I've always been convinced that by some fluke, I had gained immunity from that strange and frightening phenomena known as "the chick flick." However, with the 2006 release of the series
Kanon, much to my chagrin, I have found an anime that has completely ripped my stoic self-image to shreds. When Yuuichi Aizawa returns to live with his aunt after seven years of being away, he connects with five girls and changes their lives in various ways. It's a taste of
moe sweetness with beyond liberal helpings of angst and tragedy. So prepare to get emotional and make sure you've got a box of tissues handy (probably more like two). You're going to need them.
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Much of the game was originally about interaction with
the other characters. I guess you could say it was something like a
choose you're own adventure story, except that it was more a
'choose your own ideal but traumatized girlfriend.' |
Now with an intro like that, you're probably going to be totally shocked when I tell you that this anime was based off of a video game. Much less, a game from the eroge genre (which is based off the premise of having sexual content), but it's true. The original game was released by Visual Arts for the PC in 1999, and later a more family friendly version was released that saw ports to other systems including the Dreamcast, the Playstation 2, as well as the PSP. Clearly, the show is based of of the family friendly version that was released later as there is no trace of the erotic content the original game is said to have had. This is also not the first anime adaptation for the story, as a shorter thirteen episode anime was produced by Toei Animation in 2002. There are a number of other adaptations that have been produced, but for all intents and purposes, this review will focus on the 2006 anime which was produced by Kyoto Animation. It ran for 24 episodes from October 2006 to March 2007 on the BS-i network. For those looking to find it in the states, it is licensed by Funimation. I went into this anime totally blind. I didn't know anything about it and I had heard nothing about it. Perhaps this was why it hit me so hard. But then again, once you've heard a little about it yourself, you'll soon realize that this show doesn't pull punches.
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Yuuichi: Yup, that's me, I'm the one who's going to
save everyone else from themselves. |
Our story begins with our protagonist, Yuuichi Aizawa returning to the home of his aunt and cousin after a seven year absence. It seems that his parents travel a lot for work and have decided to leave him with his relatives so that he will be able to get through high school in a stable environment. He meets his cousin Nayuki Minase at the train station after waiting a very cold and uncomfortable two hours past the time she was supposed to have picked him up. After rejoining his relatives, he spends the next few days acclimating himself to his new home and meeting his classmates, as well as finding some of the friends he had when he was last here. One of the first he literally bumps into is a short, former playmate of his, named Ayu as she literally body slams him in an attempt to escape from a taiyaki vendor she "accidentally" didn't pay. Over the next two or three episodes he meets the other supporting characters of the story, Mai, a cool and reserved senior at the school, Makoto an amnesiac who's only lead is that she thinks Yuuichi did something mean to her, and Shiori a frail girl with an undisclosed illness who likes to stand in the school courtyard during the breaks.
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Walking with Shiori. Just in general,
you're never going to forget how cold it is in this town. |
Once again, we don't know exactly where we are in this story, aside from that it's present day in some unspecified town somewhere in (presumably) northern Japan. Wherever it is, it's somewhere that gets a lot of snow in the winter and is more indicative of wintery weather than an American southerner like myself could stomach for very long. There is snow everywhere and you're hard pressed to find a scene that doesn't constantly remind you of this. All the school uniforms are based around this fact, and even when the characters are not in school, you won't see anyone wearing anything that doesn't tell you it's freaking cold outside. That being said, the town itself seems to have been laid out in detail and while you probably wouldn't be able to use the show as a guide if by some miracle you ended up there and needed directions, once Nayuki has shown Yuuichi around a bit, you'll never really feel lost when you aren't supposed to. In spite of all my griping, the scenery is still very nice and pristine, and provides an amazing backdrop for many of the more dramatic sequences as we'll see later. Even so, there was one aspect of the whole story that caught me totally by surprise and this is probably because I came in blind. The beginning of the story leaves no hint of anything going on other than mundane stuff (unless you count a couple of the things shown in the opening which I had originally shrugged off as generic anime opening silliness) until around the time that Yuuichi ends up at the school and finds that Mai likes to run around with a sword at night, claiming she's hunting demons (though we don't really see them... yet). After Makoto's plot points start moving though, all bets are off, as we get some supernatural antics happening that are really quite surreal especially to someone who had come in believing that this was an everyday universe that was trying to maintain some semblance of realism (seeing as this was an anime, I probably should have known better but I was calling it as I saw it). Perhaps because the characters play these situations so straight and seriously, suspension of disbelief isn't hurt in the slightest, and you find yourself buying it hook line and sinker.
