Review of A Place Further Than The Universe
Out of 100 Nobles watching... 92 were impressed! 5 would like some faster pacing and less crying 3 complained about CG Sora Yori was a show my social circle had insisted I view for some time. Really due to no ill will towards the show in particular, I had been putting it off simply because the show is a 4-girl style slice of life kind of thing and that genre isn't really my thing. Really sitting down and determining to use your free time on something you feel luke-warm about is tough, but I can say with certainty that Sora Yori was an absolute treat in the wake ofsome more subpar material I had been filling my time with.
At a glance Sora Yori is another standard show with cute girls doing X thing despite how plausible it may be. One of my most irrational demands from the media I consume is the immersion factor of what I'm watching. No matter how fanciful, I need to be grabbed by the setting I'm presented with and placed in the shoes of the characters so that I can empathize with them or at least understand them. For some reason 4-girl shows of all things seem to miss this mark for me very often, but imagine my surprise when the show about high school girls going on an Antarctica expedition was the most realistically/believably depicted anime I'd seen in at least the last year.
The story follows Mari Tamaki who wants to make the most of her youth. She befriends her classmate Shirase Kobuchizawa who is determined to go on an expedition to Antarctica to follow in her scientist mother’s footsteps. On the road to that goal they add to their crew Hinata Miyake, a high school dropout working in a convenience store and Yuzuki Shiraishi, a child actor with no real friends. This cast of characters doesn't color outside the lines of personality with your bog standard Knucklehead, Serious, Genki, and Innocent lineup, but the depth in each characters story and the way they interplay off each other is fantastic and has a very satisfying payoff by the end of the show.
Some halfway thoughts about this show were "this show is titled "A Place Farther Than the Universe" so instead of making some kind of goofy metaphorical bingbong about how special Antarctica is, couldn't this just be a space program anime?" and to an extent I do hold that feeling. I do ultimately agree with the setting choice as I feel like a highly staffed scientific expedition is just in the range of plausibility. I don't know how many G's the average high school girl can take, but sea sickness and wearing extra layers is something anyone can handle.
The show was paced fairly slowly, but really I can't knock too much off here. If the early episodes didn't take the length of time they did I don't really see a way the characters could have felt as fleshed out as they were. The payoff for the time investment in episodes one through seven really was pure emotional fire in the back five.
At this point this is where the MAL review ends as spoiler content is going to be written later for posting among personal friends who urged me to watch the show. So we're cutting it short here. Good show. Do watch. Am good.