His and Her Circumstances

jpn Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo, aka Kare Kano. 1998. TV series. (26 X 30 min.) High school comedy/drama/romance. org Masami Tsuda (manga). dir Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki. scr Hideaki Anno. mus Shiro Sagisu. des Tadashi Hiramatsu, Masaru Sato. -bc

Two high-achieving students in an upscale public high school meet, compete, and fall in love. Noted as much for its visual imagination and humor as for the depth of its main characters, this series offers as rich and emotionally honest a look at contemporary high school life as any series of its type.

High school freshman Yukino Miyazawa is used to being number one in academics, sports, and student representation, and the one to turn to for help and advice. When Soichirou Arima, a new classmate, gets equally high marks, she begins a campaign to surpass and humiliate him. His gentle manner and gracious behavior disarm her, however, and the two quickly become friends, especially after he visits her at home and catches her off-guard, without the “mask” she puts on at school. The closer they get, the more quickly they fall in love and, after some hesitancy, eventually confess their feelings to each other and become a couple.

Their new status excites the rest of the student body, although it incites jealousy and rivalry in more than a few. The teachers show immediate concern as the more time their prize pupils spend with each other, the more their grades suffer. Some heated confrontations with other students and a dramatic standoff with the principal and freshman adviser, with the parents present, all add up to a series of challenges the young lovers must face.

Gradually, Miyazawa and Arima reveal more and more about themselves to each other, in particular Arima’s troubled past and the stigma of his parents abandoning him and leaving him with a well-off uncle and aunt (who are, nonetheless, devoted to him). We also meet old and new friends of the two, including Araba, a flamboyant would-be playboy who wants to use Arima to help him attract girls; Tsubasa, the girl who adores Arima and expected to be his girlfriend when they got to high school; Maho, a girl with an attitude who turns all the other girls against Miyazawa, albeit for a short time; Aya, an aspiring writer; Tsubaki, a tall, bold, short-haired girl who’s only interested in other girls; and Tonami, a boy who’d been tormented by Tsubaki when they’d been in grade school and has now returned, taller, stronger, and handsomer, eager to get revenge on the unsuspecting Tsubaki. Not to mention Miyazawa’s younger sisters, Kano and Tsukino, a pair of eccentric parents, and their dog, Peropero.

Through it all we get a portrait of the way a high school functions, with its cliques, its various forms of peer pressure, the after-school activities, and the way relationships form and develop amidst the usual welter of uncertainty, insecurity, misunderstandings, and normal appetites of kids that age.

His and Her Circumstances stands out as one of the boldest visual experiments in TV animation, surpassing even such contemporaries as Serial Experiments Lain or near-contemporaries like Boogiepop Phantom. Anno doesn’t just dramatize a conversation or an interior monologue; he visualizes it using every trick in the animator’s playbook. We see the characters’ real selves peer out from the “masks” they maintain in everyday conversation and blurt asides to the audience. We see illustrations of what’s being narrated presented as theatrical stagings, complete with spotlight and audience, or marked as “Reenactment, “Simulation,” or “Imagination.” Text pops out all over the frame to reinforce what we’re seeing and hearing, including phrases like “Emotional Scar,” “Convenient Interpretation,” “Heart’s Desire Granted,” and “My Life No Problem,” and suggestions to the viewer like, “It is said you shouldn’t try this at home,” as we see a child-sized Yukino pulling a rope tied to a heavy rubber tire, indicating exhaustion at studying so intently to reach number one in the class rankings.

The frame constantly expands, contracts, and splits, filling up with extra flourishes to underline the mood when needed. Flowery sweet talk is accompanied by red roses surrounding the speaker. Yukino’s stream-of-consciousness reveries and dialogues with Arima often occur against abstract painted backgrounds. Beautiful swatches of color appear in some scenes, while in others the background action is rendered in simple pen and ink. The sound of a camera click turns an image of the young couple into a camera negative, with light and dark reversed. A gorgeous sunset bathes them in the amber light of dusk. Chiaroscuro effects are created when street lamps shoot angles of light into an otherwise pitch-black school hallway. It’s all grounded in a very specific setting, the Musashi-Kosugi district in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, as seen in detailed establishing shots of the school, streets, shopping district, and subway stations. (Anno employed these same kinds of shots in Evangelion as well.) There are frequent cuts to close-ups of household objects like plates of food, pots on a stove, or clothes on a line, and urban signposts like traffic lights, a railroad bridge, or drainpipes releasing water.

With round faces, oversized eyes and pupils, and slightly pointed chins, the character design is surprisingly simple for such a complex set of characters, but it allows for the frequent distortion of the characters’ faces as they express extremes of emotion or revert to childlike form (a tactic drawn from the manga). The characters are sometimes depicted as simple pencil drawings or manga-style illustrations, and the action is sometimes depicted in comic strip fashion, complete with dialogue balloons. In normal form, Arima and Yukino are highly idealized, but their image is manipulated in so many ways that we quickly get a sense of other sides of their characters.

