Review of Tsukigakirei

[7.5/10] _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Behold first love. A first kiss. A tender touch. Without it, we would cease to grow. A metaphoric stomping on roots. Painted through cliche, breathing through understatements. Each veteran, wandering eye gazing down at innocence and wishing to relive moments missed. Missed through longing or melancholy. A bittersweet visage of young love remarked dismissively by jaded tongues. If only my own wasn't so jaded. These moments, mandatory, yet romanticized. It's in the genre, after all. Yet that's so often the failure. Perfection is wanted, but only through shallow wishes. Wanting perfection in a relationship is like wanting world peace. An empty claim that flirts with ignorancemore so than profundity. It's hollow, and maybe that's the point. The more hollow something is, the easier we can attach and fill that shell with our own viscous desire for something which we unconsciously know will never be experienced. It's a fleeting world of returned passion and beleaguered, yet gleaming puppy love.

That's the world which Azumi and Mizuno inhabit. Two last-year middle schoolers swept up by one another's awkward glances and burning blushes. Where handholding is first base and meeting lips may as well warrant contraceptive. Where their world veers right where many anime tend to drive forward is in the presentation of the setting. Where romance anime often pulls back on verisimilitude to create melodrama, Tsuki Ga Kirei attempts to create a bond through experience. Walking along an empty street, something as innocuous as eating lunch with one another, yet painted with a thick enough brush to be seen as romance.

These scenes border on Iyashekei, as they hold no value to anyone who doesn't want to spend time with these characters. In those moments, the moments in which we look to a budding relationship, not through admittance or confession, but through the experience of human emotion, are the series at its peak. Its ability to let these characters and their stories breath in a short twelve-episode runtime shines brightest once the final credits roll. While not devoid of melodrama, as the all-consuming love-triangle looms heavy over this lovable romp, it is dealt with so relaxed, with such an incredibly small pool of tears, that it ceases to even feel as abrasive as it actually may be.

If action anime can often be conflated with B-movies, shlock entertainment, and pulp, then romance anime would fall under the equally divisive umbrella of soap opera and cable-access drama. Something that generally feels vapid and empty, banking more on the attractiveness of the leads than the narrative or characters. This approach may be assumptive and, to a certain extent, overly amalgamating an entire medium and genre into one pigeonholed view, it does, however, hold some truth to it. This may be based on the small pool I've consumed, but these elements within anime are so abundantly clear to anyone who's watched an expansive amount of any kind of entertainment, that I feel like it is difficult to argue against.

With that notion established, you are left to your own devices. They must be used to determine whether or not this kind of entertainment truly appeals to you. Do you revel in the shlock? The pulp? The medium which can easily become trite and redundant if you look just past the surface? Or will your critical lens prevent you from doing that? Perhaps the answer is more complicated. Taste, after all, is multi-faceted and you can appreciate many different forms of entertainment, different genres and even subgenres presented in unique ways. I, like many others, have exactly that outlook on my own taste.

For example, action anime rarely does anything for me. I have a very specific outlook and belief in the way I understand and enjoy action sequences. Whether it be the nail-biting thrill of a bank-robbery to the fist-clapping bravado in an action spectacle like Pacific Rim or Fury Road. There's an exact understanding of what makes my dopamine rush and unfortunately, that "something" isn't prevalent in the action anime I consume. The over-the-top nature of so many series' that I watch quickly becomes a bore when I'm regularly forced to witness such below-average presentation.

The same can be said about romance. A genre which I'm most critical of simply by being something which I harbor little interest in. The outcomes fostered by generic romance writing are continuously so banal that the entire genre has fallen into a kind of malaise which I'm not even attempting to break free from. This malaise, of course, is my own mea culpa. Now that's not to say romance can't be done well. However, add anime's tendency to focus on abrasive melodrama and over-the-top cloying emotionality and my interest in the genre is borderline non-existent.

Thus Tsuki Ga Kerei decided to seemingly be the antithesis of what I've come to expect from romance anime. While the usual, outlined elements are there. Specifically, the too-good-to-be-true moments which romance enjoys basking in. There is a very distinct approach to go against the grain in a surprisingly effective way. The focus on experience over melodrama does so much to establish characters which would otherwise have little to no personality to actually connect with. It's so refreshing to see an anime where I can't pinpoint the otaku-driven character archetypes.

Parents, not only being present but being major players within a romance? An emphasis on legitimate, non-sexual awkwardness? It would seem as though this series traveled through the nether. From a dimension similar to ours but where romance anime actually gets a chance to explore non-market-demanded characters in situations that aren't simply made to pluck at whatever heartstrings aren't calloused over from the suffocating saccharine nature of this genre, and, to a certain extent, the medium.

Unfortunately, Tsuki Ga Kirei can't escape every cliche that one would associate with the medium. The series' biggest fault is its production. It doesn't look good. The shots are often flatter than intended and even some of the better framed moments that clearly had care put into them are unfortunately marred by low production values. There is no need to even mention the horrific CG crowds which seem to have become a common staple of rushed anime. I still have to give Studio Feel. credit for focusing on some genuinely impressive character animation, at times, that gave a lot of needed exposition about some hobbies our protagonists may have. For example, our lead Azumi is clearly a fan of boxing. We see that not only from his poster above his bed but also how he treats a hanging lamp-switch like a boxing bag. Yet this isn't ever mentioned through dialogue.

There is still a reliance on some cloying and cliche elements here and there, and it stands out all the more when the rest of the series is oriented around a more relaxed and realistic approach to the romance. Some moments tend to drag when the focus is on spurned love, particularly in the side characters which form the love rectangle which the middle-half of the series does well to not shine an obnoxious amount of light on. Even the frustrating monologuing which so much romance anime seems to heavily indulge in is included, yet not to an extreme and the pseudo-philosophical comments on love by a character who is in middle-school are well-explained by his fascination with reading. The majority of Azumi's monologued quotes come from the beautiful pen of Osamu Dazai.

The resolution feels right, without feeling wholly realistic. To return back to the initial thesis about romance anime, the prevailing feeling of "fakeness" is still present. The situations here, while given a more satisfyingly realistic platform to bounce off of, are still not "real" enough to be truly relatable to anyone who isn't living the perfect life of a kid. Perhaps that is something which I will never see eye-to-eye with in this genre. These kids, each one having problems, from a struggling passion for writing which unfortunately goes a bit unexplored, to a lingering attraction to the freedom of competitive field and track. These problems are genuinely resolved painlessly, though. While there are thankfully realistically bittersweet moments within the series, they are often back-ended by a reassuring touch from the hands of the writer, nudging you to believe that everything is still perfect.

Behold first love, as eyes meet from across a barren dancefloor. A first kiss, in the girl's bathroom, followed by a timid apology. A tender touch, which leads to immediate recoil and guilt. Without it, I would've ceased to grow. A metaphoric stomping on my own roots. Painted through reality, breathing through experience. Each veteran, wandering eye gazing down at the loss of innocence and wishing to relive moments missed. Missed through longing or melancholy. A bittersweet visage of young love remarked dismissively by jaded tongues. Maybe that's just me, though.