May Media Favourites/Recommendations

Hi guys!

I have two things to talk about this month:


Run with the Wind

It's been a busy year so far and this was actually the first anime I got the chance to watch. Run With the Wind is a novel adaptation that came out back in 2018. The show opens with our lead Kakeru Kurahara running away from a convenience store after stealing some bread. Another boy approaches him on a bike and asks him whether he likes running. They find out that they attend the same university, and the boy offers to put Kakeru, who is out of money, up at the dorm he lives in with eight other students. It's during Kakeru's welcome party that Kiyose Haiji decides to reveal that the dorm actually belongs to their university's until-now defunct Track Club. He informs his nine companions that they won't only be reviving the club, but aiming for no less than success at the Hakone Ekiden, Japan's most prestigious university cross country running competition.

I've been hearing praise for RwtW pretty much since it came out. It struck me as more of a slice of life drama than your typical sports anime and immediately appealed to me. Sure enough, it was an absolute joy to watch. I'm not a sports anime expert -- though I tend to enjoy them -- but it did feel refreshingly mature and understated in its approach to the genre. The sport is centred, but because the Hakone Ekiden is a relay and each member has to qualify individually, so too does the show often focus on the individual over the team, only pulling out to look at the whole once everyone has gone through their respective development. While a noticeable bulk of that development definitely went to Kakeru and primarily Haiji (who was my favourite character), the show still just *works*. I enjoyed every episode, felt all the emotional highs and lows and actually missed it when it was done -- I wanted to return to the world and the characters, which felt like a warm hug. It's always great to see an anime set at university for a change and it was lovely to see what running came to mean to each of the characters in the context of the lives they were living and the struggles they were having as young adults. This introspection was conveyed beautifully through subtly poetic monologues that you could tell came out of a novel. A huge, huge, huge highlight of the show was the absolutely stunning score by Yuki Hayashi, also responsible for the scores for Haikyuu!! and My Hero Academia amongst others. It became an instant favourite and elevates the show so much. I hear that the novel was also originally supposed to be a gay romance before the author was asked to change this if she wanted it published and you can definitely see that in the relationship between Kakeru and Haiji, which has some beautiful moments. After all that gushing, it should come as no surprise that Run with the Wind earns a recommendation from me.

Millennium Actress

A highlight of the month was getting to see Millennium Actress on the big screen! I feel really privileged to have had the chance to do this with one of Satoshi Kon's films, thanks to a showing here in London I went to with a friend. MA was Satoshi Kon's second film, first released back in 2001. It centres around famous actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who is tracked down in her reclusive retirement by two men hoping to make a documentary on her life and contributions to cinema, one of whom gained an admiration for her while working at the studio where she rose to fame. From here, the film quickly descends into Kon's typical melding of fact and fiction, as the two documentary-makers are quite literally taken on a twisting journey through all of Chiyoko's films and what was happening in her life as she was making them.

MA is first and foremost a love letter to the medium of film, and so it was a delight to see it in a cinema and to share it with the rest of the audience. I'll be upfront and say of the three Kon films I have seen, it's my least favourite (I'm just missing Paprika now), but this isn't to say I disliked it. The character study of Chiyoko really appealed to me in theory, but I felt we didn't actually get to learn a great deal about her -- the film focuses primarily on her pursuit of a man she met when she was young. This is brought back around to tell us something about her at the end, but for a film so firmly focused on one character, the fact that I wasn't fully able to bond with or develop an interest in that character meant it hasn't left a huge impression. The other major component of this film is, as I mentioned, the celebration of cinema, and in this, it absolutely succeeds. I could tell there were various references to Japanese cinema in particular and how it changed over the decades of Chiyoko's life which I enjoyed despite my lack of familiarity with it. The animation and editing is, needless to say, stunning, and I did really enjoyed how this was used to show how the fictions Chiyoko had been involved with had impacted her reality, how these memories began to blur into one as she aged, how film shaped her as much as she shaped film. I loved what MA was doing, and how tender of a film it was, but we didn't quite click enough for it to become a favourite. I nonetheless really will treasure having seen it as I did, and hope Kon's films will continue to be shown in cinemas for decades to come.

Otherwise, here's a few YouTube videos from the last month:

Are There Lost Alien Civilizations in Our Past? by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

The Current State of Shonen Jump 2022: A New Era of Manga and Anime by Super Eyepatch Wolf (I know this video has had a lot of flack but this series really helps me to maintain some kind of basic knowledge about what's going on in the manga world lol)

Creator Commentary: The Core Message of Oxenfree. by Dutchy (this channel doesn't update much but I really enjoy it whenever it does, this is a commentary for a video I enjoyed that also in itself is very insightful, particularly if you don't make videos)

Why you NEED to see Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress by Under the Scope (revisited this after my watch!)

【ひぐらしのなく頃に】罰ゲーム【手描き】 by  芊 (a Higu fan PV for a Vocaloid song)

月光 / はるまきごはん×キタニタツヤ feat.初音ミク&鏡音リン MV by はるまきごはん / Harumaki Gohan Official / Monnlight / Tatsuya Kitani × Harumakigohan by キタニタツヤofficial (a collab between two of my favourite artists!!! This seriously made my month)

That's it for this month! Talk soon!