Director: Yoshimasa Hiraike
Screenplay: Yoshimasa Hiraike
Based on the videogame by Enterbrain
Voice Cast: Tomoaki Maeno as
Jun'ichi Tachibana; Shizuka Itou as Haruka Morishima; Rina Satou as Kaoru
Tanamachi; Hiromi Konno as Sae Nakata; Yukana as Ai Nanasaki; Ryoko Shintani as
Rihoko Sakurai; Kaori Nazuka as Tsukasa Ayatsuji; Kana Asumi as Miya Tachibana;
Takuma Terashima as Masayoshi Umehara; Risa Hayamizu as Maya Takahashi; Yū
Asakawa as Hibiki Tsukahara
Viewed in Japanese with English subtitles
I can't believe you tried to eat me.
In terms of premises, this attempt to adapt a Playstation 2 era light novel does take a distinct approach to the whole issue with that medium, that many are designed around forking paths in the narrative based on one's choices. Here, instead of merely one romantic comedy/drama over twenty four episodes based around one figure our lead Jun'ichi Tachibana is attracted to, you have six narrative arches over four episodes each, all based around one of six female school students the male protagonist becomes romantically involved with.
If anyone wants to raise concerns immediately, than yes, whilst this show has surprisingly more nuisance than most, it does have to struggle over its own structure being around choosing and picking a perfect girlfriend, a concern as all the narratives do end positively one way or another, from simple romance to even one leading to when the couple married and had a daughter in the conclusion years later from high school. If taken negatively, it is fetishistic unintentionally. Positively, it is a nice touch of odd cosmic unpredictability that we can see six different worlds where six women can cross the lead Jun'ichi's life. It is never addressed why the structure exists, and baring the end episode preview for the next one, nor does the show ever get self aware of this structure until the OVA episodes that came after. Thankfully, whether the source material is wholesome or insidiously more problematic than it looks, Amagami SS is a show with a lot more heart than anything more duplicitous, especially in mind there are worse works in existence in anime about multiple female love interests.
Boiled down, each arch is about one female classmate. Haruka Morishima begins Arch 1, the flighty and eccentric popular girl. Kaoru Tanamachi, for Arch 2, Jun'ichi's tomboy best friend. Arch 3 is about Sae Nakata, a first year and friend of his youngest sister Miya, who is timid and quietly spoken. Arch 4, about another first year and a friend of Miya called Ai Nanasaki, at arm's reach in mood and standoffish. Arch 5 is about Rihoko Sakurai, a childhood friend of Jun'ichi's, who is always concerned about her weight, likes to eat, and is a very sweet person. Arch 6, the last, is about the school head for the Christmas Founder's festival Tsukasa Ayatsuji, which is apt as all these arches follow that Jun'ichi was spurned at Christmas two years before each story on a date, and each story involves or concludes around the Founders festival for Christmas, both leading to dramas for their female characters but also his own anxieties about having his heart broken once before.
Tonally, Amagami SS is a high school romantic comedy with some drama and a bit of sex humour. It is the type of show that is prolific, and can be argued as placating to fetishes of the perfect high school, as it is common in anime and manga, to the point it is probably an uncomfortable testament to how gruelling adult life in the work place is in Japanese culture. It is also the kind of show anime criticism I listen to tends to warn people like myself against, which lead me to being hesitant coming to this show despite being intrigued by the premise. Thankfully, the show always stays on the side of charming, helped for once by our male protagonist Jun'ichi having some actual characterisation. From the extreme of a first person camera stand in who never talks, any male protagonist remotely with personality would raising the bar to the better, but here we have someone we can actually like. He is still the meek and polite male stereotype, and girl crazed, but he shows virtue, shows a clear sense of kindness that would lead him to being attractive to his female classmates, and has little touches which help considerably build his personality, such as acrophobia, a fear of heights, which is never a plot point but naturally comes up as it would in real life in situations like going to a tall building with a glass floor on a date. The only really exaggerated aspect about him, with his best male friend Masayoshi Umehara, is that the pair trade "porn" between each other, which is absurd especially when you realise they are treating magazines with bikini models as precious contraband. To Amagami's credit, Jun'ichi is depicted as still being a horny heterosexual male, but one with actual aspects to him which you can admire, just happening to also been a young adult and thus in a time where romance is still a confused experience.
