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Any action show more or less follows a blueprint, or anyway, there’ll be an action set-piece to set up that takes time away from meaningful dialogue. Despite this, some anime make it work, and they make it work better than SSSS.Gridman. The easy example is Eva: it manages to link together the action with the rest of the show. Shinji gets punched by his classmate. who has issues with Shinji, and these issues are resolved when the Angel shows up. With Gridman though the show splits itself between slice-of-life and action. Any issues brought up are resolved in each section, resulting in less time given ... to develop character. The action scenes are more at fault, but they have bigger faults to worry over.

The action scenes are animated in 3D. The 3D models move in imitation of people in costume like in tokusatsu entertainment, which you would know if you were sixty years old and Japanese and watched Ultraman. I know because I googled it. Once you know, you accept it, but if you don’t, it looks bad. Every frame or so of 2D animation intercut between 3D made me wish it went all 2D. If this were true though the fights still wouldn’t be good.

Fights follow a strict formula: Kaiju appears; Gridman gets beat up; Gridman gets a power-up; Gridman kills the kaiju; day is saved. The different kaiju distinguish themselves with different looks and different moves, and Yuta defeats them with Gridman with different moves each time, by himself and sometimes with others – usually in one hit, which gives too little satisfaction. Fights are cut too short; couple this with the sluggish way the 3D models move and they become unexciting to watch.

But the fights do prop up the scenes of everyday life. These parts are great. When characters speak they speak very naturally and convey who they are in a lowkey way. In the same lowkey way their faces are drawn to reflect this. Scenes keep a good walking pace and shots don’t overstay their welcome. Sometimes there are very long pauses














and then we’re back into the action.

The big reveal midway through reveals a big revelation that makes you think wow this is big. It changes little apart from marking more plot. The slice-of-life parts take a back seat to a story that doesn’t engage. Points of interest still appear but the character drama does not try hard enough to be convincing. Looking at the last episode as an example: Utsumi criticises himself about not caring about the damage kaiju do – damage that was being reset, so who cares. Anti’s problems aren’t real, so who cares. Akane is escaping from reality, but you don’t know why, so who cares.

But you will care about how Gridman pictures everyday life. The way it does it should be seen. The atmosphere these scenes create is perfect. If Trigger managed to distil this atmosphere across the whole runtime this would be the best anime ever made. As it stands, this is a good show that carries a lot of baggage, but this baggage is tolerable and should be tolerated to see what’s really good about it.

Sekina Aoi writes better than he’s given credit for but that doesn’t amount to much good. He knows what makes a story work and knows how to avoid pitfalls, and knows some people and the way they speak but he uses bad patterns and bad tropes way too much to be forgiven for it. Student Council’s Discretion is smart and Gamers is smart too but it’s too often too dumb for anyone to care about what’s good.

Gamers is trying to be a comedy and the comedy is sometimes funny. It starts with gaming addict Amano about to join the gaming club with the school idol ... gamer girl Tendou. He refuses last second and I guess this is funny. It’s funny again when it’s Tendou, not Amano, who develops a one-sided crush, and it’s funny seeing her gush over Amano for one scene. It stops being funny once it’s every scene. In various similar ways and moments, the comedy starts and stops being funny. The animators try way too hard to make up for it. There are some funny things that click with the animation and they happen just enough to keep you watching but it’s otherwise tiring and this is tiring on top of the tiring misunderstandings.

Gamers takes misunderstandings as far as they’ve ever been taken. Someone’s boyfriend puts a hand on one girl’s shoulder, and the girlfriend concludes that he’s cheating, and then this is multiplied by twenty for twelve episodes across five different people. It starts well but at the seventh episode I dropped the show, I was so tired of it. The show stretches the misunderstandings so long past the point of belief that there’s no choice but to get sick of it, but I stuck through due to the animation.

The characters drawn are drawn a bit strange but are still drawn well. The lines used and the colours used remind me of Trigger if Trigger were about to go bankrupt. I don’t like how the OP has a random fight in it for no reason, but that’s the only negative thing that’s animated. It has no right to be so good considering that what it’s animating is a story that doesn’t have a plot.

There is no plot but there are some very good moments that happen where someone character realizes their feelings about someone else, or how that someone else feels about them, which are very well realized in animation, but there’s also the thick wad of smelly bullshit you have to sit through, where Amano throws out a innocuous compliment and there’s a big close-up of the girl’s eyes and her eyes go wide and her blush extends so far out her face that it disproves the Flat Earth theory.

