Unlike a Gainax anime, there are no mecha battles nor any overt biblical references. Like a Gainax anime, there exists only a provocative psychological and sociological study in its purest form ... from a male and female perspective. Who better to undertake such a daunting task of forming a coherent product out of seemingly random braincandy than the master of obtuse anime himself Anno Hideaki, the man behind Neon Genesis Evangelion and a card-carrying member of the original Honneamise bratpack?
—His and Her Circumstances—Anime Academy Review
Director Hideaki Anno has claimed that what attracted him most potently to the manga by Masami Tsuda on which His and Her Circumstances is based was its “comedy” (quoted in “[inside] Gainax,” p. 16). Nonetheless, in this series as in Anno’s whole opus, comedy unfailingly becomes the conduit for the exploration of convoluted psychologies. In this specific case, the darkest facets of human nature are thrown into relief by the show’s emphasis on inherently duplicitous personalities. The show’s female lead is Yukino Miyazawa, a model student and excellent athlete blessed with immaculate looks who, unsurprisingly, is an object of both admiration and envy for all her classmates. What is more, Yukino never seems to host any doubts as to what she wants from life and how to achieve it. Her dedication to both academic tasks and physical training subjects her to an exacting routine, which she keeps carefully under wraps in order to make her accomplishments appear to be an artless outcome of natural talent.
In fact, everything about Yukino is studiously constructed. Even her publicized tastes in literature and music are minutely tailored to this effect. For example, she pretends to be perusing Salinger while sitting on a bench in the school grounds where everybody can see her and admire her literary preferences. In fact, the book’s only connection with Salinger is the cover: Yukino’s favorite texts are actually how-to-become-a-millionaire publications such as Fortune. Likewise, she claims to have a passion for classical music, and especially Brahms, when in fact she only enjoys pop hits. Yukino’s flawless appearance is therefore no more than a veneer that the girl tenaciously maintains in public in order to gain praise. In private, however, she is actually a solipsistic, self-absorbed and praise-hungry slob tormented by insecurity and fear. As Carlos Ross and Eric Gaede have noted, “whenever Yukino goes home, off comes the ‘ojousama’ [“queen” or “princess”] façade—and on go the headbands, reading glasses, and sweats. Miss Congeniality is in fact a conniving, petty con artist with a streak of absolute nerdy bliss” (Ross and Gaede). Having enthroned herself as an unparalleled idol, moreover, Yukino lacks any genuine friends.
The only attenuating circumstances one may invoke in Yukino’s favor have to do with her exposure to parental pressure: the injunction to excel at all sorts of scholarly, artistic and athletic pursuits appears to have loomed large over her entire childhood. As already noted, culpable parents are never far from Gainax’s thematic range. At times, they are presented as overtly callous and exploitative (Evangelion, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World); at others, as remiss by default (Gunbuster, Nadia); at others still, as blameworthy due to an excess of zeal in the apparent promotion of their offspring’s best interest (His and Her Circumstances). Ironically, Yukino’s younger sisters, Tsukino and Kano, come across as exceptionally laid back, which would seem to indicate that the parents in question somehow managed to work their longing for a perfect daughter out of their system first time around and are quite prepared to leave Yukino’s juniors in peace. (Parental attitudes will be discussed in greater details later in this chapter.)
Yukino’s hitherto uncontested dominance within the educational domain is challenged when she applies to get into the Hokuhei Senior High School in the industrial suburb of Kawasaki, and comes second in the entrance exams to Souichirou Arima, a handsome, generous, charismatic and academically brilliant young man—in other words, a person who seems to genuinely be everything that Yukino has thus far merely pretended to be. However, Souichirou harbors a secret no less embarrassing that Yukino’s own hidden existence. Reputed to come from an illustrious medical family, the boy actually lives with his aunt and uncle, who took him into their care following the disappearance of Souichirou’s biological parents: a pair of petty criminals embroiled in blackmailing and stealing operations. With the sole exception of the boy’s foster parents, his entire family takes sadistic glee in intimating that this despicable conduct is to be blamed upon the boy, whom they brand as the “black sheep” of the family (Episode 18, “Progress”).