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Yuuichi: You want to know what happened to me in this town?
You'll get all the gritty details and more. But after I left...
ehh... not so much. |
The lynch-pin of the entire series is Yuuichi and the affect he has on the people around him, as such, his character is the one on which the show spends most of it's time. The point of the story is mostly his interactions with the other characters and the effect he has on them. While I'd stop short of calling him a stereotype, he's at least partly the
Everyman type character (which makes sense considering he was the
PC whose decisions the player made during the game). He does have some other defining traits such as being something of a snarker, but his greatest defining trait would have to be reserve of his inner strength and steadfast devotion to the people around him, which remains unconditional throughout the show. Given the things that come up, he needs every drop of that internal reserve as it turns out that each of the characters in the supporting cast have more than their share of problems. In spite of the generic nature of his character, he does have a pretty detailed history, though only in relation to the town he has returned to. If we wanted to know what his life was like after he left, we were out of luck, but it is of very little relevance to the present action, so I guess it wasn't considered that important.
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Watching Nayuki trying to eat while she's asleep is
pretty funny, which is good because this show needs some levity,
desperately. |
On the other hand, the five main supporting characters and their various satellite characters all have importance to the plot in some way. The first character we meet is Nayuki, Yuuichi's cousin. She and her mother Akiko provide Yuuchi with a roof over his head and they are often providing background support for the other characters throughout the story. While I tend to think they might be a bit too understanding at times, (like when it comes to allowing Makoto and Ayu to stay at their house for specific reasons we'll get into later) I'm willing to let it slide for the most part because they are both very kind people as well as because without their understanding some of the story wouldn't really work as well. Nayuki is your typical high-school athletics star with a twist. She's dead to the world on most mornings and has the hardest time getting up, which works really well for comedy. Ayu, the next character to be introduced also provides something of an interesting supporting role for the other characters as a friendly face, but her defining characteristics are being what appears to be something of a ditz who forgets things, and loves Taiyaki. Her child-like mannerisms may be off-putting at first, but start to make a lot more sense near the end of the show. Mai as I said, at first seems like the typical badass emotionless type, maybe with some slight eccentricities at first (like running around a school late at night with a real sword), but she's not without some inner demons. Shiori and Makoto are the only characters who start out seeming to have outright serious problems, as Shiori at first comes across as the quiet ill-girl, while Makoto enters the cast with full-blown amnesia and a fiery grudge against someone (she thinks it's Yuuichi). Each of the main five supporting characters have their own little eccentricities like favorite foods, or verbal tics that make them unique however, one of the driving forces of the show is also the moe aspect, and therefore there is a lot of emphasis on making the characters cute.
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Mai's actually a pretty useful girl to have around, she's a
swordswoman, and nearly psychic when it comes to
supernatural phenomena... the list goes on. |
In terms of antagonists, only one character, Mai, really has a physical antagonist who actually picks fights, and that's only because she's been blamed for damages at the school before and therefore the student council has branded her a troublemaker. However, much of the
conflict in the story is drawn not so much from a Man vs. Man situation as it is from the main five supporting characters dealing with Man (or in this case, Woman) vs. Self, Environment, or Fate (take your pick), with Yuuichi being the Man Caught in the Middle with a small bit Man vs. Self worked in. All the other antagonistic forces are circumstantial. For Nayuki, it an accident that ends up causing her mother to be grievously injured. For Ayu, there are a number of issues that pop up but all of them boil down to a personal problem, that manifests itself in her insistence that she's lost something and can't remember what it is. For Shiori it's her Illness. Mai fights demons that turn out to be less external and more of the internal variety. Finally Makoto is clearly in conflict with herself as she deals with the fact that she has no idea who she is or where she came from. One thing that is interesting about the whole show however, is the interplay between all of the girls as they take part in each other's stories. Mai is apparently really good at finding people so Yuuichi occasionally turns to her when someone else runs off/disappears and he can't find her. Nayuki ends up being either the friend or the friend of a friend of a couple of the other characters. Ayu is in the background of practically every other episode running around and looking for her lost item while being a generally friendly influence, while even Shiori has a thing or two to add when it comes to events taking place with other characters.