The writer should be sent to jail for indulging so much in stuff like this, he has to know it’s bad but I guess he thinks it’s okay since he’s doing it on purpose. CTE levels of thinking if true, and frustrating too. He writes better than most light novel authors and shows an awareness of the real world that they don’t have, and this awareness could lead to something good. It doesn’t, but it could, which is more than I can say for Oregairu or even the stuff by Nisioisin. But Nisioisin has worked out a truth for himself that he knows; even if it doesn’t show in his work you still feel his work is based on that truth. Sekina Aoi, if he has a belief, doesn’t base his work on it, so what you’re left with is this kind of mist which hangs around and blows away if you think about it too long. There are a couple moments that precipitate and crystalize into stuff you can take with you, and some characters act in a way that is true and they say things that seem true and it’s stuff you can sometimes relate to, but Aoi contrives a lot and fakes a lot too which kills a lot of the believability. Still, Gamers doesn’t do badly as a romcom, something which is usually done very badly, so if you like the genre and know what it’s like and you like games too, you will like the first few episodes and then see if the rest is worth sitting through.

Angel’s Egg is my favourite of the Oshii films because it has a wholeness to it that his other films lack. Not being an adaptation helps in this regard – in a sense, it’s forced to be whole because it can’t be expanded on. Miyazaki shat on it for not being commercially viable and soulless like his films, but he had a point, Angel’s Egg is not the sort of film that would ever be commercially viable and it was pretty irresponsible of Oshii to front such a venture to begin with. Maybe naivety had something to do with it, but I’m pretty sure Oshii ... didn’t care about turning a profit. He didn’t care because unlike Miyazaki he had something on his mind that he wanted to detach and put in a film. If Miyazaki ever had anything to say, he must have suppressed it pretty well, because he hasn’t said anything of personal value so far in his career (though I haven’t seen Boy and the Heron).

So the film comes from Oshii’s brief idea of wanting to be a priest, specifically it’s a rejection of his prior willingness to do that. Now I haven’t read the Bible and I’m not a Christian or Catholic – most Christians or Catholics haven’t read the Bible either but that’s besides the point – so I don’t understand the specific references made, so any analysis would be pretty useless. From what I got out of it, Oshii is basically saying all religious debate is like cats chasing their own whales and also Oshii criticises the church for canonizing all these saints who lived in poverty and had terrible lives, as though their needless suffering was something to be celebrated and emulated. This is what I got out of it after watching without any prior knowledge before viewing, so I don’t think the film is as cryptic as is otherwise suggested.

The film gets its cryptic, puzzle-like reputation because it’s very rare that anything in anime is presented in an oblique way like this. The effect of this preserves interest in what would otherwise bore people who want information. No one says anything hardly – it’s stopped from being boring because the atmosphere suggests always that something might just happen. Camera shots are framed in a way that suggests that there’s someone peering down on our main albino duo, and that this presence is a threat in some way. That threat never manifests itself explicitly but there is an explosion of activity part of the way in which gratifies the viewer’s assumption and makes them wonder later on if something else will happen.

Nothing does actually happen after the harpooners go after the whales but at that point hopefully you’ll be invested enough to wonder why all this stuff is happening instead of wondering what will happen next. You’re never given a flat-out answer but it doesn’t feel like a cop-out. Even if you don’t know what Oshii’s trying to say you still get the sense at the end that something bad has happened for no good reason, and that there’s nothing to do but move on.

You know something bad’s happened but you’re emotionally detached from it, which is Oshii’s main weakness coming up again and again in all his films. His films are cold and dead and hard, and you don’t feel anything from viewing from aside from horror (of the grotesque things that happen, they’re not that bad.) For all the dunking elitists do on Shinkai and Your Name and how Your Name has all these plot holes and it’s bad because it has pop songs playing in the middle of the film and it’s kiddy pop slop garbage for little kiddy kids, at the very least you emotionally connect to his characters, which is something I can never say for either Miyazaki or Oshii. They’re two little clams who clam up and don’t say nothing of personal significance. The only joy Miyazaki seems to get out of life into his films is seeing little kids run around, which is more than Oshii seems to get out of it, because this film lacks warmth in general. This is fine, as a counterpoint to blind optimism and goop, but judged on its own merit, you can’t really say that Angel’s Egg is a masterpiece if you don’t physically care about what happens to its characters. You are an observer in the events of the film, that’s the point as I see it, but it’s a limited perspective, the limits of which are shown up in films where you’re placed as a participant, where you feel what the characters feel instead of just seeing.

