It's An Angel Beats! World, I Just Live In It

My last two blog posts have both tackled some heady subjects with regard to the anime series Angel Beats!. Perhaps the fact that I have elected to write a third lends some hint towards my fondness for the story, its characters and its fascinating setting. Still, after two quite heavy, theoretical posts I felt like I needed to do some clarification. Angel Beats! is currently streaming on Netflix and Crunchyroll, two of the most prominent streaming services if you're looking into anime, so it is not exactly an obscure series that I've plucked out because it is some perfectly crafted philosophical thesis disguised as a cartoon. It's funny. Really funny. Those last two posts probably make it seem like it isn't, that it's some morose depiction of Sartrean existentialism that you are required to do dense theoretical reading to fully appreciate, but that is absolutely not the case. Fundamentally, it is a cartoon with a YA demographic, and best enjoyed as such; no matter what the indulgences of a blogger might indicate.

I have to confess that my recent rewatch was plagued with fears, and I had often put off my return to this series because of them. Something that I watched so long ago, and so early in my exploration of the medium, would surely reveal itself to have been rife with crass humour, bland characters and would be nowhere near as pretty as I remembered it being. So is the case for most people, let alone someone with as notoriously poor taste as I have. Yet from that first episode I was immediately drawn back in with its frantic pacing and unique style. What brings me back to it, ten years later, is this excellency in production values. Its design and animation quality holds up, the English dub is surprisingly effective, but it is the music which is on another level entirely. Unsurprisingly, Jun Maeda, the writer for the series, is a composer first and foremost. Sequences depicting the convergence of score and animation are imbued with an artisans touch and consideration. But the soundtrack shines particularly with the 'fictional' band from the series, Girls Dead Monster, who actually, seriously rule.

A live-action performance of 'Crow Song' pushes the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Still, there was nevertheless one significant change between these viewings: me. I'm a much different consumer than I was the first time around (though I must confess that much of the same idiosyncratic taste persists). This is what motivated me to write these posts and immerse myself more into Angel Beats! as a text, and to treat it with a level of seriousness and sincerity that I just wasn't capable of all those years ago. Still, as a transmedia project, Angel Beats! proves a challenging set of texts to interrogate in this way: its story is told across multiple mediums, each providing additive information to its core setting and cast of characters, but developmental mishaps have plagued much of the production of this project.

One of the first things you'll notice is that the series itself feels rushed, often feeling like it's going to rupture under the constraints of its 13 episode run. It's commonly believed that at least twice as many episodes were originally planned. But, more than this, few of its ancillary works have actually managed to make it to the West intact. The past ten years since the initial release of Angel Beats! has been defined by fan labour: translations, fanworks, guides, DRM workarounds and pirate distribution have become the lifeblood of an ever-dwindling community. As with the most interesting fan cultures, questions of legality arise. It remains a fact that in the West you cannot read the Angel Beats! Heaven's Door prequel manga, beyond its first two volumes, by any legitimate means. Likewise, there remains an episode of the anime itself (released some time after the original series concluded), as well as an alternate ending, which find themselves not only without English dubbing, but without any Western release whatsoever. 

Nor is there an English version of Angel Beats! 1st beat, the visual novel adaptation of the series. Whilst the translation from AlkaTranslations is a stellar piece of work, nigh indistinguishable from an official release, there remains a serious barrier of entry for all but the most passionate fans. Truly a shame, as the 'Iwasawa' route, whilst taking the series' inherent absurdity to new heights, drew from me an undeniably visceral, emotional reaction. In fairness, on that front even Japanese fans find themselves not much better off. The Angel Beats! visual novel project was envisioned to be a sprawling, comprehensive experience, retelling and reimagining the original series through six instalments, of which 1st beat was, unsurprisingly, the first. Since the release of that first instalment, there has been no word whatsoever on the rest of the story. No further releases, no acknowledgment of delay, not even an admission of cancellation. It just seems to have disappeared.