The music by Shiro Sagisu follows the model he created in his score for Evangelion, which utilized all sorts of cues to match the rapid shifts in tone that marked the series. If anything, this score is even more wide-ranging in its moods and emotions, and requires an even more eclectic range of musical styles not only to match the constantly changing visual schemes but to keep pace with the rollercoaster-like twists and turns of the kids’ lives, all of which Sagisu happily supplies. There are bouncy, TV-commercial-style choral backdrops heard one minute, melancholy piano solos the next, and a gently stirring string section another. The two lead voice actors on the Japanese track sing the end song together, a sweet, mildly jaunty duet, which breaks into a lovely bit of wordless vocal harmonizing.

The distinctive art direction is by Masaru Sato, who was art director for the similarly styled Serial Experiments Lain and had earlier done background art on director Hideaki Anno’s previous series, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Character designer and chief animation director Tadashi Hiramatsu was animation director on the Gainax productions, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and FLCL.

Director Anno left the series after eighteen episodes following a dispute with manga creator Masami Tsuda over the direction the series was taking.

His and Her Circumstances introduces two endearing and complex young characters, taking us into their minds and thought processes to reveal the reality behind outwardly “perfect” model students. As they gradually recognize for themselves what their real needs are, we come to understand them and root for smooth sailing in their relationship. They bring out the best in each other and become better people toward everyone else around them as a result. As perky little Yukino drops her mask, for instance, she finds she’s able to see the other girls more clearly and gradually develops the kinds of intimate friendships she has never cultivated before. Each helps the other develop social skills they’d previously been lacking.

A theme of Anno’s earlier series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, was the way parents fail their children, which is developed further in His and Her, but with greater optimism. Many of the lead characters’ classmates are in serious conflict with their parents and all look to Yukino’s warm, close-knit family for sustenance. Even Arima, who has two loving step-parents (an aunt and uncle) at home, is attracted to the vibrancy and activity of Yukino’s cramped household, as opposed to the spacious, but very quiet house where he resides. The scene where both sets of parents are called to school to hear the principal’s charges that the kids’ relationship interferes with their schoolwork culminates in the parents backing the children. Perhaps, Anno and Tsuda seem to be saying, a supportive set of parents is integral to a child’s upbringing.

In addition to the depth of characterization brought to the main characters, what makes the series so innovative is the freewheeling visual imagination employed to tell the story. Anno uses the frame in all kinds of creative ways to outline the characters’ thoughts and states of mind, ranging from ecstatic joy to intense anxiety. This approach is often quite funny, as the contrast between Yukino’s public image and her real self is presented so starkly in quick asides to the viewer. There seems to be no limit to the animators’ imagination as the image and characters are constantly manipulated to make a point, either dramatic or comic (or both). It might be a good idea for first-time viewers to watch this with the English track, since the onscreen text in many scenes is so fast and furious that the subtitles can prove an extra burden.

There is a major problem with the series, however, beginning with episode 19. Director Anno walked off the series following the completion of episode 18 after a dispute with the manga creator, Masami Tsuda. Ms. Tsuda reportedly wanted more drama, while Anno insisted on adding humor. A different director took over and the series never found its way again. Too many of the final episodes are devoted to recaps or rehashes of what went on before. A new subplot involving brand-new character Tonami takes too much time away from the main characters. A plot arc involving Yukino and the girls deciding to put on a play written by Aya comes and goes seemingly arbitrarily before being dropped completely. Budget problems led to some misguided stylistic choices (for example, paper cut-out figures of the characters acting out much of one episode). These developments were enough to ruin the series for many fans. It can be argued, however, that the first eighteen episodes by themselves constitute what is perhaps the greatest high school anime series ever. But the final eight are a big, glaring problem.

Episode 4 finds Yukino obsessed with telling Arima how she feels about him and never finding the right way or the right moment to do so. Discouraged and certain he has changed his mind about her, she gives up even trying. Then, at the end of the episode, as they sit side-by-side in a meeting of class reps, she notices his right hand dangling off the chair below the desk. She reaches down and takes it in hers. He looks at her, reddening slightly. She looks straight ahead, reddening considerably more. The two close-ups are side-by-side, presented in split screen. He then grips her hand, while the string section plays the lilting melody of the series’ end song. The end slate comes up, “To be continued.”

Beautiful.

Despite being supposedly set in 1998, the series never shows us a computer or a cell phone, both of which are omnipresent in the middle school series from the same year, Serial Experiments Lain. Perhaps the creators were trying to re-create the kind of high school experience they had in that golden era before such high-tech intrusions into the classroom.

Yuki Watanabe and Maria Yamamoto, the voice actresses who play Yukino’s sisters, Tsukino and Kano, appear on camera after each end credits sequence to announce, in character, the teaser for the next episode. When this series was released on DVD in the U.S., the “angle” feature on the DVD enabled viewers to switch over and watch the American actresses performing those parts in the English dub, Jessica Calvello and Megan Hollingshead, doing the same thing.

profanity Some mild profanity is used in some episodes. advisory The two lead characters sleep together in a discreetly handled scene.