Arakawa Under the Bridge episode 12

Don’t hide inside that cloud. Come down and strike me. I’m per­fectly happy if you’re loud about it. I want a bolt of light­ning to open my eyes, to pierce my heart. I’m the one who’s afraid. On this plain without a single tree, I have nowhere to hide.

Best open­ing sequence of Arakawa since epis­ode 6. I’d love it even more if I knew exactly what it meant. It does strike me hugely as thought Nino is say­ing that her Venus shtick is all a bar­rier she’s put up, which we knew already, but more import­antly that she’s des­per­ately look­ing for someone to tear it down for her. She wants someone to ques­tion her Venus­ian roots, which is a hell of a lot dif­fer­ent to what we’ve been given so far in the series. Maybe I’ve got it wrong though. Or maybe I’m just read­ing too much into it. I tend to do that a lot with this series.

Epis­ode 95: When you wish upon a star

Was there a time in the series that Recruit expressed his fear of ghosts? To me that just looks like he’s looked up the ghosts nightie to whatever unima­gin­able hor­rors lie between that ghosts legs. Nah, I bet Nino just added in the two things she’s afraid of along with Recruit’s two of Dad and pep­pers. Wait no, that doesn’t make sense. Nino is a fisher-women so she quite obvi­ously isn’t afraid of bugs. I guess she just tossed in two things people are afraid of in general.

(As for the other’s under the bridge, Sister’s big fear is nukes, the Mayor is afraid of dehidra­tion and the Iron Head broth­ers are afraid of lab coats.)

When Maria sug­ges­ted this option, my mind first went to a shoot out between Hoshi and Recruit, cow­boy style. Hoshi would look pretty darn cool in a cow­boy hat and boots. How­ever I would bet a con­sid­er­able amount of money that Recruit has had arms train­ing in his life at one point. Hoshi would try to be cool and hold the guns gan­sta style. Or pos­sibly Death the Kid style. Meh, the debate is irrel­ev­ant any­way because Sis­ter would gun them both down as they drew there weapons anyway.

Stella’s excited squeek as Hoshi and Recruit were kicked off the bridge was the high­light of the epis­ode. As in the high­light of epis­ode 95, not the full 24 minutes. Sorry, but the full 24 minutes were packed full of so many high­lights I don’t think I can pick out one.

(One part of the epis­ode that baffled me for a while was Recruit’s declar­a­tion that he had already jumped off the bridge twice. There was the time after Nino kissed him when he was con­vinced he was a blue­bird, but it took me forever to remem­ber the other time. Of course, it was epis­ode 1 when he was after his trousers! Funny how they gae us a reminder of that first scene before what happened later on in the epis­ode. It’s almost as though they had planned this all out before­hand! Yes, Arakawa has been per­fectly planned from the start. I’ll get more onto that point later on.)

Epis­ode 96: Phenomenon

There was a neat piece of anim­a­tion here. As Daddy’s plans seem to be fall­ing apart, the build­ing he’s in seems to gradu­ally fall down com­pared to those build­ings out­side the win­dow. Not sure if that was inten­tional though. You never really know with Shinbo whether half the stuff he does is inten­tional or just him being a nut­ter, but it worked this time. If I’m going to call him out on his oddit­ies, I might as well be fair and praise him when he gets some­thing right. Besides, after mara­thon­ing my way through Tatami Galaxy, I think I’ve finally found a dir­ector who has sur­passed Shinbo in the area of need­less anim­a­tion quirks.

The mys­ter­i­ous fun­der. Now I’m the type of guy who prob­ably wouldn’t recog­nise my own voice if it was played to me, let alone someone else’s. Hence when the mys­ter­i­ous fun­der said his bit, at first I thought it soun­ded like Hoshi. If the guy really did top the Oricon charts then he must have a bit of money, right? How­ever the MAL for­ums said it was the Mayor, which I sup­pose fits the tra­di­tional Japan­ese cloth­ing bet­ter. Plus, he’s Mayor for a reason right. There’s a lot more to him than meets the eye. After all Recruit said, it was the Mayor who ended up sav­ing them. The one guy Recruit could never fig­ure out is the one guy who saves them all without them know­ing. It just fits the story bet­ter, doesn’t it.

Maria kick­ing Hoshi and Recruit off the bridge over and over was the high­light of the epis­ode. As in the high­light of epis­ode 96, not the full 24 minutes. Sorry, but the full 24 minutes were packed full of so many high­lights I don’t think I can pick out one.

(When they were rolling through each of the char­ac­ters wishes, my mind instantly went to that fam­ous Gun­dam 00 scene where each char­ac­ter repeats one after the other what they love most in the world, fin­ish­ing on Set­suna say­ing ‘Gun­dam’. If Arakawa had done a par­ody of that scene with Sis­ter repeat­ing ‘Gun­dam’ then I might as well have stopped watch­ing anime alto­gether. Noth­ing would ever top that.)

Epis­ode 97: The man who never relies on anyone’s father

Bril­liant. This is bril­liant. Ser­i­ously, there was no bet­ter way to have Dad visit the bridge than for him to repeat the events from epis­ode 1. He could have arrived with an army of bunny girls to try coax Recruit back and it wouldn’t have beaten this.

(BTW do those kids spend there time hanging around on the bridge, only to occa­sion­ally tear the trousers off ran­dom passerby’s? No won­der Nino has developed that skill with the fish­ing rod to retrieve the trousers from up there so effi­ciently. Prac­tice makes perfect.)