And yet, in spite of this, Angel Beats! has developed into a very rewarding transmedia universe. The work one has to put in is strenuous, but rewarded with real, meaningful content. Throwaway, one-dimensional characters, utilised either for single gags or to usher characters between locations in the main series are transformed into compelling storytellers in their own right. You may find that the character of Yusa, a glorified walkie-talkie in the original series, was, in fact, a misandrist serial murderer or that Chaa, no more than an underground factory worker originally, rages against an unjust afterlife which separates him from eternal paradise with his wife. I often found myself looking forward to scenes and stories concerning Fujimaki, a character whose presence in the series accounts for little more than a couple of lines, or the supporting members of the in-universe band, Girls Dead Monster, who couldn't even manage that. Surrounding these expanded character stories are also further explorations into the nuances and details of the setting: how long can characters exist in it, how long has it already existed for, what is the difference between a full character and an 'NPC', or, more pertinently, is there a meaningful distinction at all?  

What I'm saying is, if there was ever a time for a grand 10th anniversary event then it is now. Announce a comprehensive physical media re-release, announce the completion and translation of the visual novel, the translation and release of its manga prequel. Hell, announce a whole series reboot. And maybe that's all a pipe dream and maybe no one in their right mind would sink so much money into a franchise that has mostly lay dormant for a decade. A franchise so messy and incomplete. Yet still Angel Beats! is one of those rare worlds of originality which can simultaneously feed the critical soul and provide a true escapist joy: Angel Beats! makes me wish I was dead.

Purgatorial Prisons in Angel Beats!

Angel Beats!, the 2010 animated series, is, like many anime, set in a high school. Albeit, not a high school that is necessarily recognisable. The monotony is rarely on display, the teachers hold no power over their students and no one ever seems to do any studying. Instead this is a fantastical environment. Specifically it is a secondary fantasy world where the unfulfilled dead are given what appears to be a second-chance to resolve their regrets before moving onto their new lives. The question of course remains: what if you don't want to move on? 

This encapsulates the struggle that the main characters face; the Afterlife Battlefront are a band of subversive malcontents who desire to fight against obliteration from Angel, the agent of corrections who would see them move onto the next world. That their rehabilitation would play out in a school setting is not coincidental. This secondary world is one wherein which survival (or, at least, persistence) is explicitly tied to subversive individuality and denials of conformity culture. The Battlefront, ostensibly students, mark themselves as different to the rest of the school. They rarely attend class, holding guerilla concerts and activities out of an impromptu base set up in what was formerly the Principal's office. They deem the students unlike them 'NPC's and, alongside taking on a distinct uniform, employ outlandish physical appearances; from adornments, such as tails and halberds, to hair of varying colour and styles. These eye-catching designs play off of the notion of Main Character Syndrome; a jovial attitude that is reflected in the characters themselves, who too are most often seen at play. Toying with the rules of this world, the day to day structure of the Afterlife High School seems to concern pushing the boundaries of the school, and Angel, as much as possible before returning to normality.

But, of course, high schools aren't fantasy playgrounds. Rather, they are prisons. It is a dramatic comparison, but one which gains veracity when the timespan of the Afterlife High School is taken into consideration. What may seem a fun romp on a cursory glance may actually amount to something more sinister. One of the series' recurring gags is that the main character often misinterprets the melodramatic language of the Battlefront and their conflict when the subject matter of conversation is something benign; for example, "Angel's Rampage" refers to the school's testing period and "Angel's Domain" refers to her dorm room. Through ancillary materials, such as the two special episodes released after the series' initial run and the prequel manga, Angel Beats! Heaven's Door, it is implied that many of the speciously teenage characters of the main cast have, in fact, inhabited this world for decades. They do not age, they do not grow older, but instead they persist endlessly in the bodies that they died in. In this circumstance, even the mundane would seem that much more disconcerting, that much more unsettling and that much more calamitous. With this ageless quality, it is as if the very institution of the Afterlife High School polices the bodies of its inhabitants. All the more important then, to rage against the purgatorial culture of conformity.

