With these words, each series of this outstanding drama series ends, about which you can find reviews on all possible forums only about a masterpiece. Indeed, it is very difficult to find a person passionate about anime, whom this monumental work would leave indifferent.
Nominally positioning itself as an anime direction shojo-ai, this series goes far beyond its genre. The last thing you have to think about here is eroticism and same-sex relationships between girls, because in the context of this masterpiece, these topics pale and look negligible. First of all, this is a heavy and carefully worked out drama with a brilliant script and impeccable directing, in which serious Shakespearean passions boil. Here everything is over the edge, on the break, in the best traditions of the Stanislavsky school. If the traditional anime of the yuri genre offers us to witness the difficult path of growing up, the first love and vanilla sensuality, then this work elevates the dramaturgy of relationships simply to an unattainable height, offering something fundamentally different.
This is an extremely serious and existential film, primarily about love and death. This dichotomy is presented here in an inseparable connection, when one is no longer possible without the other. This circumstance allows us to consider this anime as a grand artistic breakthrough in the genre of animation, which brought life and death out of confrontation and led them to the state of antinomy.
All the key characters of this series are carriers of not just unique characters, but a whole gloomy universe, an inner abyss of some terrible secrets, making it impossible for them to stay among the living both physically and spiritually. Disclosure of these secrets will be much more powerful and uncompromising than you might imagine. Throughout the series, we will be wondering: what are the skeletons stored in the closets of these amazing characters, whose behavior at first seems incomprehensible, but we immediately learn that they have reasons for this... but what? This intrigue will be revealed gradually.
The plot of the series is complex and very famously twisted, so even the slightest spoilers are unacceptable here. This title is generally a canonical example of how to build and develop a plot! In fact, this is a modern interpretation of the tale about Cinderella, stylized for the XVIII century. Crinoline dresses, costumes with toads, aristocratic manners – all this is impregnated with this series, replete with references to French culture and gallant aesthetics. Although the events take place in modern Japan (1990s), the drawing is stylized to European, which is VERY in stark contrast to the anime itself (not to mention the yuri genre), thanks to which it captivates the viewer into some completely transcendent distance! . .
In the center of the plot is a high school student who gets into an elite educational institution, the main feature of which is a closed club “Sisterhood”, where only the most elite and successful girls are allowed, causing irritable envy of all other students. Pride, arrogance, snobbery and privileged position are the key characteristics of this community, which includes only the highest representatives of the local nobility: the daughters of politicians, businessmen and other representatives of the beaumont. And it had to happen that in this elite party, a girl from the family of a modest professor is elected, by no means the most beautiful, not trained in etiquette and not showing the slightest signs of secularism - indeed, a gray mouse, possessing, however, a very large and sensitive heart, rigidly dissonant with the widespread cult of arrogance and vanity.
Why was she elected? Who's her secret patron? All these questions in no way infuriate some of her classmates, who naturally subject the newly made princess to ruthless ostracism. However, Mrs. President of the “Sisterhood” and the whole school board stands up for her - a ruthless, proud and infernal woman.
Here I must say that, despite the fact that the key characters here are no more than 17 years old, they look all 30. Such is Mistress Mia, the chairman of the Sisters Club and the main antagonist of the series; such is Rhea Asaka, called St. Just (Angel of Death), a girl with a broken psyche, seeking death, in a state of permanent decadence and in a complex pathological relationship with Mistress Mia; such is Kaora, called Prince, like St. Just, more like a man, filled with a thirst for life, but struck by a terrible disease, ruthlessly counting her last days... They are all connected by one chain, an unhappy love that drinks them like an invisible vampire.
And in the center of all this existential drama is an innocent girl, with all her heart striving to help them all and trustingly tells about it in correspondence to her named older brother. And who would have thought that this smallest and most innocent man, by the will of fate found himself in the middle of a raging ocean, would play a key role in the life of each of them! Who would have thought that the key to the solution would be the same older brother, connected with no less complicated relationships with all of them?
Each episode contains intrigue, and we (the audience) will have to build countless hypotheses and assumptions: what are all these people hiding, what are the true motives for their shocking behavior, what are the hidden relationships between them? But whatever version you build, I assure you, the truth will surpass the most daring assumptions and will have a truly stunning effect!
