and captured Jinyu in her hands to the moment Haruko finally eats her, a full fucking minute passes. The writing is so insistent on sorting through conflicts verbally that any impact this scene could have had was aborted by the hammy dialogue.

Expanding the lore isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do, but Progressive isn’t a companion piece made simply to develop the world of FLCL a la The Silmarillion to The Lord of the Rings. It’s a self-contained story about fledgling teen romance that stands on its own. Or, rather, it wants to be. But it spends way too much time dissecting the semantics of FLCL to become anything other than a milquetoast tribute. A show based on a literal interpretation of FLCL actually sounds interesting; a show that wants to be FLCL but half-asses the symbolism by taking it too literally does not. Guess which one is labelled Progressive?

The KeyAni adaptations, and harem visual novel adaptations in general, are beset by a tendency to relegate some, if not every, female character to a setup for an emotional punchline (figuratively and literally, as the narrative climaxes tend to involve the central character getting maimed, physically and/or emotionally). Once sympathy is maximally bled from the girl, she is disposed of either by narrative convenience or hasty preoccupancy with the next girl. This sadistic pattern emerges naturally from the harem visual novel, but what works in a video game doesn't translate quite well onto the TV screen. Television lacks the agency and immediacy found in games, ... so time devoted to developing a female character and her relationship to the MC becomes wasted once she is tossed for the next, never to have an inkling of relevance outside of "best girl" polls again.

What are some ways to remedy this narrative disease endemic to harem VN adaptations? Toei's solution was the virtue of economic storytelling. For the movie adaptations of Air and Clannad, Makoto Nakamura stripped the source materials of their character and route multiplicities, resulting in typical monogamous romance tales. Consequently, they have fairly coherent narratives, yet they feel rushed and lack the wholeness of a fully realized story. How can an adaptation avoid the aforementioned flaws of a harem VN without abandoning the harem?

There's a cafe scene in Kanon's fourteenth episode in which one of the characters asks the MC, Yuuichi, if he recognizes the song playing over the speakers. The piece, Pachelbel's Canon, is not only the show's namesake but its narrative foundation. Like a canon, in which a melody, the leader or dux, is introduced and played again later in some form(s) of contrapuntal imitation, the main approach employed in Kanon's structure is the reiteration of narrative on multiple diegetic levels. The most pronounced manifestation of the canon is written into the broad history of Yuuichi's time spent in the snow-covered city. Over the course of the show, the current timeline is slowly revealed to be a repetition of past events from Yuuichi's last visit, setting the musical duration at seven years. Kanon chooses to present the past in an impressively seamless manner. Instead of inserting flashbacks at narratively convenient moments via battle shounen-style, Yuuichi rediscovers his history through dreams, which doubly serve as pacing buffers between the cycles of his daily routine. By bookending each day with a dream of the past, the events from seven years prior are incorporated into the current, and the discrete timelines begin to harmonize until the past collapses into the present.

The first couple episodes set Kanon's rhythm; each girl is introduced into the daily routine, coming in gradually as reiterations of a similar sob story from Yuuichi's forgotten past. The schedule is thus: wake up and eat breakfast with Nayuki and Ayu; walk to school with Nayuki; eat lunch with Sayuri and Mai; skip a bit of class to meet up with Shiori outside the school; eat taiyaki after school with Ayu; foil Makoto's nighttime pranks. Yuuichi learns something new about one of the girls with each iteration: one day he realizes Shiori may have a sister in his grade; the next day, he finds out Mai's birthday is upcoming and buys an impromptu birthday gift for her. It's never really predictable which of the arcs will be explored next; the show keeps you guessing by weaving important details about different characters together. This way, each arc is developed alongside another, and the show constructs a braided narrative rather than a segmented pastiche of the MC's romantic life. Motifs shared between the character arcs include hospitalized family members, novelties gifted by the MC (especially hair bands), forlorn promises, gastronomic affinities influenced by the MC, and wishes/dreams in media res. The arcs resemble each other, and though this type of bad writing is pathological in these adaptations, it actually works, whether intended or by happenstance, in favour of the show, establishing a main theme like a canon's dux. As in a canon, where the intricacies of the leader unfurl through repetition and interplay between its followers, Kanon's characters are developed steadily at intervals in the slice of life narrative.