In perhaps the quote most wheeled out by Foucauldians, we see a similarity in the very structure of disciplinary institutions, specifically the similarity between the Afterlife High School and the model of the prison:

“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Foucault, 1995: 227-228)

The Afterlife Battlefront specifically defies these facets of the school-qua-prison: it flouts the regulated chronologies, as none dare attend class, lest they succumb to the dread appeal of a happy school life. Forced labour, or studying, is a similar route to obliteration. The transition of the school from a site of learning to a site of examination saw surveillance/registration disguised as education and, appropriately, the fifth episode of the series makes it clear that sincere engagement with testing is another surefire route to passing onto the next world. And it should also be stated that the Battlefront goes out of its way to incorporate neurodivergent characters, those perhaps processing trauma related to their death (T.K.), to the length of their imprisonment (Shiina) or perhaps not related to anything at all (Noda). In doing so, they are again resisting the normalising function of the prison.

Yet, for all these similarities between purgatorial school and prison, there is no clear authority governing these subjects. As previously mentioned, the teachers hold only a perfunctory power- one easily dismissed by the rebel students. Angel herself holds no centralised authority, and it is precisely this lack of knowledge-power which allows her to become erroneously known as an Angel: she is, after all, merely the student body president and a prisoner like anyone else. Yet, by series end, the characters have all resolved to put an end to their struggle, to embrace the absurd, Sisyphean proposal of being reborn into an abstract, unknowable next life and thus commit themselves fully to their rehabilitation.

If the Afterlife High School is a prison, there is no prison guard: only the phantom of one, and yet that proves to be enough. Herein lies the nature of the Afterlife High School-qua-Prison. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1995) deploys the model of the panopticon to elucidate on the disciplinary society. In both the model and its real life counterpart, the layout is thus: that cells line a wall facing a central guard tower. Importantly, at any time the prisoners cannot see into the guard tower. They do not know if they are being watched and, therefore, find themselves under constant surveillance (whether they are actually being watched or not). In each cell, the collective prisoners have been turned into separate individualities, capable of threatening no collaboration, subterfuge or attempts at escape. The prisoners will not only behave themselves accordingly, but each will become a penal agent themselves: they will take it upon themselves to enforce the authority of the guard tower on the bodies of their fellow prisoners and their own.

A 'panoptic' style prison. 

In so far as the true state of the afterlife is an unknown quantity, and that, if he exists at all, God is entirely absent, then the point of authority in Angel Beats! is always abstract and delocalised: the guard tower is always empty. 

By series' end, the students no longer engage in avenues of resistance, no longer rage against their unjust fates or the cruelty of God. The students of the Afterlife Battlefront are all subversive malcontents: sympathetic, perhaps, for the unjust lives that they have lead, yet undesirable nevertheless. Their anti-theistic, nihilism ill befits a society of conformism and must be rectified in a location away from the public eye. Yet to simply correct these youths into idealised behaviours is not adequate: they would move on from their rehabilitation and, in the new world, break once more when faced again with the abject cruelty of life. So this is the true purpose of the Afterlife High School: to create docile subjects who, in the new world, will police and correct themselves. Having learned to suitably repress their morose tendencies, they will re-emerge into a new, inevitably unjust life, and face it with dutiful poise. 

A happy ending, albeit one delivered on bittersweet terms, is evidence enough that this correction is successful, proving beneficial to the series' protagonists, or at least that is the myth propagated by the after-credits scene of the original series. With that being said, there was another, alternate ending that suggests something different:

Angel Beats! Another Epilogue

Whilst the original ending serves fans of the series' characters and the genre as a whole more favourably, featuring the tease of a romantic reunion and a promise that love can conquer even the boundaries of life and death, it is this alternate imagining that I find to be the far more compelling one. The difference between these post-series endings is vital: each one transforms the work into either a peddler of myth (particularly, the myth of rehabilitation) or into something more critical. For one, the former ending is far more considerate to 'God' as an abstract, higher power, whose movements in mysterious ways are fundamentally benevolent. The rehabilitation will not only decisively work, but it will lead to a new world where the struggles of old are gone and only hope remains; vindicating the process as a whole and offering comfort in the notion that we all grow out of our rebellious phase- and that that is for the best.