This “opening of the cards” will indeed be very difficult to observe: naturalistic cruelty and vanity, revealing the most unsightly properties of the human soul; family scandals; suicidal tendencies – all this is presented in abundance not for the sake of hype, but through the prism of a deep inner understanding and experience, so far from the world of childhood and youth. Those who are sensitive to the dramatic genre should understand that this series can just turn the soul inside out! There are so many tears here. As the epigraph says, there is simply no end. This plot is not worthy of a real artistic adaptation, but even a full-fledged classical literary novel. The picture is replete with artistic symbols and allegories: cut roses, birds breaking windows, breaking objects predicting the proximity of death - all these are signs of very high-quality high direction. It is a pity that you can not disclose any details and, on the basis of which, give a detailed assessment of the whole work, but believe me that these 17 hours of viewing will become very valuable in your life, and for some, life after that will never be the same.
The heroine of the anime Nanako Misono was not born an ordinary girl. There was too much in it: depth, purity, the desire to think, the ability to see. And yet it was a wildflower. Who says it's a shame to be a wildflower? There are so many of them, you can’t tell the difference. But if you zoom in, you'll be fascinated. He saw her once, still a little girl, persistently asking the question: who are you? Indeed, who was he to her, whom she herself will see later, whom she will single out among all those to whom he will write daily, beginning his revelations and reflections with the words 'Dear Elder Brother'?
Japanese singer and manga artist Riyoko Ikeda once wrote a story about teenage girl Nanako, her friend Tomoko, her friends and enemies, the beginning of her adult life. The master who created the once brilliant and bitter image of a woman in a men's suit, Lady Oscar, the one who gave fans of manga and anime unforgettable portraits of the fateful handsome Axel Ferzin, and the leaders of the French Revolution: Robespierre, her brain - and Saint-Just, her disgusting-bloody dagger, beautiful as an obsession, the murderers of Saint-Just. The one that told about the fate of not wild flowers, but roses: those that are doomed to live on display, captivate, be the object of envy and hatred, and therefore have hard thorns that make beauty impregnable. In the anime series about the early adolescence of the girl Nanako, her first year at the prestigious high school "Seyran", roses will also be.
White, Ray, Lady Saint-Just, will appear at once. In her eternally flawlessly exquisite male suit, she will stand in a crowded bus with a volume of French poetry in her hands, ash-haired and violet-eyed, seventeen-year-old and desperately grown-up, broken, breaking in front of her eyes, living incomprehensible pain and guilt. Fate will cause two girls, the eldest and the youngest, to suddenly find themselves in each other’s arms for a moment; this minute will last for the youngest for life, becoming a shadow, a dark and bitter parallel companion to her ordinary, traditional First Love. The scarlet rose, in her impeccably feminine, royally restrained and magnificent robes, Fukiko, Lady Mia, guarding the departing grandeur and sanctity of the Japanese aristocracy with its thorns of pride, and with it its heart wounded by many blows, will appear later, arrogant, angry, breaking, living incomprehensible hatred. Next to them, support, joy, strength, eternal support, will bloom a yellow rose, Kaoru; no one will know what lies behind her steadfastness and vitality, humor and invincible, reverent, no less independence. Nanako, the favorite of her mother and stepfather, a faithful girlfriend, a child with predictable dreams, did she rush to Sorority, the elite of the elite school, did she need the fate of the rose? However, she had to play an uncharacteristic role. She had to be a rose to be herself, but a different self. For of her own volition, she once came close to one who, by the law of female love, choosing the indisputable beauty of male appearance, male soul, male power, became the center of the anime universe. It became a sun for such planets, which by themselves could eclipse any sun.
The film is banal, like life, and like life, unpredictable. The homoerotic component, together with the sadomaso-seasoning brought to an incredible concentration after peeling off not the husk, but the skin becomes the naked meat of the same eternal loneliness and orphanhood for anime. “Perverse” love turns out to be just an endless sisterly... passion, and “wrong” attachment paradoxically becomes a lesson of true love. There can be passion, not love, between relatives; two women can be connected by true love, devoid of passion, a serious discovery. The power of solitude, attraction, sophisticated revenge on themselves and each other makes the arch of Rey and Fukiko extremely memorable; but the arch of Kaoru, which concludes the film, seems to refute and overturn the romance of passion. Unmanufactured, uncontrived, unrelenting pain, sacrificial, not broken love - that was what was to visually complete the difficult school lesson of a diligent student Nanako.
To see to the end of this children’s film, the classics of shōjo, “girl stories”, you need to have the patience of your heart: this film is an adult, not suggesting a simple and planned ending, stirring up a whole tangle of human sorrows. This is a story of strong and extraordinary people, and therefore a strong and extraordinary story. Beautiful music and visually luxurious scenes in the series will be a lot. And yet the main song will remain the opening song. Yes, girls are destined to be small, dreaming of princes, carriages, sighs and hugs. Some of them will ruthlessly abandon their dolls, leaving on the sidelines of life, some will become a discarded doll, some will remain only ma chere poupee. But if you choose not a dream, but life, if you drink to the bottom both cups - a gold one full of good, and a silver one full of sorrow - you will become an adult, a real one, and life will not pass by, will not pass by you or through you. A small and huge anime film is probably primarily about that.