Angel’s Egg still is a great film within these limits, but I don’t understand why Oshii didn’t try to move on from this when he already got it in one. Maybe you can argue in the Sky Crawlers he tries to make you care about the people, but even there it’s more like he’s rationalizing why he can’t care about people in general, because they’re interchangeable, replaceable, etc. etc. The end in that film starts towards optimism, but there’s none actually displayed in the film itself. Maybe in trying to be a priest, Oshii was looking for a way to find compassion for others, and thought instead that making films was the way to go. In making these films, he probably succeeded, though it’s hard to say with the films themselves.

In Bakemonogatari the starting scene of Hitagi falling from the stairs is portrayed through Araragi’s eyes up to proportions Biblical, sounds affecting as though she’s falling from a plane, and when she falls in Araragi’s arms she poses like a Madonna, and the piano plays like at a wedding. Watching, you accept it completely, as of course, this is exactly how it should be. Later on, Araragi’s brain is picked apart and broken up as some sort of spaghetti food thing, and again this is exactly how it should be, you feel.

It may not be obvious why unless a lesser example is given. The ... later entries of Monogatari are full of rapid cuts and zoom-ins, characters drawn in different art styles that reference something, characters in the background moving around – tricks done for the purpose of breaking up the long conversations to be easily digestible. As this method is repeated you begin to see the issue, being that there is no relation between what is happening and what is being described. Gradually you find that your mind filters out the visual, and focuses on what’s spoken instead. So rather than working together, the written and visual elements are now put at odds with each other. This is bad, because it is wasteful. You have to go back to Bakemonogatari to see an effective marriage.

Hitagi speaking to Araragi in Mayoi Snail: one of the best sequences in the show, with seamless transitions between each scene, and with each scene – and each action in the scene – corresponding exactly to what is being discussed. Even on mute, you can tell what the tone and mood of the scene is, by seeing Hitagi and Araragi cycle around on pieces of raw meat. This is not accidental – the matching of visual with audible can be seen also in the first conversation between Araragi and Kanbaru, or with scenes in the cram school with Araragi and Oshino. This is a directed effort, clearly, by Tatsuya Oishi. The effect results in an enhancement in the appreciation of the information conveyed – you get what Nisioisin is trying to say better than if it were just written. This in turn, increases enjoyment, because you’re better able to understand the characters, understand their situation, and so sympathize more, and treat them with more attention and more respect. What’s great is that it’s not something that needs to be focused on, or understood to enjoy, it’s enjoyment that you get naturally from viewing.

Where Bakemonogatari jeopardizes this enjoyment is in what’s written. Doesn’t really matter how well directed the visuals are if the scene in question is a middle school girl deep-throating a snake. That aside, after the first two episodes, conversations tend to drift. The second story after Hitagi’s, Mayoi Snail, has a lot of aimless dialogue that wastes time in a bad manner. This aimlessness raises its head again in the final volume, Tsubasa Cat. There’s a protracted gag involving anonymous names chiming into a radio show to tell jokes relating to their names, and it’s not really funny or interesting.

For the rest of the show it’s more a case of conversations not getting to the point as quick as they should, or lasting a little too long. The dialogue itself is true to life. There are occasional lapses, that are occasionally disastrous lapses, into infamous degeneracy, but generally, you would believe they were real people speaking. This provides a good base to develop interest when you are led to wonder why they act a certain way, and later, when a sensible explanation is provided.

The aforementioned structure is what each of the five stories use. Like a mystery novel, which is no coincidence. It works well until the climax, where it then crumbles, because Nisioisin then needs to contrive a feeling to suit the scene, rather than the other way around. It’s not really a love story: Hitagi’s relationship with Araragi comes off like a contractual agreement between two parties who will mutually benefit. If there’s any real feeling present, it's in scenes between Hanekawa and Koyomi. Their almost tragic relationship is almost impactful.