Yet it is the alternate ending which shows us the true apotheosis of the Angel Beats! school's mission, taking it to its full, logical conclusion: at the end of the story, the site of rehabilitation becomes again a centre of discipline and corrections as the main character of the preceding story takes on the antagonistic 'Angel' role. Attempting to rehabilitate his dissatisfied subjects, the main character becomes as much a prisoner as any of them: only now he is all the more aware of his disciplinary role. He is an arbiter of surveillance, a figure fearsome to his fellow students, yet one also in fear himself; who can only ever hope to be an arm of the abstract authority and never the authority itself. Here, the success of the school as a correctional facility is left ambiguous. But he is a truly institutionalised figure now, a character who persists in the world not because he has rejected the purpose of it, but because he believes in it thoroughly. Perhaps the willingness for fans of the series to invent and believe in a theory that the main character is, in fact, the root cause/grand designer of the afterlife is tribute to how this idea of surveillance and self-policing was effectively communicated through the series. 

But, if there is one idea given more prominence, then it may well be that of divine punishment. The world itself, as fantasy, may seem fun, even desirable, but beneath that veneer it is callous and cruel. As established, this is a world of corrections, to transform the subversive, nihilist subject into an inoffensive consumer, functioning on the operative to merely 'Enjoy!', posing no risk to the grand narratives. Yet, rehabilitation, the disciplinary, is all too often only the sanitisation of the archaic punishment: the deviant must pay for their transgressions, yet we recoil from the idea of them being dealt physical pain, or even receiving their sentence in the public sphere. We erect these correctional facilities not to adequately care for and rehabilitate their inhabitants, but to absolve ourselves from any societal obligation to the condemned. That goes not only for prisons and prisoners, but for hospitals and the ill, for asylums and the insane, for factories and the workers and, of course, for schools and young people. That is why the story of Angel Beats! must take place in the afterlife; it is the one point most removed from all other gazes. So long as these miserable people are dead, we no longer have to witness their miserable lives.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish. New York: Random House.

The Existential High of Angel Beats!

To ask what happens when we die is a fundamentally narcissistic question. It is this moment, often disguising itself as philosophical query, that we are engaging directly with our inherent existential dread, with the abject fear of ceasing to be and with the futility of interpreting an unintelligible universe. "What happens when we die?" is almost always "What happens when I die? Will the self that exists now persist, in some form?" and so on. It certainly doesn't help that the best medication to prescribe for death anxiety is just basic repression. It is, after all, the one most logical fear. So, try your best not to think about it (Try it out now! Try not to think about dying). And once we retreat from our questions of death, we inevitably switch over to its counterpart, asking "Well, what's the point of life then?", which, of course is always also "What's the point of my life?"

That the anime Angel Beats! leans so heavily into comedic territory makes this all a peculiar segue yet, in its 13 episode run, the series nevertheless sets about confronting these questions; arriving at answers that are, at first, comforting, that subsequently grow more unsettling as the story unfolds, before finally reaching its conclusion. Angel Beats! is an 'isekai' series; one which concerns the transport of characters from 'our' world into a secondary fantasy world. Here, the answer to "What happens when you die?" is that you are transported to the aforementioned secondary world: a world where this particular afterlife takes the form of a purgatorial high school. If your youth was an unhappy one, you may find yourself here. Attend classes, score well in tests and appropriately exhaust yourself with extracurricular activities and you will be able to find contentment in the quotidian nature of an idealised school life. Upon finding this satisfaction, you will then 'move on' from this barrier between worlds, completing the journey from primary world, to secondary world, to the abstract, unknowable next.

