White Album

You’ve probably caught on that Japanese drama is very slow, very dense, and very gradual, like the pacing of a Harold Pinter play. White Album turns its pages very delicately, inter-lacing love and politics, commitment and heartbreak, dreams of success and responsibility. This is a subtle, realistic story about holding onto what you love in a world that gives you no control.
Touya Fujii is the kind of main character who can put you to sleep (mainly because it is debatable if he ever is awake in the scenes.) He works at a café, tutors fellow students, and sleeps a lot. However, his isn’t the interesting story; his girlfriend, Yuki Morikawa is on her way to becoming a rising pop star (like Brittany.) Her career begins to put serious strain on their relationship until Touya gets a lucky break: becoming a personal assistant for the current pop sensation, Rina Ogata. Red haired and fiesty, Rina is a diva with a heart of gold and a big sister role-model to Yuki. From here, a quiet love triangle begins to take shape, vanishing and reappearing almost to its own accord, like Brittany Spears’ talent.
Rina’s manager/older brother is fixated on Yuki being the next big thing and begins sacrificing his sister’s career. It feels that Touya has literally no say in anything that happens. A lot of time is spent on the bare and empty rooms and buildings in the scenes; people are very often alone to an excruciating degree. Many scenes revolve around missing phone calls; the pop stars are stuck in the studios and only touch the outside world through their box phone (like Brittany).
Touya has many women other than Yuki who become his “goddess of the day,” a term of endearment who those who help him out, though he spends all his time helping women to various degrees. While this may seem like the set-up to a harem or dating-game anime, the female characters are too complex for such a restrictive label. Younger sister, girlfriend, mentor, all the other characters have an essential element that Touya (like Brittany) lacks: drive and passion. Well…as much drive and passion as can be allowed in such a molasses-paced series.
A narrative technique that gives this series its charm is Touya’s internal monologue, displayed as poetic subtitles across the screen; thankfully these terse verses give us insight into the complicated drama beneath the surface (like Brittany’s psychiatrist.)
Another aesthetic that externalizes Touya’s feelings are the depictions of the various women as goddesses, a pastel shading of the girl that is misleadingly soft and warm. Flowing and trapped behind a soft-focus lense, these moments add a personal quality to a very stand-offish drama.
It’s hard to pitch this series to non-anime fans (unlike Brittany,) and nearly impossible for younger people because of its maturity in tackling issues like political manipulation, fame and sex. This is a dispassionate series and whenever emotion is shown, you realize how it long it has been building up. It’s like Chekov as an anime.
White Album digresses and develops its side stories musically, flowing between Yuki’s career and her struggle to hold her relationship with Touya. Commitment is hard to keep during a career, the isolation seems maddening (like in Perfect Blue.) Soft, light, romantic, but the subtext drives you crazy. Yayoi is Yuki’s driver/assistant and takes Touya to a dam to tell him, in so many words, not to date Yuki anymore so she can focus on her career. She then offers herself to Touya dispassionately to distract him. The narrative is never clear if he does or doesn’t take the bait.
A unique story, which is a good and bad thing. I recommend White Album to older fans who want a series to share with their significant other. Sadly, the complete 26 episodes have yet to air, so we can only wait for this story to conclude happily, or at least co-hosting the VMA’s…like Christina Aguilara. Anigamers gives this series a solid 3 out of 4, beautiful art, great story and script, but pacing of a hundred-meter dash for Brittany after a night at Boston Market.

School Days

“At first, I was satisfied with looking…sitting next to her…just having lunch with her made me nervous. I wonder when it started…when I wanted to touch her, when I wanted to hold her…I ended up not being able to control myself with just that. I wanted more…more…and it turned into my selfishness.” – Makoto Itou, episode 12.

Half of me wants to recommend School Days because of the frightening bait-and-switch and treatment of high school sexual promiscuity. The other half wants to know how a series this twisted was ever pitched to a producer. Perchance it went something like this:
“Thank you for meeting with me, Mister Producer.”
“So let’s hear your idea, TNK studios.”
“Well, we wanna do a high school romance. We wanna start casual and light-hearted… then rape half the cast.”
“…go on…”
Makoto Itou has a secret crush on the beautiful, shy girl that rides the train with him every morning to school. She is Katsura Kotonoha: quiet, clean, and beautiful. One of Makoto’s classmates, the free-spirited Sekai, collaborates with him to help him get his mojo working. School Days begins with the light-heartedness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, develops slower than Julius Caesar, and switches gears to spiral into an ending that would make Othello squirm.
Beautiful animation is paired with unusually overt dialog. The director is very careful to emphasize the character’s cell phone texting as their sole means of honest self-expression, since everyone is lying to someone else in this series just to keep Makoto and Sekai happy together. There is almost no music, but the sound of trains and ringing cell phones sets the lackluster pace of the series.
In order to make Makoto more comfortable around Katsura, Sekai puts him through special training…and that’s when things turn ecchi. Sekai literally throws herself at Makoto, saying that it’s “just practice” and not to be taken seriously. But of course she secretly loves him and longs to make Makoto hers. Now comes Makoto’s inner struggle: does he go for the girl who gets dirty with him, or for the girl he wants to get dirty with?
This is where things get complicated, and for the first half of the series, there is memorable (though sluggish) sexual tension and believability in Makoto’s infidelity toward both Sekai and Katsura. Whom does he like? Answer: both. Unfortunately, despite its poignancy on love and sex, School Days will never see the light of American television; you can thank the gratuitous sex, nudity and rape. That’s right, the “r” word – couldn’t have a show about betrayal and relationships with the “r” word.
By the story’s end, Makoto has the best year ever, having more affairs than Zeus, and less regret than a guest on Jerry Springer. I do not particularly recommend this series to experienced fans (let alone newbies); it’s just a bit too torpid. This anime is a carefully composed cautionary tale about the fruits of lust, and, though a bit exaggerated, a clear statement on the confusing physical dependence of adolescent sexual awakening.