If I can sum up my criticisms with the writing, essentially it’s too silly, so whenever it tries to be dramatic, it fails, and it’s tedious or tame where it tries to funny. However in a few rare scenes you start to see a genuine feeling emerge, through the lens of someone who knows what it is. When this happens, things begin to finally start to take off.

The most stereotypical vanilla experience ever conceived for television is the anime adaptation of Leaf’s break-out visual novel success: ToHeart. I had a kind of crisis realizing its similarities to other present-day romcom shows, right down to its self-aware jabs at the genre and quirky characters. Watching ToHeart made me realize that the human lifespan is not long enough to prevent history from repeating itself. Better to remain ignorant of that truth and avoid watching ToHeart entirely, though credit where it’s due, its capacity to cause a mental breakdown is perhaps unrivalled. I’d expect nothing less from guy who directed Berserk.

Touch is the first of three notable baseball manga made by Adachi Mitsuru, and is easily the weakest of three, which is reflective more so of my good opinion of H2 and Cross Game than any faults of Touch, though Touch does have several faults, chief of which, its insanely slow start. The first sixty or so chapters are a monument to boredom. One slice of white bread (Kazuya) and another slice of white bread (Minami) compete to see which one of them is the more perfectly flawless gift to humanity. Kazuya has a twin, and supposedly he’s got greater talent for baseball, but the ... author is more concerned with teasing the audience over whether or not he’ll join the team than actually doing something with him. Characters like Harada seem to pop into existence whenever the plot demands it (if a plot even exists), the love triangle progresses with excruciating slowness for how predictable it looks on paper, there’s a load of two-dimensional, one-off thuggish villains thrown in randomly for the sake of having something happen, and for the baseball manga, there isn’t a whole lot of baseball being played. The only meaningful toss in these sixty-odd chapters is Kazuya’s body as it’s hit by a truck.

And so, the story really begins. Uesugi Tatsuya is compelled to take up his dead brother’s dream to take his middling highschool baseball team to the summer Koshien. It is an excellent idea that lends a great amount of weight to each match, but it takes far too long to set up, and most of the set-up is superfluous to the rest of the manga. A new rival shows up to reinstate the love triangle, and somewhere along the way Minami and Tatsuya’s relationship seems to reset, as if they had never kissed. While I’m on the subject, Minami and Tatsuya’s relationship is the worst thing in the story. They have no chemistry together and their interactions are unbelievably dull. I was always rooting against Minami, yet I wanted Tatsuya to be with her, and this, I think, just barely justifies her presence in the story – it gives Tatsuya another reason to try, and gives the reader disinterested in baseball a relevant goal to see through to completion. Outside of this function, she’s simply too perfect, too flawless, too bland. She would be more believable as the Koshien trophy.

Minami’s hectoring and lecturing may only provoke a series of terse one-note responses from him, but Uesugi Tatsuya is otherwise the most complex and endearing character that Adachi Mitsuru has created. Forced to play the role of his dead twin brother, Tatsuya’s situation represents a whole lot more than just stepping into the role of being Meisei’s ace pitcher. Like a child forced to shoulder the responsibility of adulthood in one way, or someone pushed to do something unsuitable to who they are in order to please the expectations of others – either way, his honesty in expressing his unwillingness to conform to expectations, and his selflessness in sacrificing who he is for the benefit of others, is sympathetic, even heroic. Anyway, it lends a lot more depth and richness to what, in another author’s hands, would be a straightforward story about loss and baseball. Tatsuya’s predicament could’ve been easily spelled out, but Mitsuru respects the reader’s intelligence. This may not seem anything special, but in the medium of manga, this sort of subtlety just doesn’t exist. On a more basic level, Tatsuya gratifies the belief (or delusion) that “I can do it if I tried.” He’s lazy, but when the chips are down, he gets the job done, and this is clearly you! The reader! Regardless of the realism of this sort of thing, it is great to see Tatsuya’s transformation from a lazy guy to a hard-working member of the baseball team. Watching this unfold is one the main reasons to keep reading, aside from the natural progress of the plot.

The plot, after the death of Kazuya, picks up the pace. Characters still pop into existence without any foreshadowing, but there is a lot less of the one-off two-dimensional villains required since there’s some actual baseball matches that are played to focus on instead. None of the matches are particularly memorable aside from the final game, but they don’t progress too predictably for them to be dismissed entirely before their respective conclusions. Akio and his sister liven things up even if they are stereotypes, and even if it reintroduces the love triangle. The conflict they introduce is completely artificial, but at least it keeps the ball rolling in a direction related to baseball instead of the arbitrary conflicts that were before.