That is unless you happen to be a particular kind of student, a student unwilling to fade away, who instead seeks recompense from the cruel, malevolent higher being who foisted an unjust life upon you. Such a group of (un)dead students are the main characters of the series, the "Afterlife Battlefront", and are united by common purpose: to invoke the presence of God and seek their revenge. In doing so, they also desire not to be 'obliterated', as resolving their issues would mean a pass onto the next world and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Together they defy that which seems the very purpose of this school for the dead. 

The setting is an absurd one, a world of no meaning or consequence, which often manifests itself with the invocation of features and terminology from video games: in this world, non-main characters are NPCs, hit counters tally acts of violence and people don't die, they just respawn. From here derives much of the humour, where undying teenagers wage war with increasingly sophisticated weaponry crafted from dirt. But the absurd ultraviolence is not the premier nihilism of such a setting. Rather the series' true villain, beyond angels, shadows and malevolent student body presidents is in fact the inherent lack of a higher purpose. The search for God is always a failure: the students cannot kill God, because he is already dead.

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus retells the eponymous Sisyphean myth as a parable for human existence. In the original myth, Sisyphus is cursed to perennially rolling a rock up a hill. Once reaching the summit, the rock would always return to its starting point, and Sisyphus would have to take up his endeavour once again. It is Camus' existentialist declaration, that "One must imagine Sisyphus happy!", that hits at the core of our shared experience. Our lives are too often monotonous, at times they are capricious and cruel, and as such we look to higher authorities for the reassurance that there is some greater plan, or inherent meaning to the universe. And, of course, there is none. There is instead only the struggle to look for meaning.

Imagining Sisyphus happy.

There is much in common between Sisyphus and the cast of Angel Beats! as characters, particularly in their respective denials of death. Sisyphus, whose guile afforded him to cheat death twice over, in one story is said to have kidnapped the very personification of Death itself. So, for a while, humans lived as immortal. With their constant revivals, it would not be a far cry to believe that Angel Beats! took place in such a world where Sisyphus had done precisely that. However, there is one specific aspect of the myth that Angel Beats! places itself in. This purgatory setting is exactly Sisyphus atop the mountain, watching the rock tumble back down, and anticipating his descent. This is someone who, having finished living a life of abstract, unjust pain is being told to get back to the bottom of the hill and start pushing again. 

The premier example of this is the case of Yui: the cat-girl singer who makes up for a life confined to bed, reliant on care, with effervescent energy in the afterlife. At four years old, this character was left paralysed after a car accident, the kind of random, injury that is so abstractly cruel we can only call it an "act of God". Yet, in the end, Yui doesn't resolve any lingering emotion by performing those things she couldn't do whilst alive (her post-life bucket list containing playing in a band, performing wrestling moves and sporting feats, alongside getting married). It is instead the fantasy, the capacity to imagine a meaningful life for herself, which allows her to find peace and the resolve to live out a new life. That new life may well consist of the exact same trauma as before, but she will face it regardless. The lesson is not that their lives secretly had meaning all along, nor was it that they were given a space wherein which meaning could be inscribed for them, instead each of these characters required to find meaning for themselves. 

Yui resolves to push her rock up the hill once more.

What is important is that, the student-rebels against God did in fact succeed in their purpose: in the Nietzschean sense, God is dead and they killed him. There is no higher power with which they must live their lives genuflecting towards, there is no ethereal mandate to live in accordance to. But the anti-theist trend of Angel Beats!, and the student's mantra of "There is no God, Buddha or Angel", is only the first half of the equation: after the battle is won, and the shackles of a higher power cast off, we are then burdened with absolute, terrifying freedom. In a world where no sense or purpose is given to us, the onus is on us to find whatever sense we can in the abstract. In friendship, in art or in love. In the tiny facets of life that seems so petty in the face of total cosmic annihilation. It is a bloodcurdling prospect, but it needn't be. Because, is it not true that however scary the thought of succumbing to the void is, it is that much worse to have lived a life unfulfilled? It is only ever we, ourselves, who can delineate our own reason for being, and even though we may never quite figure it out, we can find meaning in the very struggle for it. 

