Anime from the past or big seen at a distance Preface.
In this review, I will describe not only my impressions of what I saw, but also reasoning about trends in the anime on the example of this series.
I'll start from afar. Lemonade is the first anime I watched knowing it was anime. That is, before that, as a child, I watched Sailor Moon and Pokémon, but these were for me at that time the same cartoons as the dungeon of dragons or echo platoon.
This happened in 2007, when the Internet was not as limitless as it is now. In those days, a lot of people sat on city forums on the local network of a local provider, and this is my case. On the pages of this forum, I caught the eye of the holivar between anime fans and their opponents, and after reading a little, I decided to just look at what, in fact, the speech, and then bought a random disc with anime, which was just this series. I must confess that he had made a strong impression on me at that time, and although I can no longer say with certainty what feelings I had, I would not be myself if I had not tried to understand them and to understand the cause. Now we can say that I experienced dissonance from comparing what I saw with the surrounding reality. From this I came to the idea that in the anime, the Japanese showed their national traits: diligence and striving for an ideal. And now, 15 years later, I might add that this is achieved by emasculation on the one hand and hyperbolization on the other. (Of course, we have to admit that everyone does this one way or another, but the Japanese in the anime have gone further than most, in my opinion.) That is, removing from the work everything that could interfere with the desired effect, and exaggerating what should contribute to it. And at this point, you can turn, in fact, to the "lemonade" itself, and see this effect on its example and not only.
The plot of this series is quite simple: since it is everyday life and romance, we are shown the story of friendship, which began from early childhood, grew into a deep sense of love against the background of, who would think, everyday life in the Japanese outback. There is no passion, no dashing plot twists, no dynamic narrative. Quite the contrary, the plot immerses the viewer in feelings of benevolence, peace, peace of everyday life and happiness based on them. Perhaps such feelings can be experienced if you go to live in a monastery, regardless of whether it is Tibetan or Russian Orthodox. But in the anime, the romantic feelings of the main characters are added to this, which, although three-quarters of the series do not develop (in fact, there is a reason - young people have long fused with them, because they do not notice them as air), but with each series more and more are revealed to the viewer through a comparison of the flashback, which usually begins the series, with the current reality. It is in this idyllic picture of the events and feelings of the characters that lies what I wrote earlier, in my opinion. That is, we are shown an idealized and therefore beautiful life in reality is a routine, by and large. The last series, after all, brought drama to the plot for its culmination and, in fact, development in the feelings and relationships of the main characters. Although we can say that here in terms of feelings, not even development, but awareness of them.
Now a little bit about the characters. In addition to the main character and heroine, there are: the hero’s sister, his cousin, his best friend, his father, the mother of the main character, a motorcycle girl stuck there because of a broken bike, and 2 girls from the school where the heroes study. The set of characters, as you can see, is very close to the haremnik, but it is not such in the modern understanding of this phenomenon. Female characters do not try to hang on GG, only 1 girl in love with him in addition to the main character (thus forming a classic love triangle, which is quite common for romantic stories), and in general they do not occupy such a significant place in the narrative, being secondary characters. Thus, personally, I believe that on the example of this series you can see from what haremniks evolved to their modern state. And comparing them (this series and any haremnik from the 20s), you can see how far modern animators have gone on the path of emasculating normal human feelings, behavior patterns and life situations and in hyperbolizing what is formed to create the right storyline and gags that have become an integral part of such plots. To be honest, modern haremniks, in my opinion, very much correspond to the words of Sergey Shnurov in his interview with Pozner when he talked about television. He said, “Television is like bad old porn, but it ends in foreplay.” The same can be said about a lot of modern anime, which is based on the relationship of gender. And if you go back to what I said about "emasculation and hyperbolization," you can see it very clearly in this comparison, and this low rating of this anime makes it clear why this happened. Because the viewer, especially the young, prefers action to beauty and peace, cute idyll – ridiculous and awkward situations over which you can scold, normal human relationships – unnatural behavioral models, deep meaning and / or drama of the plot – appeal to instincts, toilet humor, etc. things. At the same time, I am not a moralist and I am not a principled opponent of all these, but all these modern trends are adequate only when qualities from the first category are not discarded. But as I have already written, the trend that I caught 15 years ago today has led to the emasculation of everything normal, which should be the background, and the monstrous hyperbolization of everything that should be just a dynamic element. And thinking about it, I come to the same idea that is expressed in the chorus of the song of the group Civil Defense "Rifle". Well, the same words that go immediately after "rifle is a holiday."
Although it must be admitted that today there are quite adequate anime like “rebirth of the unemployed” or “I was kicked out of the squad blah blah blah.” The latter, by the way, has a rating about the same as the Lemonade. In my opinion, it is also undeserved, and in general, for the same reasons. That is: little dynamism, lack of gags and other toilet humor, the emphasis on adequate relationships of characters, and as a result - the absence of stupid cliches necessary for the bubbling of all these praised substances.