ef: A Tale of Epiphanies

I spent a lot of time lamenting about what the first post on this new blog should be; something that would set a good enough standard for the following posts as well as give a good enough idea about the person writing to the readers.  I couldn’t write about my favorite anime, Madoka, because everyone has said something about it and I when I do get around to saying my thoughts, I want to be well versed enough to do them justice.  I also don’t want to start off with negatives as I am so tired of the cheap and easy trick that is, “rant about whatever you hate in a funny way”.  Only while watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya did it occur to me; why not simply write about the anime that made me a fan of the medium?

So here I am, talking about ef:  A Tale of Memories and how it took me from liking anime only on the surface, to truly appreciating it.

I’ve certainly always liked anime and watched it on Adult Swim or Toonami, but that was about as far as it went until 2010.  I was that guy in highschool that arrogantly claimed I was a huge anime fan, despite only having watched Cowboy Bebop, Death Note and a handful of shounen that everyone has seen.  This was soon to change when I found out that Bleach was something like one hundred episodes ahead of the western broadcast in Japan.  I promptly began it online, which, fortunately for me, also gave me access to hundreds of other anime.  My pride wouldn’t allow me to simply stop after catching up on Bleach.  I, of course, began trying to expand my knowledge on what I only superficially loved at the time.  With zero knowledge of the art, craft, production, history, studios, staff or anything remotely related, I picked based on the thumbnail art.  Whatever I thought looked like it had a good art style.

After bouncing around for a few months I managed to go from watching Dance in the Vampire Bund into ef.  Purely coincidental, because at the time I had no idea about Shaft.  Dance in the Vampire Bund had left a heavy impression on me at the time, being the first piece of avant garde media that I had consumed.  It left me extremely uneasy, with the romance between the young man and the vampire being something I wasn’t sure about on several moral levels and the show in general weighed on my mind for several days.  My mindset was very deep in thought over what the Hell I’d finished a few days prior when I finally reached the focal point of this post:  ef:  A Tale of Memories.  I only bring Dance in the Vampire Bund up because it’s important to note I was already in a thoughtful, more questioning, mindset before starting ef.  Without that mindset, I doubt this show would have had the impact that it did.

Now, to be clear, I haven’t rewatched this show since, so the story is very hazy for me.  The story revolves around two tragic relationships, one where a girl only has the memory span of eight hours and a love… square(?) that explaining would take up too much time.  Everyone has a suitably tragic back story and each character arc was beyond cathartic.  The story is relevant but also irrelevant as far as what impacted me about the show in general.  What was the defining feature was the way in which we were presented the story.

All these things that are now taken for granted as just Shaft-isms but were completely new to me:  beautiful framing with abstract symbolism throughout, shots that were obscured by something between the camera and the subject, foregoing any sense of realism to have a larger impact culminated into this beautiful show.  I remember about midway through the show being so proud of myself for catching how the sheet that was wrapped around Miyako, billowed behind her to form the shape of angel wings.  I wasn’t too bright at the time.  Or, I should say, I’d never given such moments thought before this moment in particular.  I remember how destroyed I was when the screen slowly faded to white as words being said filled the screen and how elated I was when those Hiro sorted out everything between the girls.  All these moments were presented in ways that I had never imagined they could be.  The most vivid thing I remember, though, is the fight between Hiro and Kyosuke.  Kyosuke calls Hiro out for not even using his dominant hand to fight and asked if he was going to continue half-assing everything.  That moment in particular hit me hard because that’s how I felt at that time.  That was the exact moment where the show went from something that was merely heartbreakingly interesting and I felt truly connected to anything.

I can guarantee that everyone has had the same moment, this moment of feeling completely understood by a creator or group of creators and completely understanding them in return.  I’m sure majority of anime fans would point to Evangelion as their first time feeling this way, this indescribable epiphany about ourselves and the world around us.  It’s a beautiful yet terrifying thing but for a time I was completely enraptured in that exchange and started taking steps to better myself, to hold myself to a higher standard than I hold others.  A work ethic I hold is that when I’m working on a personal project, I can’t simply make it “good enough” because the only person I have to blame for its quality is myself.  If I can’t make it good for myself, then I can’t make it good for anyone else.  After that episode I took a reevaluation of so many things, the relationship I was in (which was the first time I began wondering about how toxic that whole ordeal was), how much effort I was putting into class, what I was doing outside of class, how I was treating my friends, etc.

Throughout the days that followed of intense consideration of many aspects of my life I slowly came to the realization that this story could not be told the same way, with the same effect, in any other medium.  I am completely aware that it is an adaptation of a visual novel, my point is that the staff fully utilized the story’s new medium.  I can guarantee that the game did not use the same techniques as the anime to get the core points across.  I can also guarantee that a live action version could not even dream of using the techniques presented in the anime because they were all so specific to the anime medium.  Even if they tried and somehow were able to replicate it shot-for-shot, it would probably be awful.  This epiphany was the catalyst for the following epiphany; I finally understood what anime, and more importantly, art was.

Anime was no longer a genre, nor was it a superficial point of pride that only existed to feed my individualism.  With the understanding that anime was a medium, not a genre, that had its own strengths and weaknesses came the understanding that all mediums are the same in that regard with varying virtues and vices.  Stories that flourish as one medium might not be able to be properly adapted to have an equal affect that the original had, and maybe some stories were first put into the wrong format to begin with which caused its ultimate downfall.  There came the understanding that its possible some stories aren’t the creator’s fault for not being good, because it’s possible that the creator simply chose the wrong medium.

After the seven years since this epiphany, I still point to that moment as when I truly became a fan of anime.  Not only a fan of anime but a fan of art and drove me to begin learning more about the industry that makes said art, albeit slowly and in very small baby steps.  The first step at this time was simply finding out which studio made it, and that studio would later become a staple to my taste in anime.  Bless you, Shaft.  My next step in my journey wasn’t as game changing as you might expect coming on the heels of such a life altering epiphany; but its significance was extreme considering where I had come from.  I picked an anime with similar character design and genre tags.  That would, as luck would have it, be Clannad and my first foray into KyoAni.  However, that would be another story entirely.

Art is a powerful entity; one that can utterly change a person in an instant.  In this case, it was a slow build up over two or three days, but over those two or three days I grew exponentially as a human being.  I changed from being a simple-minded teenager who reveled in his imagined superiority to being thoroughly humbled by this thing he thought he understood and underappreciated.  Prior to this, I’d just been meandering around the starting line; but now I had begun my journey proper.

Thanks for reading!  I’ve got a few more ideas that are in varying degrees of being written, if you’re interested in A Place Further than the Universe or Yuki Yuna is aHero, keep tabs on here.  I’m planning a more objective look at the world building of Yuki Yuna and another more personal story around story telling theory within A Place Further than the Universe.