Knowing the cast are mostly between sixteen and seventeen, which is surprisingly older than I had presumed for anime high school, you can see the case as being more mature in aspects, but still having the prangs, hesitancies and concerns of being young adults. Likewise the female cast is given time to grow, especially as even in other characters' arch the other five female characters still appear in the stories. Fanservice is there but thankfully minimal, the focus on romance and character development. Personally, my heart sides with Kaoru Tanamachi being the real narrative path as, alongside being the best arch, it did touch upon the fact that, having a female best friend when I was a teenager, there is a chemistry there even if you remain merely friends, something which is played upon in this case when Kaoru as the female tomboy with Jun'ichi joshes and teases him. The same can be said for Rihoko Sakurai as, showing what a sad sack I am, I am naturally going to be more sympathetic to the character who is a childhood friend who has hidden her crush for him, especially as her arch is more from her perspective. Interestingly hers is the only with there not being any romance, only the optimistic hope for one, set around her tea club instead.
Honestly, everyone in the female cast, in the annuals of characterisations I have encountered, are a lot better depicted here. Haruka Morishima is the only one I would not want dating the lead as, whilst her arch as the first starts the series, the eccentric Japanese-British student eventually, even if unintentionally, has a potential gay reading which is so much more intriguing then a generic romance. This flighty figure who skirts around school clubs and collecting images of cute dogs is much more interesting when she (questionably) is spying on the female swimming team, as she also finds them cute, or (more positively) in the relationship with her best friend, the sane person to reprimand her indulgences, whose relationship together yet is sweet and even involves in one arch participating in a best couples competition which is meant for male and female couples but they compete in for a lark. Even in terms of a character like Tsukasa Ayatsuji, the last and in danger of being such a bland figure from how she is only in the other arch the person getting the Christmas festival ready, plays that off actually to an advantage as she is insanely complex with many layers, to the point of even being very manipulative and dark just to complete a noble act when she finally loses all her masks, even playfully toying with the idea the show will turn into horror story for a joke.
Structurally as well, there being two opening themes throughout the series, each narrative arch has a different end credits and song, from the perspective of the female love interest and sung by their voice actress. If ever Japanese anime evokes the old era of the variety entertainer, it's in examples like this. The arches themselves do not really differ from each other. Amagami is paradoxically able to create feature films effectively with their four episode stories, and have a leisured pace between them, story wise gentle with any tension coming from seeing parts of the female lead's own personal lives which affect them, never any drastic. Production wise, it is bright but naturalistic in depiction, the characters not as exaggerated and in this world none likely to have pink hair unless any dyed their locks or for a single scene joke. The only real exception is for Sae Nakata. She is the character in most danger of the show revealing its hand as a stereotypical "perfect girlfriend" show. A freshman, meek and shy, she can easily be confused as being a middle school student (i.e. younger), as it found when she wants to go to a tokusatsu team performance for kids as she loves the show in question1, but as a common running gag has a big bust even her female friends wish they had.
It is a character, especially for the last detail, you could roll your eyes at. The arch however decides to go for a broader tone, noticeable in a male narrator you never hear outside this arch, his melodramatic delivery deliberately adding to the more comedic tone of the arch. He is also voiced by Jouji Nakata, whose career in anime but also video games has allowed him to voice a lot of bold, mighty voiced figures between M. Bison, Albet Wesker, Alucard and Megatron among many, characters I have mentioned if you look into suggest why his inclusion here is an inspired comedic touch. There is also the haunted house sequence, when Junichi takes Sae to the amusement park, which is the weirdest moment of the series and legitimately strange. Somehow this attraction has been allowed access to a powerful hallucinatory gas, which alongside creating creepy monsters in an ancient Egyptian pyramid setting, also leads to Sae turning into a bowl of ramen, which gets kinky when Junichi cannot stop himself from considering eating her. Yes, even I was caught off-guard that this transpired.