Mitsuru must’ve been worried that there wasn’t enough excitement because he also introduces a major villain, who happens to be Meisei’s new coach. His inclusion is so completely unnecessary, but regardless, he exists, he stirs up trouble, he’s comically evil, and has a comically tragic backstory. His development is so predictable, and trite, yet he still manages to be a great character, who contributes to some of the most tense and exciting moments in the story. In the end I don’t know if Mitsuru justifies his inclusion but I can’t deny that he adds a redemptive quality that raises the emotional quality of the narrative. Other developments of this nature happen throughout, and have a similar quality to them, where they’re ham-fisted, and are clearly contrived, yet still, are undeniably effective in moving certain parts of the story forward.

None of this really matters though. The story could’ve gone to the dogs and I’d still read it through to the end because once Kazuya dies you are locked in with Tatsuya whether you like it or not. You have to see him succeed so badly that you’ll endure any number of bland conversations with him and Minami, or the numerous fanservice shots, or the innumerable faceless, nameless side characters who exist to waste space, or the fourth wall breaks that are nothing but filler. Touch manages to work in spite of all its flaws for this very reason: Tatsuya is someone worth rooting for: for who he is, who he wants to be, and what he wants to achieve. The ending closes this all out in as perfect a way as it can manage, and is as satisfying as you could hope, with Tatsuya defying the expectations of everyone, even the reader. Though it is less polished and overall less enjoyable than the following two baseball stories Mitsuru penned, Touch has a literary quality to it that neither H2 nor Cross Game retain, and for that reason, it is worth reading. Worth reading over a book is debatable, but books are books, and manga is manga. You can’t expect one to be the other, and you wouldn’t want that anyway.

While ‘Spring Passes’ is a very good short story and the best of the collection, to say it is the best thing Adachi Mitsuru has ever created is going a bit too far considering the greater complexity and lasting enjoyment that his longer work gives to the reader. But ‘Spring Passes’ is still excellent, the way its plot twists and twists again past the point you expect it to stop ensures its impact and memorability. The visual metaphor at the end justifies the subject matter of rugby in fantastic fashion.

‘The Current State of Affairs’ is another highlight, and similarly, accomplishes a lot in a short ... space. Notable for its pleasant, festive atmosphere, believable drama, and bittersweet ending. Lacks subtlety maybe, but that would be out of place for a highschool reunion.

In ‘The Runaway God’ Mitsuru goes into the memories of his youth and Shinji Nagashima, a manga author that Mitsuru’s brother (and eventually Mitsuru himself) worshipped as God. Interesting both as an insight into Mitsuru’s career trajectory, and as a story itself.

Lastly, I’d throw in ‘Love Confession’, which represents the best of Mitsuru’s older short stories. A pretty sweet love story.

I’d recommend to read these four stories, I think they’re all worth reading. There are some others like ‘Angel’s Hammer’ that you could argue are worth reading as well, but Spring Passes covers the same ground and is generally just better.

Some lunatics decide it’s a pretty good idea to go to war. One batch of lunatics is led by a man named Four Vagina. Four Vagina thinks it’s a good idea to employ a teenager, (with a GIRL’s name) with no control over his emotions, and no experience in combat, to pilot a tank, shaped like a man, that can fly, in the hopes that his flying tank skills are better than the other side, who, coincidentally, also fly tanks. Obviously this goes very well, for our heroes and for our viewers, until the story hits a brick wall, by trying to juggle too many ... characters at once. Also it introduces a series of thoroughly unconvincing romantic subplots between the aforementioned teenage lunatic and stand-ins for Tomino’s mistresses. Eventually, things devolve into a kind of trainwreck that only the GENIUS Tomino can produce, where everyone starts acting so out of character that you wonder what their original characters were even supposed to be. There’s a scene where one robot impregnates another robot with its metal spike, so I guess it’s a masterpiece.

Clannad Afterstory is the portrait of a life with a sense of scale and scope not often found in the anime medium. In its latter stages you feel a sense of history with its characters that accentuate and heighten their ordinary conversations, giving them a dimension beyond their original meaning. More than a story about family, it’s a story about the passage of time, executed with about as much intelligence and skill as you’d expect from a very talented toddler.