. In a lazy soul
We all remember the coveted nonsense;
We all remember our liar’s delight.
And the hearts are proud.
And the woe of internal victories.
Karolina Pavlova
Nanako Misono was not born an ordinary girl. There was too much in it: depth, purity, the desire to think, the ability to see. And yet it was a wildflower. Who says it's a shame to be a wildflower? There are so many of them, you can’t tell the difference. But if you zoom in, you'll be fascinated. He saw her once, as a little girl, persistently asking the question: who are you? Indeed, who was he to her, whom she herself will see later, whom she will single out among all those to whom he will write daily, beginning his revelations and reflections with the words 'Dear Elder Brother'?
Japanese singer and manga artist Riyoko Ikeda once wrote a story about teenage girl Nanako, her friend Tomoko, her friends and enemies, the beginning of her adult life. The master who created the once brilliant and bitter image of a woman in a men’s suit, Lady Oscar, the one who gave fans of manga and anime unforgettable portraits and fateful handsome Axel Ferzin, and the leaders of the French Revolution: Robespierre, her brain, Saint-Just, her disgusting-bloody dagger, beautiful as an obsession, the killer of Saint-Just. The one that told about the fate of not wild flowers, but roses: doomed to live on display, captivate, be the object of envy and hatred, and therefore have hard thorns that make beauty impregnable. In the anime series about the early youth of the girl Nanako, her first year at the prestigious high school "Seyran", roses will also be. No, they will not be thirty years old, but who said that the secret of the future is not yet visible in the young man... if it is destined?
White, Ray, Lady Saint-Just, will appear at once, poisoning the carelessness of life forever. In her eternally flawlessly exquisite male suit, she will stand in a crowded bus with a volume of French poetry in her hands, ash-haired and violet-eyed, seventeen-year-old and desperately grown-up, broken, breaking in front of her eyes, living incomprehensible pain and guilt. Fate will cause two girls, the eldest and the youngest, to suddenly find themselves in each other’s arms for a moment; this minute will last for the youngest for life, becoming a shadow, a dark and bitter parallel companion to her ordinary, traditional First Love. The scarlet rose, in her impeccably feminine, royally restrained and magnificent robes, Fukiko, Lady Mia, guarding the departing grandeur and sanctity of the Japanese aristocracy with its thorns of pride, and with it its heart wounded by many blows, will appear later, arrogant, angry, breaking, living incomprehensible hatred. Next to them, support, joy, strength, will bloom a yellow rose, Kaoru; no one will know what lies behind her steadfastness and vitality, humor and invincible, reverent, no less independence. Nanako, the favorite of her mother and stepfather, a faithful girlfriend, a child with predictable dreams, did she rush to Sorority, the elite of the elite school, did she need the fate of the rose? However, she had to play an uncharacteristic role. She had to be a rose to be herself, but a different self. For of her own volition, she once came close to one who, by the law of female love, choosing the indisputable beauty of male appearance, male soul, male power, became the center of the anime universe. It became a sun for such planets, which by themselves could eclipse any sun.
To finish this children’s film, the classics of shōjo, “girl stories”, you need to have the patience of your heart: this film is an adult, not suggesting a simple and planned ending, stirring a tangle of human sorrows. This is a story of strong and extraordinary people, and therefore a strong and extraordinary story. Beautiful music and visually luxurious scenes in the series will be a lot. And yet the main song will remain the song on the opening credits: it is the essence, as in the accompanying video. Yes, little girls should be small, dreaming of princes, carriages, sighs and hugs. Some of them will then ruthlessly abandon their dolls, leaving on the sidelines of life, someone will remain ma chere poupee, and that's all. But if you choose not a dream, but life, if you drink to the bottom both cups - a gold one full of good, and a silver one full of sorrow - you will become an adult, a real one, and life will not pass by, will not pass by you or through you. Yes, a relatively small, but accommodating so many events and feelings anime film is about that.
