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- Verified Buyer
It seems odd to love a story that spirals relentlessly toward its grim conclusion. It's no spoiler to reveal things don't exactly end happily ever after; the subtitle is perfectly accurate. Saikano is not rosy, escapist, shoujo (or even shounen) fare. It packs an emotional punch.The setting is a small, seaside town in rural Hokkaido (that big northern island in the Japan Archipelago). Chise and Shuji are classmates. Neither is particularly remarkable. Both are awkward and shy. Chise is small, slow, clumsy, not terribly bright and apologises for everything. She has tended to be sickly and has a hard time making it up Hell Hill to school each day. But she's cute. And genuine. Shuji used to be on the track team. He's quiet, uncertain of himself, a little bristly, sort of cool, sort of directionless and disaffected. Chise worked up the courage to ask Shuji to be her boyfriend. He agreed. Thus they begin.Shuji narrates their story, and the primary device is an exchange diary Chise asks him to write with her. She is a more conscientious contributor than he, and through her words, reveals things she cannot bring herself to say face to face."Normal" does not last long for this improbable pair. For reasons we never learn, Chise is chosen to become the ultimate weapon in a global-scale war. Only Shuji knows who and what Chise has become, and it is her dichotomous existence that shapes and clarifies his love for her - Shuji ultimately proves himself deeply compassionate in the face of this insanity. Chise's abilities evolve, the two fumble in their attempts to articulate their love, they grapple with their human flaws, and as the war inexorably progresses, their world crumbles around them. When it seems they are lost to each other as so much flotsam and jetsam amid forces of epic proportion, they find the strength of their love.Other characters revolve around this pair in ways that are sad, urgent or affirming. These relationships, all tragedy-prone, provide the framework upon which the story develops its themes. Saikano is not particularly interested in the whys and hows of war and weaponry, it is interested in what happens to individuals who live with the experience of war.Saikano is based on the manga series by Takahashi Shin. The character design in the animation is sensitive to Takahashi-san's line art; the plotting is largely consonant (yes, even in the manga everyone is perpetually blushing, and Chise is a waterworks). The artistry of Saikano's character development is such that I found myself caring as much for the supporting cast as I did for the leads. The anime generally tames the didactic tone that occasionally made the manga feel message-heavy.Mecha otaku beware. Despite her experience with the mecha genre, director Kase Mitsuko (Mobile Suit Gundam) clearly made the choice to remain faithful to the human focus of Takahashi-san's story rather than flesh out the technology. Where others have minded this, I am grateful.Look elsewhere if: you require a conventional happy ending; you need the machinations of your geopolitical conflicts fully outlined; you need your science fiction carefully and credibly explained; you crave long, action-packed battle scenes; you find the willing suspension of disbelief problematic. A mass of hardware, sometimes insect-like, sometimes angel-like, sometimes tank-like, sometimes octopus-like, is contained in Chise's small body. Every now and again she inexplicably expels chunks of it. Just suspend judgment and go with the flow. It really doesn't matter to the story that's being told what the weapon is or how it works or even why Chise was the chosen one; it just matters that a small, inconsequential girl who had rather conventional aspirations and was in love for the first time became a weapon capable of eradicating humanity.The story suggests numerous questions: what does it mean to love? what does it mean to live? what are we meant to do? what are the repercussions of our destructive nature, and might destruction encompass a measure of compassion? who is to blame? what does it mean to be human? what is happiness? what are our sins? what evidence do we leave of our passing through? what matters? We're not talking Philosophy 401, but neither are we talking your typical light-weight cartoon pablum. Saikano has the grace to leave many of these questions open to your own interpretations.In the final scenes of the manga (it's expressed differently in the anime; the question pertains to both), Shuji asks Chise, "Do you think we were good lovers in the end?" How do we measure the goodness of love? If we look at Shuji's relationship with Fuyumi or the manner in which he eases Akemi's death by affirming her beauty or Chise's relationship with Tetsu and see only evidence of cheating, we will measure love's goodness shallowly. In Saikano's world, love is not a casual, superficial construct; it is a path, often confused, often morally ambiguous, toward redemption. Love, in its many permutations, matters.After the world ended, Saikano still lingers in my mind in the same way Kino's Journey and Mushi-shi do (though these are hardly similar stories!). It touched me as deeply as did Grave of the Fireflies. Works like these constitute Anime for the Thinking Person, and I cherish artistic creations with the power to leave me feeling moved, thoughtful and enlarged.Kino's Journey - The Complete CollectionMushi-shi: The Complete SeriesGrave of the Fireflies[Note: There is tastefully executed nudity and sex. There is blood. There is killing (this is about war). Characters you come to care for die. Chise, who is supposed to be a petite and very cute high school senior, looks underage, which raises the spectre of paedophilia for some. If you are inclined to be bothered by any of these things, it's best to avoid this anime.]
