girl cartoons

Mr. Avisch at The Fool wrote a great article on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back, ending with a note about the ending theme, calling it “haunting” and “morose” and noting how its mood seems to conflict with the tone of the series itself. That had me thinking a bit more about the song than I usually think about ending themes when I noticed that the strange, conflicting sound of the ED really does make perfect sense.

The visuals of the animation itself play an important role: the video consists of various rectangles with door markings, as with a house floor plan. This motif is used to generate a variety of interesting images - a purple and yellow floor-plan expanding and multiplying through a canvas of red-and-grey pairs, a Fibonacci square of rooms, a yojouhan (the titular four-and-a-half-tatami square room) flitting around, to name a few. The mood is chaotic and unpredictable, with the rooms shifting in size, orientation and place unpredictably.

Perhaps the most fascinating, and the one which tipped me off to the intended symbolism, is the very last: an imposing mass of solid-grey rooms slowly converge on one pale green yojouhan. The music builds to a climax, the camera shakes uncontrollably, and finally the mass closes upon the small room. This nervousness, this “haunting” tone, is Watashi’s internal struggle.

Tatami Galaxy is a show about choices - the interplay of the characters’ decisions with their fates, through however many incarnations, and what those choices can and can’t affect - and about the connections formed between people based on or in spite of those choices. The rooms of the ending, in their tentative exploration and in their frantic attempts to move faster, paint a visual of these connections.

When the rooms move fluidly and cleanly out of each other, they depict tentative, paced explorations, such as Watashi’s choice of club. As they begin to simply appear, one in front of another, as the mass desperately attempts to keep up with the speed of the camera, they depict unforeseen snap judgments - Watashi’s struggle between the three girls in episodes 06 through 08, for example. At a few points in the animation, separate masses reach out and connect to each other via long hallways, marking decisions that connect one person-mass to another.

And that final shot, with a homogenous mass of decision-rooms closing in on a lone yojouhan, mirrors perfectly our protagonist’s apprehension and futile attempts to avoid making commitments or following through with his own decisions.

Episode 10 of B Gata H Kei was uncharacteristically fast-paced, given the tone the last few episodes have set. It hearkened back to the frantic pacing of the first episode, in more ways than one.

In particular, the final scene of the episode brought with it the culmination of a subtle secondary idea the show has been building up to in Kanejou. From her first appearance at the school festival, and more formally on her introduction as a main character, Kanejou has unmistakably branded as the closest the show is likely to come to a villain. At every turn she is conniving, hoping to control the school for no reason but the fun of it, and making herself the biggest inconvenience to Yamada in particular possible - fitting for a self-centered sex comedy rival. And an incestuous crush, to boot.

But most of those things describe Yamada - her ostensible goal of sex with 100 men is nothing if not a (misguided) quest for social stature; she is manipulative and coarse in pursuit of her goals; and she hates and inconveniences Kanejou at least as much as vice versa. So why is one such a likable protagonist, and the other such a loathsome rival?

Perspective - Yamada is a narrated character. Her “erogami” follows along with the audience, noting all of her mistakes and insecurities - things which make her human and relatable. Kosuda, as well, grew a dimension and became a tangible character with actual depth around when his own erogami was introduced. B Gata reveals its characters’ humanity in spite of the front they present to the world through these little-explained, semi-diegetic fourth-wall-sitters. And in episode 10, both Kanejou and Miyano’s erogami are introduced.

Miyano’s erogami appears during an emotionally-tense dialogue with Kosuda in which she’s barely able to contain herself while advising the boy she loves about his love of another girl. It provides some light comedic relief as a transition into the following scene, but also serves to signal to the viewer that she is a real character - her emotions here are as real as any in the show, and she is not simply a clumsy set piece in Yamada and Kosuda’s romance.

Kanejou’s erogami is more devious in its appearance - after Kanejou “kidnaps” Kosuda and begins her efforts to seduce him, she finds herself at a loss for what to do. Her erogami appears, and she instantly becomes a nervous wreck reminiscent of the Yamada of the first few episodes - not thinking straight, she begins stripping in front of Kosuda, at the same time exhibiting more of a will to attack than to seduce in her body language. For a moment she is the spitting image of Yamada, shoving Kosuda in a storage closet and pulling her shirt open defiantly.

Suddenly our awareness of her unsavory sexual motives take an immediate backseat to her mental breakdown, and her despicable antics give way to a light, comedic tone. Most important, within the span of a few seconds, she becomes human. When we see behind the veneer of her outer persona - in a more honest sense than our discovery of her brother complex - she is irrevocably humanized. She is, at worst, only as bad as the girl we have been rooting for since the very first episode.

2DT mentioned at the end of a great post on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back that he noticed some similarities between Tatami’s Akashi and Bakemonogatari’s Senjougahara. This made a few things click for me, as I hadn’t yet been able to get a grasp on what fascinated me so about Akashi.