Camus, A. (2013). "The Myth of Sisyphus" in The Myth Of Sisyphus. New York: Random House.

Film Review: Weathering With You

Spoilers Follow.

Weathering With You (Original Title: Tenki no ko), Makoto Shinkai's 2019 follow-up to his preceding mega-hit Your Name (Original Title: Kimi no Na wa), is much more effective as spectacle and viewing experience than it ever is as a film. It should come as little surprise to those familiar with Shinkai's previous work that the production values are stellar, but fans of Your Name may find this new story to be an overall less affecting affair.

Your Name was, of course, such a sweeping, international phenomenon that Weathering With You begs comparison to its predecessor. The film itself does little to dissuade this. It is clearly set-up as a spiritual successor to Your Name (and, as eagle-eyed fans have noticed, as a pseudo-sequel as well), and similarities between the two frequent: they are both bildungsroman, coming-of-age stories, both depict characters moving from the country into Tokyo, both feature light fantasy elements, stunning animation and music by Radwimps. There is a tragic loss, that is promptly undone in time for a happy ending. Weathering With You goes through these motions by way of a romance between Hodoka, a runaway, and Hina, a young orphan girl with the fantastical power of atmokinesis, of weather manipulation. Hijinks ensue.

Shinkai's films are often praised as timeless, or ageless, or whatever superfluous adjective confers his work rewatchability, yet I think they are rather the opposite. Whilst there is a universal romance to them, both Your Name and Weathering With You are expressly concerned with contemporary youth anxiety. This film, in particular, addresses the relationship between Generation Z and the environment- more specifically, the lack of any such relationship. Reflecting Japanese youth apathy to ecological disaster, the anthropocene takes a backseat in the lives of our focal young protagonists. Instead, for much of the film, it is the police, perhaps repressive society at large, who are depicted as the antagonistic force and enemy of young people. The police are repeatedly shown as inadequate, foolish and incompetent; frequently harassing the undeserved, at one point prioritising the pursuit of runaway children over the prosecution of a paedophile; incapable of performing their jobs, as they are repeatedly outwitted and outran by children; and, as you would expect, are proven wholly ignorant of the grander, fantastical elements at play. It is in resistance to the police that the core family of runaways is both formed and lost, and it is the abdication of ecological responsibility that allows the family's return at the film's climax.

For the majority of the film, nature is quite playful: it affects mood, rain makes people miserable and the clearing of the sky alleviates it. Hina can bring temporary relief from the rain, at the cost of a later, heavier downpour, something which the entrepreneurial youths utilise to charm the Tokyo citizenry out of their cash. Only in the film's epilogue is nature's destructive potential played out. Offscreen, in a time-skip. Refusing to sacrifice Hina to restore typical weather behaviour, rain continues to fall until half of Tokyo is submerged entirely in water. Typing it out makes it sound like such an obviously disastrous outcome, but this is presented to us as a happy ending. With half the city drowned, the film's resolution is one of its biggest curiosities.

If we perhaps view the character of Hina as representative of the anthropocene, as it is her atmokinetic powers which incur the calamitous weather conditions and her sacrifice which abates them, her decision to prioritise herself is pseudo-Randian; with the world pushing down on her shoulders, she shrugs. It's unexpectedly provocative material from Shinkai, considering the film is a mostly lightweight affair. One particular piece of dialogue resonates: "Who cares if we can't see any sunshine? I want you more than any blue sky." Hodoka confesses this to Hina at the film's climax, declaring defiantly that human will and human love should be prioritised over the relationship between people and nature.

