No anime is dropped forever: Air

There’s no point in doing these ‘no anime is dropped forever’ posts if I don’t actu­ally watch any of the anime fea­tured. I’m wait­ing until I get out of uni­ver­sity so I can tor­rent Macross Fron­tier so I can’t watch that yet. Instead, I decided to take a look back at the earlier posts, before I star­ted imple­ment­ing polls, and pick up some­thing from there. So I picked up Air (which also came up in JP’s ‘what I was forced to watch this week’ post this week, whose post format slightly inspired me to start these posts).

Picked up on: Epis­ode 7

Why I picked it up again: The main reason behind pick­ing up Air again was because pick­ing up Clan­nad After Story again turned out to be a good decision. Why not try recre­ate that feel­ing again by pick­ing up yet another Key/Kyo Ani series? Not only that, but I’ve been migh­tily impressed enter­tained by Angel Beats. Jun Maeda seemed to be on a bit of a roll with me recently. The other reason was because I only had a few epis­odes left to watch any­way. Nobody was exactly fall­ing over to recom­mend it to me when it showed up in the first of these styled posts, although maybe that was because they were too busy talk­ing about this new post format of mine…

Review: …or maybe it was because they knew I wouldn’t like it.

The prob­lem with cri­tiquing Air is that the many reas­ons I have for not lik­ing it are also reas­ons why oth­ers do like it. A small example of this would be the extent this show went to show how imma­ture Mis­uzu was. It went to quite ridicu­lous extremes. The sum­mer diary, the teddy dino­saurs, the ‘will you play with me’, right up to the point when she cut her hair, she could have just as eas­ily been 6 years old and I wouldn’t have bat­ted an eye­lid. But that’s not really cri­ti­cism, is it. It’s just some­thing I didn’t like. It’s like cri­ti­ciz­ing Hanamaru Kinder­garden because no real child has the depth of  know­ledge Hiiragi has. It’s like “so? that’s what makes her awesome!”.

The entire second half of the show was basic­ally one huge sob drama story. Everything was tossed in to make this story even more sob-inducing than before. I’ll keep away from spoil­ing any­thing but mak­ing the lead female char­ac­ter sicker with every passing epis­ode and mak­ing the mother feel even more attached to her with each epis­ode felt way too manip­u­lat­ive. Not that there’s exactly any­thing wrong with being manip­u­lat­ive. Often it’s the sign of a good story teller. But never once did I give a fuck what happened to any­one in that show. Some people get sucked in incred­ibly eas­ily into sob stor­ies and for them, Air con­stantly throws them moments to feast upon. I sup­pose you could say that Air needed more epis­odes to make me care about these char­ac­ters but I don’t buy that. Double the epis­ode count and all I can see hap­pen­ing is doub­ling the amount heart­break­ing situ­ations involving Misuzu.

I don’t care. I just don’t care and fail to ever care about these manip­u­lat­ive sob stor­ies. I liked Clan­nad for the double blow of excel­lent storytelling and the char­ac­ter of Tomoya, but rarely cared that much about the sob stor­ies bey­ond how they fit­ted into the story. Air never felt like it was com­pos­ing a coher­ent, well struc­tured story. It was just fling­ing these bloody baawwww situ­ations at the screen over and over and never once did I care. In fact, I can only think of one time I did care. That was when that winged girl was try­ing to juggle for her mother. As someone who’s quite good at jug­gling myself, I know the pain of hav­ing to con­stantly pick up those blas­ted things, although I get the feel­ing that wasn’t what I was meant to be sad about.

I sup­pose it didn’t help that there was a year break between watch­ing the first half of the series to the second, fol­lowed by a mini-break of watch­ing Ber­serk where I was incap­able of think­ing about any­thing else after­wards. The first half of the series wasn’t exactly that bad either. At least it cre­ated the atmo­sphere of sum­mer well and I quite liked the lead male char­ac­ter. If the second half of the story had con­tin­ued the for­mula of ‘guy spend­ing two epis­odes chat­ting, two epis­odes solv­ing magical prob­lems for these girls’ I might have made some unenthu­si­astic review where I said it was a rather aver­age anime. But the second half wasn’t that at all (they turned my favour­ite char­ac­ter into a fuck­ing crow!). The baawww heap­ing is what made me severely dis­like the series, which is also why oth­ers love the series. Hence it’s not really cri­ti­cism of what it did wrong. Just what I didn’t like about it.

Was it worth pick­ing up again: No, my opin­ion of it plummeted upon com­plet­ing it. Jun Maeda is bet­ter when get­ting chance and maybe some luck as well.