In fact, whilst a quaint series altogether which pulls away from lurid fanservice, it is amazing how Amagami SS get kinky a lot in unexpected ways. Kissing a girl's belly button over an extended period of time, kissing the back of another's knee, the obsession with swimming team uniforms, a reminder that Japanese culture if merely viewed from a stereotype of being very meek and polite forgets that eroticism can appear in unexpected places in their pop culture quite a bit. For Ai Nanasaki's arch as well, it is just explicit, romantically having them eventually taking a bath naked (to his surprise) in a secret outdoor hot spring on land her family owns. I have to admit, whilst the kinkiness of some of this series is odd, especially the bowl of ramen scene, I am happy the show does not shy away from this as, whilst nothing is consummated, it does deal with the likely tension of having someone stay over you like and having to share the same bed as takes place. It also, for all the aspects that are usual in anime, like someone accidentally seeing something out of context or accidentally stumbling in on someone in the bath, usually the lead's sister, the decision to not ogle its cast means that when it does decide to be more sensual, it is in good taste for once.
The two OVA episodes, if you are a completist, do end the show on a poor note. Thankfully, they are bonuses, two regular length episodes, both offering tantalising attempts to cross all these divergent paths but having points that undermine them. The first offers a really interesting shift, actually radical in context, as it interconnects all the beginnings of each romance, only to have a female admirer break up potential relationships between the female cast and Junichi by bringing each one to the same back alley at the school and lying that he has a girlfriend already. It is still romanticising a stalker mind, and the problem with the two OVAs is that they are one episode for two different stories. As a result, what could have been a redeemable character, who is attracted to Junichi and becomes romantically attached to him, is just left as a problematic figure even if the end credits sequence is her actually apologising to everyone one set to music.
The last is about Junichi's little sister and meat bun obsessive Miya, thankfully the show never turning into an incestuous romance like a My Sister, The Writer (2018), instead from the perspective of a regular character trying to figure out why her older brother has no girlfriend yet, learning that he is yet surprisingly popular among women as she (alongside the girl introduced in the first OVA) secretly follow him on a day. It is in many ways a sweet episode, the sister bonding with her older brother in the end. The problem with the episode is that it does stumble badly into bad taste, namely not having enough time to address her obsession that he has to have a girlfriend, less like a natural concern but one implanted into her thoughts as necessary. There is also a scene where she does wonder if he is gay - if this had been a four episode arch, this scene where the two characters blunder into toe curling defensiveness could have worked (even shot by shot and same dialogue) if he had learnt from it and Miya especially grew up a lot during an arch. If she has to accept her brother is his own person, then what could have started as a first episode to an interesting, non-romantic arch would have been special. More so, in a scene that would grow in a longer arch, that she even rejects interest from a boy her own age smitten with her and thus has a bit of complexity to work on.
Thankfully those OVAs are side material, though any material which builds into a canon narrative sadly does shadow the final result even if you can separate them, especially those bonus episodes shoves the series' own foot in its mouth with questionable aspects, raising the issue this series' premise always had of the "perfect girlfriend" to the "perfect (i.e. bland) heterosexual couples" story regardless of tact. Excluding them, than the show as it transpired is actually quite nice, because really, beyond this, I enjoyed Amagami SS a lot and am fond of it. A guilty pleasure? Partially, entirely because, as mentioned, you cannot help but read ideals into the material that are an issue even if accidental, a greater issue of there are a lot of anime (and visual novels) about dating from a heterosexual male perspective, a lot of which I will eventually also be getting to. There is also the existential concern, which the premise accidentally raises, that you think of all the female characters sympathetically as Junichi is dating someone else in another timeline. That definately is unintentional; who would have thought that a romantic comedy anime would offer the perils of omnipresence?
That in itself was why I found the premise fascinating coming to the series, unconventional in content but one of the unique premises in spite of the show never being unconventional or weird in tone. The juxtaposition adds a distinction the more you think about it, baring one scene with ramen tonally normal.
Usually a premise like this is a Groundhog Day scenario or Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths, the later a famous short story talking about parallel realities and all the various forms of it. Whilst one would usually hope for any show to tackle this existentially, anime with a great record of accomplishment for exploring these ideas, for once I am glad Amagami never went that direction but instead played with it for fun. It was more concerned with being the teller of the romantic stories, and it did so with a wink, as even the OVAs for all my issues ended the show perfectly...the final episode preview being for the first arch, creating an ouroboros.
================
1) At this point in my anime viewing, I am now aware that these live "hero shows", for tokusatsu programs, are more than likely common at Japanese theme parks and events. This is not surprising and actually ridiculous for me to have only considered now as, if you have live spectacle shows at Western theme parks, why wouldn't you have similar ones for tokusatsu programming?
No comments:
Post a Comment