Were the ending played differently, it would seem that the film is condemning a selfish, lackadaisical youth. But, in the film, there is no tragedy or horror to the ending. Life in Underwater Tokyo is presented as an undeniable improvement, as businesses expand, city infrastructure adapts and hopeful optimism abounds in the populace. For a film that starts off seemingly sympathetic to the vagabond, this ending shows little to no curiosity as to the wider effects of the lovers decision on the poorest of the city. Real world climate change, of course, will not affect us all in the same way: whilst the older, richer citizen is able to move out of her drowned house into high-rise apartments, many poorer people would be unable to do so. The mass displacement of people in the event of such a calamity would be a humanitarian crisis, not to mention the potential loss of life that may well have occurred in the transformation of Tokyo into Atlantis. The notion that the film's ecological disaster can be accepted as a return to the natural order actually serves as little comfort in this light. The anthropocene eventually rolling back is hardly something to look forward to, so long as the 'anthropo' still walks the Earth.

As such, it is a very strange film to view in 2020. It presents us a narrative wholly concerned with ecological calamity, but not with its prevention; the total antithesis of the messages of Extinction Rebellion, the Climate Strike and likely many of this year's Oscar acceptance speeches. In an otherwise easily consumed, whimsical fantasy, the ending proves a bitter pill to swallow. It must be said that, for all my gripes, it has certainly been the point where I've been most forced to grapple with the film, and its wider meaning. I do wonder if my failure to enjoy the ending is rooted in the void between Japanese youth sentiments towards ecological disaster and my own, Westernised perspective. As defeatist as it is, the suggestion that we (and young people, specifically) are actually powerless in the face of climate disaster may be closer to the truth than we'd like to admit. And maybe, if that is the case, then narratives of hope in the aftermath of climate calamity are a necessary, if unfortunate, tonic, to the rhetoric that suggests that our failure to prevent climate change signals the end of our species and planet.

Nevertheless, where I found the story unwieldy and alienating compared to Your Name's triumphant melodrama, I felt the animation and music were clearly of the same, if not higher, calibre. When Shinkai said that he found himself disappointed with Your Name, feeling that the studio hadn't managed to push the potential of the animation far enough and deeming the film "incomplete", I was shocked. My puny, prosaic brain couldn't imagine something surpassing Your Name, at the time. Weathering With You must have been what he was envisioning. How many films can you think of where one of the most startling sequences features someone eating a Big Mac? Where you will gladly watch long sequences of just rain, because each and every drop is stunning? Everything from sequences of food preparation to the sequences of Hina's atmokinesis are rendered with a level of care and dedication that makes nearly every frame desktop wallpaper material. The score and J-Rock musical accompaniments from Radwimps are of similar quality. It imbues the film with kinetic energy when it needs to, whilst never missing an emotional beat. Whilst some of the deployment of the J-Rock songs may be questionable, particularly with regards to the aforementioned offbeat ending, the songs themselves are a lot of fun.

Roger Ebert once referred to animation, particularly Japanese anime, as a form which "releases the imagination so fully that it can enhance any story, and it can show sights that cannot possibly exist in the real world." Weathering With You lives up to that potential and embodies spectacle-film in its purest. As the screening ended, I felt a sensation that this is what cinemas are still here for. Now, wide-release of international cartoons are not going to solve the woes of every dwindling multiplex or just-holding-on indie venue, but if you want an example of a film experience that cannot be simulated outside of a cinema, look no further.

I'm interested in seeing this film again! It just also seems like a crime to see it on any smaller screen. I don't want to watch it on my laptop screen, which I've never been able to get fully clean for very long, nor do I want to watch it on my TV, with its cluster of dead pixels in the bottom right. I want to see every detail of the animation blown to gargantuan proportions. I may be satisfied if we could screen it on the White Cliffs of Dover, but nothing less than that. That the film has received such a limited UK release is a deep shame. Everyone deserves to be able to see films like this on the biggest screen possible.

