AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond looks at 2 anime series about the spoken word, though he doesn’t necessarily ascribe to the notion that the idea of animation celebrating what Chuck Jones referred to as ‘animated radio’ shows the medium’s decline.
This week, I’m covering two anime series about the power of the human voice.One is a current series, , that’s streaming on the HIDIVE platform.
The other is a 12-part show from 2020, , which can be found on Crunchyroll, and which has never had its full due; a shame, as it’s terrific.For a certain type of cartoon classicist, the idea of an animation celebrating the spoken word shows the medium’s decline.In a previous column, I acknowledged Chuck Jones’ gibes against “animated radio,” and how animation should be understandable with the sound down.
You may find that argument supported or undercut by some of the most celebrated “speech” scenes in American adult TV animation, such as Quagmire’s ranting takedown of Brian the dog in (in the Season 8 episode “Jerome is the New Black”) and ’s 20-minute demolition of his late mother (the Season 5 episode “Free Churro”) Flower and Asura (Poster 2) Of the two anime I’m covering this week, is far removed from such tirades.It’s a very mild series, based on a manga by the writer Ayano Takeda and the artist Musshu.The anime is made by the young Studio Bind, best known for the popular fantasy series , which is a different title.
From the first moments, it’s obvious is markedly better-looking than most TV anime, though that’s thanks more to its attractive backgrounds and palette than to its character work.Then again, the girl characters have moments when they move with marked grace, evoking the work of Kyoto Animation.Like many of that studio’s anime, this is a school club series, with the weight on the female characters (though the boys are more than tokens).
The club is a broadcasting club, and its members have their sights on competitive glory.They take part in a range of projects – for example, they make a short video film, which ends up reflecting the youngsters’ “real” problems.But the main focus of the series is on dramatic readings, with the club’s current President, a girl called Mizuki, forcibly pressing a new student to join the club.
This is a chronically shy girl called Hana, who happens to have an exceptional reading voice.Even by this point, many anime fans would have clocked ’s tropes.Series about school clubs, often highlighting girls, are legion in anime.
The show’s competitive element also aligns with the sports anime genre, which I covered a few weeks ago.As often happens in these shows, the students treat their given talent with an all-encompassing seriousness.That was easier to buy in the ice-skating series , where the physical and emotional demands of the sport are obvious.
In the case of dramatic readings, it’s a harder sell to viewers.skill or talent can become a person’s whole world, but it can still feel faintly ludicrous presented as drama to the outsider… though less to anime fans who know the tropes.even starts like , with Hana staring raptly at another girl on TV, who’s mastered the craft Hana craves.
Yet beside all the tropes, tries something unusual.When a gifted character in the series performs an exceptional vocal reading, we see another character have a vision, one inspired by those words.The idea is that they’ve been instantly pushed into a dream by the power of their companion’s voice.
It’s like the end of Pixar’s , when the nasty critic Anton Ego was plunged into a Proustian memory by the title dish.A similar idea underlay , which created dreams for us inspired by music.I was also reminded of the 2014 film , where the title poet’s spoken teachings were illustrated by a range of signature-style animators, from Tomm Moore to Nina Paley.
The dream sequences in – some just moments – are often effective.In Part 2 Hana starts reading from a beloved Japanese children’s story, , and her companion suddenly finds herself sitting on the space-going train that story.(’s imagery resonates through such films as and ; I wrote more here.) Hana herself is transported to enchanted caves and deserted cities, or to the courtly Japan of a thousand years ago.
The latter episode brings up how to read archaic Japanese, older than Chaucer’s English.Many of these dream-visions look obviously homoerotic.In the first vision; Mizuki sees Hana reciting on a beach in the middle of a roaring storm, her body snared by vines and rebuilt by leaves.
It gets even more passionate later, when Hana starts reading, and dreaming, a book about two schoolgirls’ intensely romantic relationship.There’s a huge amount of fan commentary about such anime imagery.Many LGBT fans see it as cynical queerbaiting, as these relationships are so seldom cemented.
I’ve asked two top anime directors about such content in their work.One was Shinichiro Watanabe (my interview here), who made the boys’ friendship series .The other was Naoko Yamada (interview here), who depicted girls’ passions in her film .
When I asked them about those works, both directors declined to describe them as “straightforwardly” gay.Rather they saw them as depictions of intense adolescence where sexual orientation, it seems, doesn’t .Many fans will say that answers nothing, while the directors’ comments suggest they don’t recognise the question.
On the basis of the first nine episodes, I found a pleasant series, but sometimes dull.The arresting dream moments are usually brief; the characters’ fallings-out and makings-up can be brazenly unearned.A later story on those lines in part 9 is compressed into sometimes risible melodrama, whereas it could have been better told as one of the main ongoing plotlines.
And with that, let’s move on to , a very different, more macabre, and much better series.Wave, Listen to Me! In one episode of we’re suddenly thrown into the middle of a domestic row turned murderous.But for once, the woman has the upper hand.