The clearest and most obvious comparison is, as 2DT noted, their “inauthenticity”, their difficulty in expressing their feelings in a natural way. To coin an abominable neologism from one which has already lost almost all meaning, they seem to exhibit something of a “post-tsundere” archetype - they aren’t so much reluctant to admit their love to themselves as they are reluctant to be reluctant. Senjougahara expresses her feelings for Araragi in explicit, self-aware language, but with a tone so dry that it’s hard to believe she’s sincere. She hides her feelings in plain sight, pushing them out in front of her rather than attempting to bottle them up. Her affection is “tell, don’t show” carried to an absurd degree.

Akashi displays a similar inauthenticity - she never fawns over Watashi, but she follows him everywhere - even from episode to episode.

Episode 04 included some tacit confirmations that the series is linear in a more concrete sense than previously indicated - the ever-present fortune telling gag almost reached out and knocked on the fourth wall, and Watashi is displaying deja vu-esque recollections of the events of previous episodes. Episode 06 made it about as explicit as it could be. The show is most definitely progressing in a loosely-linear manner - from Watashi’s point of view.

But the rest of the characters still exist independently, which is where Akashi’s inauthenticity reveals itself. Assuming that, on each reset, Watashi consciously changes his choice of club, then the only way Akashi could “simply happen” to appear in each club - the film club, the cycling club and the disciplehood of an eccentric eighth-year student - is if her choice of club was made after, and in response to, Watashi’s own.

Episode 06 muddles this, with Akashi present only through implication at the very end of the episode, and various other consistency-violating ideas introduced to the episode’s romance: not only is the only love interest up to this point disregarded, she’s replaced with a love triangle (…plus one, perhaps) with two completely-new characters. But she does appear, and with strong implication that of the three choices Watashi has been debating throughout the episode, she, the fourth choice, is still the correct one.

I had been loathe to commit to the idea so far, as appealing as it was to my own tastes, but it’s fairly clear by now that Watashi getting together with Akashi is almost certainly the show’s destination.

My unwarranted optimism for K-ON!! seems to, as of episode 3, be paying off. The hinting at more serious development of the maturity angle wasn’t just a fluke, and they’re actually managing it well this time.

Episode 2 was reasonably explicit in its reference to Azusa’s growing estrangement from the others, shown in the straightfaced moment where Azusa noticed the freshmen getting used to their new clubs and in gags such as the “new member” at the end - KyoAni are doing an admirable job of weaving a tempered discussion of the effects of growing up into the apparently-vapid “moeblob” show its viewers and critics expect.

Episode 3 expanded upon this in a new direction I certainly didn’t expect, though - the other members seem to feel anxious as well. On one level Ritsu’s crisis with drumming is a(n effective) vehicle for 22 minutes of fresh gags, but it indicates so many other things. It shows character consistency, something which I argued in my last K-ON! post had been in decline in the OVA and the new season’s first episode. This might not be particularly of note in works of fiction in general, but for a show which regularly receives the sort of flak that K-ON! does, I think it bears notice. Anxiety about not “shining” and the absurd ways she decides to try and remedy the problem exhibit minute details of Ritsu’s personality established over the course of the whole series so far.

The questions of maturity the show has been raising with Azusa will most likely be directed at the other girls as well - after all, Azusa won’t be the only one affected by the girls’ graduation, and the others all have their own personalities and hang-ups that this impending split seem to be stressing. Ritsu has her own image problems to address, which I definitely think run deeper than episode 3’s half-hour reconciliation addressed.

This theme of maturity hearkens back to the first season’s twelfth episode, in which Yui reflected on how she had grown over the past two years, and at least become more determined if not much more competent. I’d predict more from season two developing her and Ritsu’s characters, and Mio’s monologue in episode 3 ideally implies that her character might be dropping the moeblob ball for a moment or two in the near future. KyoAni definitely seem prepared to really speak to the themes they’ve set up.

Hidamari Sketch is over.

Yes, the most recent season is over, but in a more broad sense I’d posit that we won’t be seeing a fourth season in the style of Hoshimittsu. Shaft seem to have said about all they can with this.

Episode 12 of Hoshimittsu essentially wrapped up everything I proposed in my previous HS post. Nazuna and Nori have become part of the Hidamari Apartments in-group: they are treated by outsiders (Yoshinoya and the landlady, most obviously) as a contiguous part of a new group of six, and the cinematography reflects this. Most telling is the number of shots of the six of them intermixed during this episode, with very little to divide them from the other four outside of the pairing with each other that we see equally with Yuno/Miyako and Hiro/Sae.

If, as I proposed before, season 3 was a response to seasons 1 and 2, that statement has been made. Continuing the series any further in the style of Hoshimittsu would serve no real purpose. Granted, the show could always be expanded in some other way, but I think most of the questions left to ask that Sketch is in any position to broach would be better-addressed by other franchises - for example, Sketch has already commented in passing on the issue of seniors graduating and leaving their juniors behind, and K-ON!! has already primed itself to engage that dilemma at length, so a fourth season focused on Hiro and Sae’s departure would be uncharacteristically redundant.

The series as it stands simply works so perfectly as a beginning-to-end statement that I have trouble imagining any way that tacking more manga-adapted gags on to the end could improve the franchise as a whole.