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Poor, poor Makoto, all of these girls have sad stories,
but just thinking about her and Ayu now... it's just too sad. |
This is an anime with no filler period. While the story may seem somewhat slow to start at the beginning, once it gets going with Makoto's main plot points around episode 7 or so, everything that you saw in the first few episodes suddenly explodes with importance and once that happens... to put it bluntly, you're going to need those tissues for the remaining 17 episodes. This is not a joke. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, the rest of this anime is sad. In ascending order of traumatic experiences: We already mentioned that Nayuki's mother get's hit by a car at one point, but then if that wasn't sad enough for you, how about Mai's friend Saiyuri getting hurt by one of her 'demons' leading her to try killing herself? Or how about Shiori nearly succumbing to depression and attempting suicide because of her illness combined with feeling totally isolated? It gets worse. I'm not going to ruin Ayu's situation because it will give away the last part of the show but I will tell you I was in tears consecutively for the final three episodes (for someone who has worked so hard to cultivate a stoic demeanor in the face of sad stories, this was absolute torture). However, the saddest and most emotionally crippling part of all, had to have been what happened to poor Makoto. To make matters worse, this was the first major event in the series too, so naturally, I went into it without any warning except what suddenly made so much more sense in hindsight after the damage had already been done. You see, it turns out that Makoto is not actually a human but a Fox who has turned herself into a human to be with Yuuichi by way of a miracle. However, it turns out, that this miracle isn't permanent. It took her memory first, and eventually, it kills her. While in terms of actual passage of time, her existence in the show does not linger much more than a couple of episodes after this earth-shattering realization comes to light, in terms of emotional turmoil, it is painfully sad to watch as she slowly starts going downhill from being fully capable of human interaction at her introduction, to becoming more animal like, gradually losing her ability to speak, and eat properly, until eventually, she just fades away. I guess there's a reason this show has earned the nickname "Sad Girls in the Snow." It fits. Although considering how sad these events make the viewer, one can only imagine how painful it is for Yuuichi. He seems to suffer even more than we do, and frankly I'm quite amazed the poor guy didn't permanently crack, considering that all this stuff happened consecutively to the people around him! In terms of the payoff, there definitely is one, but you will have to be prepared to endure so much emotional suffering before you get there that I can only recommend seeking this show out if you like tearjerkers.
The presentation is very well done and the imagery is beautiful, if a little depressing (but please take into account that I hate snow). There are two very conspicuous uses of 3D graphics, but other than that, it's all traditional animation. The music is mostly variations on the theme song ("Last Regrets" by Ayana) which is okay since it's following the motif of the title (a Japanisization of the word Canon) which is supposed to be based off of the concept of a piece of music that is entirely made up of variations of a base theme. The opening theme isn't half bad anyway, as it's a nice though melancholy theme, while the end theme "Kaze no Tadoritsuku Basho" also by Ayana is a bit more upbeat. The Japanese voice acting cast is led by Tomokazu Sugita, known for being Kyon's voice actor in
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Chris Patton (Joshua in
Chrono Crusade) in the English version as Yuuichi. The Japanese version's voice acting may seem a little silly at times when the moe aspect is played up a bit too much, but in the serious moments, the acting is very well done. English voice acting sounds okay, although some of the more intentionally comedic moments do come across as somewhat out of place in both versions, like they were shoved in rather than perfectly crafted into the narrative. Even, if I didn't know this was a video game adaptation I wouldn't have been able to tell. The story is very well put together, and while it was a little bit boring at first as the various elements were put into place, it grows into itself as the story moves. It's a good story, mostly, though you should expect to cry, and even if I added 'a lot,' it would be a gross understatement. And that's the tiger's two cents.
Images taken from Kanon.