The slice of life segments are employed with expertise here, ingratiating the viewers with each girl at a steady, repetitive pace. Repetition is key, even in the comedy found in the short manzai routines or the character specific gags (for example, Akiko's special jam became more amusing with each introduction to a new character's palette). As the days repeat, the daily narrative begins to denature and break down as the voices play out to their natural conclusion. The different arcs are explored and conclude, and respective characters drop out (Makoto disappears; Mai and Sayuri are hospitalized; Shiori is hospitalized) but not completely since they are permutations of the leading melody, and their presence can still be discerned in the remainder of the show (e.g. the snow bunny reminds Yuuichi of Mai creating a snow bunny zoo for her mother instead of Nayuki's confession, the spectral Makoto watches over Yuuichi during the climax of Nayuki/Ayu's arc.) Nothing feels extra or wasted, and each arc comes to a satisfying conclusion.

Kanon is a glimpse at what the ideal harem VN adaptation should be. Repetition espouses the harem, allowing each arc to resonate on its own yet tethering it to a thematic principle. That being said, the faithfulness to the magical realism of the source material undermines the tone at times. Makoto's arc can be given a pass, as her overwhelming desire-turned-to-miraculous incarnation has mythological and folkloric roots. A relationship with a fox-turned-girl may be morally dubious, but the concept isn't entirely strange. Rather than the miracle itself, the real hiccup is the show's explanation, opting to introduce an extraneous character who has had a similar experience and can thus elucidate and dispel the mystical. The show also delves completely into Makoto's arc for three episodes, ruining the pacing by returning to the typical isolated arc structure of a harem in which the rest of the cast is largely ignored.

Mai's arc is the guiltiest of flouting aesthetic distance; dark, shounen-esque sword battles with invisible demons run completely perpendicular to the light slice of life school routine. The supernatural mechanics are given a half-assed explanation: Mai's healing powers somehow manifested themselves into fake beings with real, tangible consequences? The reasons are unidentified (not that everything needs to be; mystic and vague circumstances are often a given when dealing with supernatural phenomenon and are part of the appeal), but when a how is more or less provided, it's only natural to question the why. Her arc comes to a climax when she impales herself with her sword, after which she walks away completely unscathed. The scene is full of such bombast and unwarranted melodrama that the show, for the first and only time, truly flaunts its Key genetics. Thankfully, the subsequent arc, Shiori's, proves to be the most mature and profound, staying entirely grounded in realism and containing only one crying scene (of which is not even enacted by the arc's heroine). Interestingly, the final arc explores two characters, Ayu and Nayuki, simultaneously. As a sort of coda, the last episode restores Yuuichi's harem by revisiting the daily schedule, thus completing the Kanon.

As an addendum, I'd also like to praise the OP. The sweeping medium shot zoom in/outs are absolutely breathtaking; it looks as if a camera was actually used.

The girl simply turns up one day and gets into the back seat of the 1943 Rikuo. She doesn't seem to have a name, but then nobody else does, either. The driver and the passenger drive away without even speaking to her, and that's how they come to be together. A little further down the road, they run into Suzuki, so called because that's the name of her machine, and they agree to conduct a cross-country race all the way to Nagasaki. Winner gets the other bike.

Shinohara's "Two Car" is mostly about this race, which is an odd race in that nobody much seems to ... want to win. The driver and the passanger have devoted their lives to racing and winning with their customized and rebuilt Type 97, and Suzuki identifies intimately with her bike, yet they keep stopping to help each other along the road, as if the road would be unbearably lonely if that other car weren't sometimes in view.

What I liked about "Two Car" was the sense of life that occasionally sneaked through, particularly in the character of Suzuki. She is the only character who is fully occupied with being herself (rather than the instrument of a metaphor), and so we get the sense we've met somebody. That, and some of the racing and road scenes, and the visual texture of the manga, makes it worth reading.