Right yeah, so Maeda watches the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, yeah? And so he watches this film, yeah, and it’s about this guy, you know, ... and he marries this girl, yeah? But they’re kinda broke, but they have to run this bank, and there’s this big evil rich guy who’s trying to develop the town, he’s trying to get a monopoly on things, and our main guy’s trying to stop him. And he sacrifices all these things to stop the evil guy, yeah? But he gets sad doing it and gets to feeling that he wishes he was never born. So some fat fucker who’s an angel in disguise says “Alright, bet” and he creates a world and invites the guy to view this world, a world where he doesn’t exist. And this world is on some 1984 shit, you know? Major dystopia. His brother’s dead, his cat’s dead, sister’s dead, mother’s dead, father’s dead, Biff has married his mother and owns Trump Tower and is also the president of the United Nations of the World. Main guy goes “nah fuck this go back” and the fat guy goes “Alright, bet,” and he brings him back to the real world and they all go celebrate Christmas.

It’s a good movie, sentimental for sure, but its sentimentality is offset by the fact that the miserable things that the guy James Stewart is playing goes through still happen, and that their outcomes still exist in the fictional world they inhabit. It also displays the power of fiction, of how an alternate reality with no tangibility can have a tangible impact in the reality we inhabit. By viewing a world where he doesn’t exist, James Stewart is made to realize that his life is very valuable to the people around him. You could argue Hollywood peaked with this one. It is a perfect sort of story, for film especially, having the necessary simplicity required for mass appeal while still retaining the depth necessary to remain relevant past the fashions of its era.

Yeah, so this is relevant because Maeda saw this and tried to emulate it. Source: telepathy. Source two: there’s a Tomoyo Afterstory visual novel with the subtitle ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. And the plot bears many similarities to the film. Guy meets girl, marries girl, is happy for a time, encounters hardship, is met with tragedy, wishes that he never met girl, encounters further tragedy, renounces his wish, which reverses the tragedy, and they all live happily ever after. Not a one-for-one copy, but the same beats are hit. The way Maeda does it is out of wack obviously, because the tragedy that occurs happens in the story’s real world, and so when it is reversed, it reverses what caused the wish in the first place. This is why many people feel that the ending in Clannad Afterstory feels so cheap and hollow – it doesn’t build upon what has happened before. Instead, it overwrites it with a new reality, that’s happier, but also less meaningful than the reality that existed before.

The characters have regressed. Tomoya is arguably the most interesting person in Clannad’s story, giving the moeblob atmosphere a harder edge with his delinquent status and his troubles with his father, and so to see him here as this kind of goofy kid in the middle stages of the story and a punching bag in the latter half is a bit too one-note to be interesting. Same with Nagisa, she’s sweet and kind and kind and sweet and that’s all she really is. A puppy to be run over. Same with Ushio, but here it’s a non-issue. Ushio is a really good part of the story. Maeda here is able to achieve a perfect union between the way Tomoya feels towards her and the way the viewer feels, which results in many emotionally fulfilling moments. Her introduction is the starting point of a good stretch of episodes where the show is plainly, really good.

Outside of that stretch, the rest is dubious. The girl and the robot has got to rank as the single most superfluous narrative of all time. Each time the story transitions to its world, it kills off any and all momentum the main narrative has generated up until that point. They walk and talk and – whatever! None of it matters. To the very end, nothing that happens in that world matters in the slightest. It is the source of the fantasy elements in the story, but the viewer never sees its influence. It exists to give off a pretentious magical, ethereal air, an aesthetic of something profound, for something as hollow as bird-bones.

And as usual for Maeda, things take too long to get going anywhere. There is an exorbitant amount of time spent with Tomoya at his new job for instance, ad the first episode takes its entire runtime to reintroduce characters who aren’t even important to the main plot, and the two story arcs preceding the main story are entirely irrelevant to the main story. All this superfluous detail dilutes the quality and impact of the important story moments.

