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So, here we have one of last year more prominent animes, i mean one that tries to lift itself above the dross-line. HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD... The protagonist is a high-school student named Takao Kasuga, a typical high-school student who has an ideal fantasy class high-school girlfriend whom he loves from afar (or to put it in his words, a "femme fatale") and thinking himself more supreme and intelligent from his classmates because he reads more and especially reads poetry. Things go wrong one moment when he is alone in the class and sees his idealized girlfriend underwear, in an uncontrolled urge he picks them up sniffs them and then when wanting to put them back into the locker students start to arrive in the hallway so in the rush of the moment he hides them and carry them home with him. But one girl sees it, the class outsider and loner Sawa Nakamura, who from now on blackmail him and taunts him for the rest of the series. So, reading the premise of the series i thought that what she was going to do to him is physical humiliation, but the things she does to him are mainly horrible in his head. Yes, to most persons (more than people are willing to admit), school students and youths in particular this can be humiliating, but far from something that will ruin someones life. So, as people realized by now, his a weak jelly instead of a spine non-male in the style that becomes more and more prevalent in anime's since the 2000's (think Golden Time's Tada Banri for an equal or even worse). I wonder if the director or manga this is based on is trying to tell a story in the style of Margaret Atwood "Cat's Eye" where the torment of the main character is psychological, it isn't good as cat's eye. Moving on, it is pretty obvious why he is so afraid of Nakamura, he deems himself idealistically pure, he is more good natured, more worthy and sublime from his classmate brutes, then comes Nakamura, a girl who is not only stronger than him and has perversions, but she's got no problem with her perversions, she's, in a way, "a natural" and more pure than him. At some point, Takao befriends his ideal classmate girl Nanako, who is a simple minded schoolgirl who finds Takao something of a cross between a weirdo and an almighty youth intellectual, therefore alluring. Nakamura orchestrate their relationship in a way that, to her, it always will look like Takao's fault every time more details about the mysterious underwear thief are discovered. Despite that, his behavior is so remote from her she tries to understand him, in the episode where they escape to the mountain, Nanako is literally brought to tears by his behavior, but still, Nanako image as a femme fatale is broken for Takao, who sides with Nakamura, you are decadent not because you want to but because you can't help it. Too strong(?) for Nanako and too weak for Nakamura, they both leave him. In the last episode we get to see Nakamura's diary and her motivations into her teacher-student of perversions relationship with Takao, in short, she thought she had found an equal to evil like hers, she could teach him true humanity, which is evil, because every good person has an horrible perversity in his core, and the mass of humanity are hypocrites who hide their true core under veils of goodness, that's why she wants to go behind the mountain and see if there is something beyond ultimate peak of nature (she tries to bring the symbol into tangible reality, which is a very uncommon way to use symbolism. She's almost aware of it, almost, but then she's not, and i wonder what the author of this had in mind).
So, maybe there is something other to this, but this is all very predictable and done better in other places. The animation, places, direction and mindfulness of other surrounding stuff that related to making film and art are certainly interesting and something different, but aren't good enough to make you forget it's subtext weakness. The themes here are undoubtedly decadent (Baudelaire and staff) and a little bit nihilistic. A little above average but that's all.
score 7/10
NRTOOD 12 October 2014
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3103245/ |
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