1331: Not That Irish Band

Been a while since I talked anime (relatively speaking, anyway) so, well, here we go.

I finished watching the second season of Haiyore! Nyaruko-san recently and enjoyed it a great deal — perhaps not quite as much as I liked the first season, but certainly enough to regard it very fondly — and have now moved on to a series I’ve seen a lot of people mention in the past, but have never checked out myself: Clannad.

I know very little about Clannad save for the fact it was originally a visual novel (that, to my knowledge, never received an official English release, nor a complete fan-translation — do please correct me if I’m wrong) and that it was a show with a certain degree of notoriety for being emotional and moving. As those of you who have been following me a while will know, I have a real soft spot for emotionally engaging media, and take a perverse pleasure from works that are genuinely “harrowing” in some way. I liked Corpse Party so much, for example, because I found it genuinely horrifying, disturbing and upsetting — you might think that would make it unappealing, but in my mind it was just a sign that it was achieving exactly what it set out to do. I think fondly of To The Moon because it legitimately made me properly full-on cry at the ending, and I feel the same way about Kana Little Sister. You get the idea.

So I was always going to check out Clannad sooner rather than later, despite knowing next to nothing about it. And after four episodes, I still know next to nothing about it, but I do know enough to talk a little about my first impressions and what I like about it.

Clannad initially appears to be one of the many slice-of-life high school comedy dramas that make up so much of the modern anime landscape. I’m a big fan of this style of thing, so I have no problem with this, but I’m also conscious of the fact that some people don’t like it quite so much.

Where Clannad differs from your usual slice-of-life business is in its atmosphere. On the surface, it’s the usual sort of high-energy, high-intensity chaos that this type of show is known for, but there’s a very peculiar atmosphere overlaid on the top of it all. Specifically, despite the show’s initial impression of being colourful, vibrant and full of energy, there’s a very clear sense of melancholy about it, too; a feeling of loneliness.

This is partly personified by the character Nagisa, a lonely girl whom the protagonist comes to befriend. Exactly what Nagisa’s deal is hasn’t quite been revealed yet, but it’s clear that she’s a sickly girl — she missed a year of school and had to repeat, and in one early episode she just collapses in the rain without explanation. I have the distinct feeling that Things are going to Happen with Nagisa at some point in the series, though exactly what I don’t know just yet — and I’m avoiding spoilers like the plague for the moment.

Nagisa isn’t the only source of this loneliness, though; occasionally, the show cuts to a seemingly completely incongruous sequence where a young girl lives alone at the end of the world, and ends up building herself a mechanical friend out of junk. I have no idea of the relevance of all this, yet, whether it’s real, dream, metaphor or all three, but it’s certainly got my attention.

There’s not a lot more I can really say about the show as yet, save for the following opinions: 1) The art and animation is gorgeous. 2) Its visual novel roots are obvious, what with the protagonist’s recurring encounters with the female leads. 3) It has the most irritatingly catchy ending song ever. (Dango, dango, dango, dango, dango daikazoku!)

More to almost inevitably follow once I’ve watched a bit more.