I’m not going to say some shit like ‘I wanted to like Clannad Afterstory’ as if it was Maeda’s job for me to like what he’s written, but it’s true that I liked the idea of liking Clannad Afterstory. I’m not going to say ‘admirable’ either, because that’s just patronizing, but I like the idea of a story like Clannad Afterstory. For people don’t like the ending of Afterstory for another reason: there are no consequences for any of its characters. Tomoya gets to live happily, with his beautifully kind wife, and his adorably loving daughter. Somehow, there’s a feeling that this isn’t fair, a feeling that Tomoya is a criminal who has hoodwinked the detective called Realism. There’s almost a sense of jealousy. ‘I don’t want this to exist, because I don’t want to acknowledge that such a thing could be real.’ Because if miracles were to exist, if magic really was real, then what value does your suffering hold? If all your pain could be reversed in the flick of a wrist, then what was the point of the pain to begin with? I think such thoughts are besides the point. Pain and suffering has meaning because a choice is made to imbue these moments with relevance. The meaning itself is not real, yet there is a choice made to believe that the meaning is real. The belief leads to a change in the real world. Through the belief in something un-real, something real occurs. That, in a way, is a kind of miracle, which is what the ending tries to capture, though obviously, the miracles that occur in real life are not as miraculous as Jun Maeda’s success.

Though there’s little to like, there’s plenty to admire in this particular Ikuhara series, usually in the aesthetics, occasionally in the writing too. Everything’s set at angles in Yurikuma, which tie in with the dividing lines made quickly apparent between the bears and the humans outlined in the opening narration. Despite carrying around a reputation for being obtuse, Ikuhara is as subtle as a sledgehammer here with his themes – pretty clear pretty early on what’s being implied with the divide between human and bears, and the devouring and so on, and in case it isn’t clear Ikuhara will make the character repeat the same ... thing about six or seven times, just to make sure that you understand, just in case you didn’t hear it the first, or fourth, or fiftieth time.

Ikuhara’s characterization here though is terrible, but he’s always been very weak at that in all his shows. He eschews realism in favour of having his characters represent some sort of idea, and he will twist time and space to make sure that they act in such a way that adheres to this idea, using whatever justification necessary for having a character act in a certain fashion regardless of whether or not the justification itself makes any common sense. Results in a lack of relatability, and a lack of personal connection to any of his characters beyond the idea they represent. Putting it another way, you like Ikuhara’s characters not for who they are but rather what they represent. By extension the same logic applies to his works as a whole. There’s very little, in my opinion, for the viewer to latch onto as something relatable, some situation that’s grounded in reality.

Take the main girl, an orphan who lives alone, is ostracized by her peers, is bullied – can’t care. No attention is drawn to her plight beyond what is necessary to the core message of the show, so none of it seems real, there’s no chance for any sympathy to form between you and the character, because Ikuhara doesn’t allow her to have a life outside of the story. Broadly this applies to everyone in the show. The resulting lack of an emotional attachment to the characters naturally leads to the adoption of a very indifferent attitude to the majority of the events which unfold in Yurikuma’s story.

Like the characters, the story is a farce. There are bears who want to eat humans, bears disguised as humans, bears who want to kill other bears disguised as humans, all very grizzly. The bears are lesbians, the humans don’t like lesbians, but some humans do like lesbians, but those humans are excluded, by the other humans, because they don’t like lesbians, because they think lesbians don’t like them, because they’re lesbians. Something like that. Ikuhara uses this circular irrational line of thinking as a baseline for circling around the various reasons for the irrational hatred of lesbians and draws some pretty obvious though nevertheless valid conclusions which the show explains in obvious fashion.

Personally not a fan of these open-and-shut social/moral questions with obvious right answers in fiction because it makes the story very predictable and also very rigid, with very little to interpret beyond what Ikuhara wants you to interpret. Granted, there is more to Yurikuma than that theme of loving what/who you love regardless of what other people think, but its nothing that Penguindrum hadn’t covered already from another angle. It’s all very agreeable but merely being agreeable isn’t really anything noteworthy.

With Ikuhara, you never really get the feeling you’re getting what’s been promised. He’s someone whose works I admire but never personally like. His shows never really seem to come together when they should, they’re always aesthetically pleasing but uneventful, always lacking in concrete action. Things seem to happen in Yuri Kuma Arashi, and they do happen, but it never really sets in and leaves an impression in the mind. Watching it is like witnessing a dream, but a really bland dream, where you just sit in a room, on a chair, and stare into space, and then wake up. And then you go about your day as usual. And then maybe in a few days time you think about it again in a vague sort of way. Not hard to believe that it happened, it’s just hard to really care. But in the end, I suppose it’s bearable.