Reconciliation of Trope in Convenience Store Boyfriends

2017s Konbini Kareshi, also known as Convenience Store Boyfriends, is not a particularly revolutionary series. It's not, really, even a very good one. Yet as I watched this "slice-of-life" anime for the first time recently, I couldn't help but find it extremely interesting. Here we have a show that is harangued by trope and cliché, yet is also desperately trying to find a way to reconcile anime and slice-of-life genre tropes for a modern audience. It, in no uncertain terms, fails.

Convenience Store Boyfriends is the anime adaptation of the B's-Log Comic mixed-media project, having first been realised in prose and audio drama. It is this cynical, detached approach to storytelling that I think has caused the production to concern itself with the modern sensibilities of its audience. It is a series that appears to have been designed by committee, looking to utilise its high school genre, setting and character, to best appeal to, not only the romance anime fan, but a younger, more socially aware generation. It is in the conflict between these two demographics that we see the failure of Convenience Store Boyfriends' reconciliation. In one of the focal romantic relationships, between the character Honda, a popular soccer player, and Mihashi, the stalwart "Class Rep", we see the struggle between playing into safe generic tropes and appealing to an audience that has long moved past them.

As it has been said that Japan is still some time away from its "#MeToo" moment, it is noteworthy that, at least for a little while, Convenience Store Boyfriends put issues of consent and harassment right at the forefront of its depiction of this relationship. Honda is berated for his retrograde attempts to impress and romance the Class Rep, who often makes it clear that these are unwanted advances. It is in the return to trope where this all falls apart. Due to its nature as a romance anime, and its unwillingness to make any major diversions from its tropes, the Class Rep soon gains the confidence to accept the previously undesired advances. Issues of consent abound in the discussion of the anime trope, "tsundere", used to refer to female characters who disguise their true feelings behind layers of animosity, that the male protagonist must strip back in order to pursue the desired relationship. It's a female character seen across not just anime, but throughout all of literature, but it is the anime tsundere who is most well-known for their predictable behaviours and for promoting morally dubious wish fulfilment narratives. This is the character archetype that the Class Rep is forced to become because of Convenience Store Boyfriends' need to fall back on trope.

Yet those early moments, where it does seem like the series wants to offer us something interesting, were extremely exciting. Not just as viewers of television, but as citizens; for its, otherwise unimpressive, early episodes seemed to suggest that serious social change was taking hold and that the dangerous romantic tropes of yesteryear were being cast-aside for a new look at how modern relationships can, and should, be formed. So when this was done away with, Convenience Store Boyfriends' actually yielded from me its biggest emotional response. My sense of disappointment was palpable.

So, what does the failed reconciliation of trope then tell us? Is the failure to reconcile the tsundere trope with modern sensibilities down to the quality of this production or is it due to the irreconcilable nature of these tropes? I would argue that it is a little of both. Certainly Convenience Store Boyfriends' is no major piece of revisionary work. For example, the tsundere is not the only trope to be promised subversion and then remain unchanged in Convenience Store Boyfriends' (though it is certainly the most prominent and worthy of inspection). The step-sister romance, the strict household impeding romance, the school festival, the one that got away and so on, all make an appearance in this series that wants to play it by the numbers that no one uses anymore. The series has some very weak, uninspired storytelling, that means they can never get across their new perspective on tired tropes. More than that though, I would say that the attempt was doomed from the start. Even if the studio behind Convenience Store Boyfriends' wanted to pursue a new approach to the romance genre, they could never do so while still attached to tropes like the tsundere. I'd like to see an expectation-subverting story, where the person who thinks they are the romantic lead is shut down for misogynistic behaviour, but that show simply wouldn't be a romance show any longer. The tropes and genre effects are simply not fit for use when it comes to creating romantic stories for modern sensibilities.



The show does have one really nice song though. And a plot twist that I'm sure the whole board room were patting themselves on the back for.