It’s the small hours of the morning.The woman has pinned her boyfriend down in the kitchen, taped his mouth shut, and the moon glints off the chopping knife in her hand.Soft music plays from her mobile phone, tuned to a local radio station.
She’s about to do the deed.Then there’s a burst of static… and the music is replaced by a demented female voice.Cackling and breaking hysterically, this voice gloats she’s stabbed her boyfriend, who has the same name as the man lying in the kitchen.
It’s a demonic woman’s voice, conjuring up pictures as only radio can, between Dante and .isn’t about demons or murders, and it’s not a horror anime.It’s an upbeat comedy-drama full of crazy curveballs, and the “demon” voice on the radio belongs to the main character.
She’s Minare, one of the best anime leads ever.She’s no maniac; she just lets her imagination carry her off when she speaks without inhibitions.(In the scene above, at first we’re not sure if the kitchen-killer scenario is actually happening, or if it’s just a projection of Minare’s fevered imagination at the mike.) She’s no blushing schoolgirl or sexy warrior.
She’s a believable working woman whose life is frustrating and crazy but can also throw her the strangest opportunities – like going on radio on the dead of night and scaring listeners silly.The setting is Sapporo, the biggest city on the north Japanese island of Hokkaido.Since leaving home, twentysomething Minare has made a living here, working at a soup curry restaurant.
She’s recently broken up with her boyfriend, and this leads her into a spiralling situation.Drinking at a bar, Minare unloads her feelings on a handsome older man, whose eyebrows remind her of her dad.She ends up waking up after an alcohol-induced blackout, though strangely she’s back in her room, lying tidily in bad.
(That mystery runs through several episodes.) At work the next day, Minare’s aghast when the radio in the background suddenly starts playing rant from last night about worthless boyfriends.She storms over to the local radio station and confronts the boss – who’s the older man from last night, Kanetsugu.Weirdly, he calmly lets her into the radio booth to “break into” her recorded monologue and tie it up.
Then he deflates Minare’s threats of legal action by showing her the consent note she wrote, letting him share her words to the world – something she forgot after her blackout.But that’s not all.Kanetsugu has been struck by this complete amateur who’s not only unafraid to express herself, but can “rant” fluently and entertainingly in public without a second of prep.
He wants Minare to go on the radio again and deliver more unplugged performances, while his colleagues wonder what on earth’s got into him.That leads to scenes like the one I described above, where Minare plays a demented bunny-boiler with gusto, breaking onto the airwaves without so much as a jingle.Be the bear But this isn’t just the story of a rising radio star.
A few on-air monologues in the dead of night won’t make you rich, and much of the show is about Minare’s daily toils, trying to keep her job in the curry restaurant where her boss does want an eccentric radio personality on his staff.There are also possible new romantic attachments, with a male workmate who’s openly interested in Minare, and the problem of affordable accommodation.This eventually leads to Minare sharing a flat with Kunetsugu’s shy assistant Mizuho, who’s the cute girl Minare isn’t, though this works for comic effect.
(Mizuho has the same Japanese voice as Tohru in and Maquia in courtesy of actress Manaka Iwami.) The show is animated by the Sunrise studio, best-known for the never-ending space franchise.Its pictures are – to use a word I normally loathe – less pretty than ’s, with the aggressive voices carrying much of the weight in the way Chuck Jones despised.(Minare herself is superbly voiced in Japanese by Riho Sugiyama, who’s appeared in many other anime but seemingly seldom in leads.) But the character poses, layouts and editing are forceful and funny; there’s a weight and muscle that I rarely find in American adult cartoons.
actually starts with a flash-forward to another Minare radio monologue, with her fighting a bear on a Hokkaido mountain (both imagined).It’s so fresh and funny, so meta and slapstick, that you just want more like it, and find yourself chafing through the show’s slower patches.Still, it ties in with the unpredictability of Minare’s situation, which can change utterly in a blink.
Midway through the series, she and Mizuho must go into a suspicious house which might contain angry ghosts, dismembered corpses or a heap of comedy red herrings.This is a show that can go anywhere with Minare holding it together, an unfiltered blabbing beauty who’ll run out of words.For anyone wondering about the comedy’s tilt to the macabre, the creator of the source manga is Hiroaki Samura, who also wrote the notoriously gruesome , adapted several times in animation and live-action.
And yet ’s last episode, which involves a random but believable event, has a Capra-esque warmth, celebrating radio’s power to project a human voice through the night.The ending, though, is also ’s greatest liability.Like many anime series, it doesn’t resolve any of its ongoing story threads, as that story didn’t in anime form.
Samura’s source manga is still going as of writing, with 10 books available in English, but the anime version never resumed after one 12-part season.Still, it ends not on some exasperating cliff-hanger, but on a hopeful glimpse of tomorrow, with those weird cackling voices that haunted the small hours silenced – for now.Andrew Osmond is a British author and journalist, specialising in animation and fantasy media.
His email is [email protected].
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