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.

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.

The Tatami Galaxy (Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei), in its three aired episodes, has drawn comparisons for both its unique visual style and frantic delivery to the work of acclaimed studio Shaft under director Akiyuki Shinbou. However, there is little to this comparison beyond the fact that Tatami and Akiyuki Shinbou’s work can be ambiguously categorized as visually “abstract” - Shinbou’s style is - particularly recently - much sharper and more aggressive, even in shows such as Hidamari Sketch, and the surreal elements are primarily non-diegetic. Conversely, Tatami’s visual style gives off a more unfocused feeling, drifting between more-directly-surreal scenes which the characters react to directly.

Tatami’s premise, across its first three and likely fourth episodes, is that each relates the story of main character Watashi’s (“I”, “anonymous”) first two years in college - in entirety. The variance between episodes is mostly in the details, such as which club he joined and met Ozu in, and consequently where he is or what he is doing when the same basic series of events happens. There has been some difference between the episodes in which events happened, but the overlap between them is heavy - while the cake and Watashi’s promise to Akashi didn’t occur in episode 03, other elements such as the keychain were played down in episode 2. It’s too early to tell whether his success in these lesser events will improve as the show progresses.

It’s also too early to tell exactly how the show’s chronology is presented - while each episode retreads an identical timeline, there probably aren’t eleven Watashis walking around at any given moment. The rewinding clock at the end of each episode implies that each retelling isn’t, for example, an alternate universe, but there are still many other ways the timeline could be reset. The ever-present voice-over seems to imply that the story is at some level a personal recollection - but is he simply rewriting his recollection each time with new memories? Is there some sort of supernatural force at work which actually reverses time and allows him a chance to revise?

Whatever method the reversal works by, the show is fairly liberal with its indications of the idea’s importance - every episode includes multiple instances of Watashi complaining that if he had only joined a different circle his college experience would have been so much better, and that it was all Ozu’s fault that he wasted so much of his life.

But Ozu shows up in every club Watashi decides to join - it’s become obvious that, within the story, Ozu is in every instance planning to get to Watashi in order to make his life a hell. Why? The most obvious assumption so far is that Ozu represents something about us, which follows and finds us everywhere, no matter where we hide from it. It’s been established in the show that the characters’ faces are interchangeable - each “character” design indicates a few personality traits but the details of each character’s life are rewritten each episode. So it’s unlikely that Ozu represents one static human who hunts down Watashi regardless of where he runs to.

In fact, this applies to Watashi as well - his hobbies and tastes change with each episode; perhaps there are eleven Watashis running around. Perhaps there are, say, 6.69 billion Watashis. 6.69 billion unremarkable faces running around every day, making stupid mistakes, missing out on incredible opportunities, being crushed under the wheel of fate and their own incompetence. Maybe Watashi is us.

The continuity jokes, such as the old woman’s price hikes, appear to indicate that this doesn’t hold up as a literal reading of the premise. But Tatami is so surreal that I doubt in eleven episodes there will be any one satisfactory literal reading. The message of natural predestination is much more applicable to human life in a framing that makes it realistic - not, as in Suzumiya Haruhi’s Endless Eight arc, that given identical environmental input a person will produce the same emotional output 15,532 times in a row, but that given the similar input of “the modern world” six billion people will produce comparable outputs in each of their lives. The message speaks not to individual human nature but to the aggregate human experience.

Of course, with only one-fourth of the show unfolded by now this is mostly speculation, but that’s what I have so far.