Reaching you is reaching me

The com­ments on the pre­vi­ous post very much poin­ted out that I need to put more energy into my reg­u­lar, anime related posts. I agree with that. I haven’t talked about my abso­lute favour­ite of the sea­son Kimi ni Todoke yet, except in the short blurb post, which was short and a blurb so it doesn’t count. Kimi ni Todoke namely, in my opin­ion, deserves more. In short, let me use this oppor­tun­ity to try to write bet­ter. Because the anime deserves it truly. It is — and here I can’t do any­thing but use the same expres­sion as many other blog­gers I read before — a very deep and emo­tion­ally power­ful anime.

From the first epis­ode on, from its first seconds it held me in its iron hands. In real life I am a very cold per­son and it needs some­thing to put me out of sorts. But Kimi ni Todoke, with a car­rot and a stick, man­aged to make my eyes drop tears, and I smiled and d’awwed more than ever before. For that I am grate­ful, because to show true emo­tions from time to time feels really good.

Why a ‘car­rot and a stick’? I would use this idiom to describe the amp­litude of how happy the anime makes us feel when Sawako her­self becomes happy (when she smiles, or when she asks so idea­lessly ‘F-friends?’), and how sad it makes us when troubles appear. Whilst both high and low points make one’s eyes moist and one’s lips bit­ten. But why? I do not relate myself with Sawako too much, not in the usual ‘relate with the prot­ag­on­ist’ way. People are not scared of me, and there aren’t any rumours about me (in grim under­stand­ing I must add ‘not that I would know’) , and I con­sider myself a nice-looking young lad, so the only thing would be how isol­ated Sawako is. I’m not that isol­ated of course, not any­more, but I can remem­ber the first time when I moved to Ger­many and didn’t know a word in Ger­man. Mean­while I have won quite a few friends, be it through help­ing them in school or hav­ing same interests. So, as said, I don’t relate with Sawako — but she still has all my atten­tion and all my sup­port. I think that’s because of a sort of a moé, and I thank gods that this is an anime, because in con­tra­versy to live-action or real life the as scary described Sawako can look cute here. Her cute­ness is not everything that makes her moé to me though. It’s more like the ‘girl is in dis­tress’ factor, a think­ing rail that was planted in my head by my par­ents when I was a small child — the gen­tle­man rules? Her inno­cency and naive­ness add onto that, at the same time mak­ing out the com­edy aspect of the anime.

Look at the above image. Such chibi moments are not a rar­ity in anime, but it does what it should flaw­lessly. I can’t sup­press a smile when I see Sawako ser­i­ously think­ing about things other people don’t give a damn about.

But I think I focus too much on one single char­ac­ter. Kimi ni Todoke wouldn’t be not even half as good, I think it would be no good at all without the other mag­ni­fi­cent char­ac­ters. Kazehaya. Ayane. Chizuru. Kazehaya not only makes fangirls fangirl in their fullest when he shows him­self chibi­fied, he is also very much a per­fect boy­friend. Nu, of course I can’t really judge that from my point of view, but at least he is what I would like to be for a girl — always a sup­port, always a per­son to com­fort in dif­fi­cult times, and a hand­some one at that.

I don’t have female friends at the moment. Though I remem­ber hav­ing a crowd of girls around me when I was a cute shota back in Moscow, not a single pair of them was like Ayane and Chizuru. In that mean­ing, they are unique to me, in terms of how they act and how they act. And besides unique, I find them incred­ibly kind. It evolves from a nil of two bully girls to the levels power­fulier than your aver­age Miyazaki char­ac­ter. They were friendly to Sawako before every­body except Kazehaya. They believed in her even when everything was against her, even in the such pop­u­lar ‘trait’ situ­ation. Their kind­ness radi­ates out of them as an aura that tres­passes even the mon­itor, so you can feel its warmth on your skin. I truly enjoy all of their screen time.

The kind­ness is what makes Kimi ni Todoke spe­cial to me asides of the more or less real­istic beha­viour (which is an ori­gin­al­ity). I mean, there are plenty of series I watched which had some of it included (pretty all of them I would add), but there were very few which would make the word pop out in my head like that (Kam­is­ama Kazoku for example).

And with all that, Kimi ni Todoke is still not a sugar blob I would be afraid get­ting men­tal dia­betes from. The series didn’t fin­ish yet, but if the qual­ity will hold until the end I know it will be an anime I will recom­mend to people in the future. When most anime leave an after­taste only after the last epis­ode, I even now have this aura of Kimi ni Todoke on me although it’s already two days since I last watched it. I whole­heartedly hope you enjoy it as I do. Any­body else thinks it could become the anime of the year?

Fur­ther reading

• The above men­tioned short blurb on how I like this Fall 2009 season
• Ghost­light­ning on Kimi ni Todoke
• Oh, so this is the real reason to watch the show
• And girls go kyaa over chibi Kazehaya