I love this face-0ff. Only one of the char­ac­ters real­ise how sig­ni­fic­ant a meet­ing this is. The other is just her usual spacer self. Daddy is pretty intim­id­at­ing and I dare say Recruit was too when he was in the real world. In a way, that’s what makes this scene work so well. They were both try­ing to keep there intim­id­a­tion up in their ridicu­lous state, dar­ing Nino to chal­lenge them, but Nino couldn’t care less what state they were in which leaves the two Ichinomiya’s in an uncom­fort­able pos­i­tion that they aren’t used to deal­ing with.

That’s what she said.

Nino is under­stand­ing of the ran­domers strange sexual pref­er­ences. I’m so using that last screen­cap at another date though, pos­sibly in one of my Hetalia posts as a reply to one of the commenters.

(Nino~<3 You are fant­astic. I go on about Sis­ter a lot in these posts but it’s Nino who really makes the show tick. She’s the poster girl, the one who makes things hap­pen. Recruit may be the main char­ac­ter, but it’s Nino that makes the story. She’s the one who’s chan­ging him. She’s the one who has drove Recruit to devote him time to stay­ing under the bridge. She’s such a unique character…well, there is no char­ac­ter in this show who isn’t really unique. If there’s one thing you can’t level against Arakawa, it’s unoriginality)

Daddy real­ises it too, although he doesn’t truly under­stand until he meets her. He knows that it’s not any of the other nut­ters under the bridge that changed Recruit. While his rela­tion­ships with them have changed over time, it’s Nino that brought all that about. Seems to me like Daddy is run­ning away from the prob­lem as much as Recruit was run­ning away from him. It’s all brought about in a circle. Like this scene, like this whole series. It’s just so well worked and this epis­ode in par­tic­u­lar brought that all to light.

But Nino has changed as well. It’s obvi­ously a lot more subtle than Recruit’s change, but now she has some­thing she cares about. With this scene in epis­ode 1, she was pretty indif­fer­ent to everything that was going on around her. Now she’s become more groun­ded (in rel­at­ive terms obvi­ously. Com­pared to the rest of the world she’s as groun­ded as a dan­delion seed). She’s changed Recruit and Recruit changed her. Corny stuff, but done subtly enough to never actu­ally feel corny.

Epis­ode 98: A father’s feelings

Next time you watch some weird fet­ish dom­in­atrix porn, think about this: What about the poor Mr.Whip. Is that what he really wants to do with his life? Back in the good old days, whips were respec­ted. They were used in pris­ons and feared by the inmates. They were a sym­bol of power. It may have been a lonely life but at least it had mean­ing. Now all they are used for is shady porn movies. The whips want to regain their respect. To stop selling their bod­ies and return to the good old days. Led by the great rope sym­path­iser Maria, there will be a revolu­tion. Ropes and Whips Banzai!!!

Wind­mill Hair Nino makes a return! That must be why Recruit’s plans to build a power plant under the bridge were instantly dis­missed. Nino’s hair could power a town with a pop­u­la­tion of 500 people, provid­ing the pop­u­la­tion turn off their com­puters at night. Ser­i­ously people, turn off your com­puters at night time. Is it such a pain to have to wait for it to boot up in the morning?

Recruit’s mum? I did ask way earlier on in the series why there was no men­tion of his mum. I thought it was just the typ­ical anime char­ac­ter syn­drome of char­ac­ters par­ents always liv­ing away from home, but clearly Arakawa is too smart for that. But this is great isn’t it? The dad say­ing that his son isn’t cap­able of liv­ing up to him the whole way through the series. The son con­stantly liv­ing in the shadow of his father’s great suc­cess, try­ing to mimic what he does but not being able to dir­ectly con­front him. And yet, at the end of the series, without the son even real­ising it, he had sur­passed his dad in the one place the dad was not able to succeed.

Epis­ode 99: Conclusion

Nino run­ning around, unable to answer the phone was the high­light of the epis­ode. As in the high­light of epis­ode 99, not the full 24 minutes. Sorry, but the full 24 minutes were packed full of so many high­lights I don’t think I can pick out one.

(Also, defin­it­ive proof that Nino isn’t Japan­ese. What Japan­ese per­son doesn’t know how to use a phone?)

He’s got approval from his dad without real­ising it. He’s told Nino that he’s going to stay with Nino forever without real­ising it, although he does real­ise it a few seconds later. For me, that’s the per­fect end to this series. Recruit has manned up. Dad approves but is too caught up in his old ways so has to leave Recruit to find his own way from now on. And Nino and Recruit have done the closest this series would ever get to a mar­riage pro­posal. In fact, can you ima­gine how awe­some a scene this would have been if he was telling his dad he planned to pro­pose to Nino and for Nino to reply yes while she was stand­ing behind him?

That epis­ode was titled ‘con­clu­sion’ and is effect­ively the end of the series. The plot points were cleared up and I bet the last epis­ode will just be a gag epis­ode (I’ll still blog it though). So to wrap things up, while I was excited about the pro­spect of watch­ing this series, no way in hell did I think it would end up quite as fant­astic as it did. This epis­ode really wrapped up things bril­liantly and showed how per­fectly con­struc­ted a series it was. Genu­inely and fre­quently funny. One of the most mem­or­able cast of nut­ters ever. I loved this series far more than I ever thought I would. Shaft, you deserve your break next sea­son. You’ve won me over with Nino and co.