BLAST OF TEMPEST SERIES

Andou Masahiro is a theatrical director with a great sense of scale and scope, and the perfect choice to work with this material. This is not a show that stands up well to being broken down into its component parts – it needs to be appreciated as a whole, almost like a painting rather than a narrative drama. But Zetsuen has a funny way of slowly sucking you into its marvellous absurdity – it happens within the episodes themselves (I almost always found myself slow to get into them, but completely enraptured after the break) and it happens over the course of the series.

BLAST OF TEMPEST SERIES

I liked the atmosphere but found the plot indecipherable and the characters dull, and I wasn’t sure if there was really enough there to carry a series for two cours. This was not a show that made a big impression on me right off the bat, to the point where I wasn’t even sure I was going to continue blogging it.

In trying to summarize just what made Zetsuen no Tempest such a special series, I hardly know where to begin. But she took it with her to the next life in the end, and it died along with her, and with magic. That metaphor was Aika’s, and as long as she was the one calling the tune, it dominated the narrative. The Tempest thread was almost as much a red herring as Yu-chan was, though it was indispensable as a framing device for the story. In the final analysis the entire Hamlet vs. This is really what the battle against the Tree of Genesis was all about in microcosm, the fundamental need of humans to chart their own destiny rather than follow the proscriptive path of a deity, or an alien intelligence, or a dead playwright (or girl). Life is, in fact, not a play at all but something to be lived, and it’s somewhat surprising that it’s Mahiro who winds up grasping the big picture most clearly in the end. It was a tragedy and a comedy both, and the above scene demonstrates that perfectly. To the matter of which of The Bard’s masterpieces Zetsuen no Tempest ended up being, it was exactly as the episode title suggested it might be – neither. For a character who was dead before the first episode started, Aika was a huge presence that was felt at practically every moment. They’ve both been wrapped around her finger for the entire series despite the fact that she’s been dead – pretty much the whole world has – and this was her admonition to the two of them to move on. I loved the way they both reacted almost as much as the video itself, and in fact the entire scene is every bit as necessary in completing their story as it is Aika’s. It was also a very honest and open declaration of love for both Yoshino and Mahiro (more so Yoshino, in truth) that once again impresses with its directness. It was in effect her statement of purpose, unapologetic and somehow both sentimental and detached at the same time. I found the final video message via the SD card to be close to perfect, from her fidgeting with the camera right down to her teasing promise to strip (so in-character that I found myself expecting it). She did a superb job with the series on the whole – those two elements in the finale just happened to swing-and-miss for me, whatever their source.Īpart from that, there’s also the fact that Aika’s acceptance of her death wasn’t an act – wrong or not, her attitude was quite sincere. Now as to whether these two quibbles are anime-original or not, I have no idea (if I were guessing I’d say the first wasn’t, and the second was) and I don’t intend to use them as a cudgel to pound on Okada Mari’s writing here. I don’t feel as if that moment was in-synch with the developments up to that point, and it was a little too neat and too decisive.

But it feels as if the final shot sequence especially was out-of-character, both for the series and for Yoshino. That’s not to say he might not develop those feelings, and I would have been quite happy with an open-ended resolution to that thread. I felt pretty confident that the series had spoken clearly on Yoshino and Hakaze – he simply doesn’t feel about her as she does about him. Not the moments leading up to it (I’ll delve into those in detail shortly), which were sublime, but the last 30 seconds. The other thing that seemed a bit off was the very end of the episode.

Blast of tempest