But it was, in our country, almost Soviet time. But we didn't have that painfully truthful on screen. There were books – Alexin, Krapivin, where similar heroes acted. People like this girl are perfect, Nanako Misono. Pretty, big-eyed, usually chestnut-haired, “daddy’s daughter” of his beloved stepfather, who went to his beloved mother, of course, when the first family “disintegrated itself”. Something similar to shōjo, anime or manga, the story of teenage girls, their growing up, the formation of their personality is not uncommon everywhere. It is so wonderful, so joyful to the heart – a good girl who entered a prestigious school, touchingly and directly made friends with her first teacher, a beautiful and positive man, writing him detailed letters, without changing the habit of analyzing each of her actions, closely monitoring her spiritual movements.
And the other was, even before the revolution, Charskaya with her shojo-ai, albeit Orthodox, naive, chaste. Shame on anyone who wants to vulgarize such understandable early feelings of girls who grow up and greedily want to love, but do not have a close object of the opposite sex, and do not realize their aspirations. Friendship Nanako and Tomoko, maiden in emotion, male in strength; greedy and longing for a new girlfriend bright and very lonely beauty Mariko; and finally, terrible, piercing, bitter, inexpressibly painful and only to the end understandable relationship between the most strange and wondrous heroines of anime – Ray Asaka and Fukiko Itinomiya. Lady Saint-Just and Mia, so similar to Prince Patrick and Princess Albina from the Soviet film Don't Leave.
You should not throw a stone at this anime, declaring it too feminine, girlish - so romantic in drawing, so deliberately pedaling feelings. This is the work of the same author who created The Rose of Versailles, the unforgettable Lady Oscar. The same drawing, and the same deception – “veal tenderness” on the surface, the depth and bitterness inside, the ambiguity of the characters, such a sudden force of individual phrases and storylines that it takes off. From there, the charm of Mia, at the same time Antoinette, Dubarry, and Jeanne Valois; the duality of Ray – the victim, the undoubted victim, but also the involuntary “demon tempter”, superficially – the virgin transvestite, in fact – the same Lady Oscar, a woman who wore a male suit not for a love whim, but at the request of knightly duty. You do not understand why suddenly the notes of not only Dostoevsky’s Nezvanova, but even the cycle of Tsvetaeva’s Girlfriend burst into such a “children’s” animated series? Why should children, admiring the music of the tower clock, instead of a bell calling to class, suddenly realize that in an empty tower - the orphanage of the unfortunate is not a woman - a girl, in fact, a seventeen-year-old girl with a murdered childhood, stoned and full of pills, mortally in love, prone to all suicides together, living half in life, half in French, whether they are cursed, poems or oneiroid, do not understand? Why should they see heartbreaking scenes and understand how a completely innocent, curious, kind, fairy-tale creature suddenly breaks its heart, how it is given to experience that first, strongest, brightest feeling - and it is homoerotic?
Why should children know that under the bright face of a strict, noble creature, which seems to embody all the pride of the nobility, lies a creature cunning, insidious, malicious and vengeful, and in this evil creature with a skewed face, as in a doll, a deceived love child, deceived on all fronts, entangled in a false understanding of love, in a false understanding of pride and honor? Why know that fathers betray and leave the family, and the family itself, seemingly prosperous, is not always created honestly? Why do you know that a real, one-in-a-million, love that promises a good family and children can erase a terrible diagnosis? Why would you know that you could fall victim to intrigue, be in mortal danger, and be silent, silent? Then I'm probably going to have to go through all of this or more. And you have to survive. And not to lose the ability to see, to understand, to forgive; to lose, to find, to be disappointed, to love. The song on the title credits speaks best of all about this: in order to become an adult woman – do not talk about men now – you need to drink to the bottom both a golden cup of joy and a silver cup of pain at the beginning, in becoming. If you do not prepare yourself, you will be poisoned, not drunk, real and adult – no, you will never be. You will be just a doll thrown to the curb, a doll who lived in a world of masks and fabulous ideas about life and love. “Ma cherie la poupee” will not be played.
This childless film with a children's wrapper is not doomed to be liked, but is doomed to be remembered. No character is abandoned, and conflicts are resolved in a completely non-trivial way. It seems that I should understand, but do not understand why at the end of the almost forty-series marathon, where there was a place for sweet humor and joy, you sit squeezed like a lemon, weeping with inner tears? Why is this music playing inside – albeit not the best in the whole heap of anime soundtracks, but so piercing, heartbreaking? Why is there snow before you, on which a stain of blood is spreading, a barefooted maiden with a violin in the night forest, two figures on the thin edge of a skyscraper, the most beautiful sunset in the world ... and she, she, the death of young Nanako Misono, the Angel of Death, is ash-curdled, violet-eyed, ironic, with the voice-bellor of Saint-Just himself, slipping away, dreaming? .
P. S. Is not my voice carried away by the wind of an unrealistically beautiful spring day: I love you.
10 out of 10