Although Yukino initially vows to pulverize Souichirou’s reputation through hard work and titanic determination, driven by her inveterately vindictive disposition, the two duplicitous adolescents actually end up falling in love with each other. The romantic element, it must be stressed, is originally handled, in keeping with Studio Gainax’s penchant for redefining deconstructively the conventions of established genres. The series’ form-muddling tendencies are overtly emphasized by the “Producer’s Notes” contained in the first disc of the His and Her Circumstances DVD Box Set released by The Right Stuf International in 2002. Importantly, said notes concurrently stress another key feature of the show, and indeed of Gainax’s oeuvre at large, namely, its deliberate withholding of conclusive explanations for its characters’ actions, motivations and ultimate objectives: “How to explain Kare Kano to someone who has never seen it before ... that’s a bit like trying to describe an elephant to a blind person.... As you progress through the series, don’t be too surprised to find out that you have to re-evaluate your opinions of many of [the] characters. Finally, don’t be too surprised if you ... catch yourself looking through open windows at rainy nights and thinking of the past” (“His and Her Circumstances: Producer’s Notes”).
As Yukino and Souichirou become acquainted with the occluded—and not too pleasant—aspects of their respective personalities, they gradually learn how to be true to their natures and circumstances beyond the sanitized self-images they project in the public domain. In the process, the program charts the ups-and-downs in their relationship as they are persistently tested by school, family problems, and friends. At the same time, the series works as effectively as it undoubtedly does insofar as it is consistently able to counterbalance its deeply introspective moments with outbursts of undilutedly hilarious comedy. Thus, the storyline asserts itself as a delicately balanced blend of sincere romance and exuberant humor, while Anno’s directorial style imparts each and every scene with the individual atmosphere it needs in order to strike the required chords. In the course of a single installment, one may experience glee, annoyance, melancholy and irritation in equal measures, without the shift from one mood to another ever feeling arbitrarily forced.
His and Her Circumstances echoes Evangelion on the technical plane in its deployment of Anno’s favorite expressive strategies: collages, montages, swiftly flashing text, lengthy static scenes and frames from the parent manga. This is not especially surprising when one considers that His and Her Circumstances was the first animated show directed by Anno since Evangelion. Whereas Evangelion uses relatively gentle distortions of its characters at points of heightened emotional intensity, His and Her Circumstances adds explicitly SD (i.e., super-deformed or squashed-down) caricatures of the normal personae to the heady brew of its graphic repertoire. Capitalizing on overtly cartoonish and grotesquely infantilized versions of the characters, these aim at exposing their foibles by recourse to parodic humor. Monstrous caricatures depicted in aggressive hues, specifically, come to the fore in shots where unfettered anger dominates the show’s precarious balance of emotions.
It is also worth noting, in this regard, that super-deformity of the kind seen in His and Her Circumstances is also deployed to comparable dramatic effect in the TV series Paradise Kiss (dir. Osamu Kobayashi, 2005). On the whole, the show adheres to the style characteristic of the manga by Ai Yazawa on which it is based, as well as on that of the semi-prequel Gokinjo Monogatari (a.k.a. Neighbourhood Story) created by the same author and adapted into an animated series by Atsutoshi Unezawa (1995–1996). Accordingly, it exhibits a marked preference for elegant lines in the rendition of the characters’ bodies and costumes and arresting facial expressions. Occasionally, however, the SD mode takes over and blatantly unrealistic caricatures gain center stage. What is unusual—and perhaps most memorable—about Kobayashi’s use of this technique is its application to serious or painful moments.
Most importantly, His and Her Circumstances does not starkly oscillate between realism and distortion but rather offers subtly modulated gradations of both typologies. For example, characters may be portrayed as exhibiting more childlike features and reduced dimensions at moments of uncertainty or embarrassment without actually morphing into chibi (i.e., “child body” or “mini-body”) versions of the characters in a full-fledged sense of the term. Refined deformation also encompasses the use of silhouettes that are unquestionably realistic yet also highly stylized due to the elimination of all somatic details, or mere retention of one feature intended to heighten a specific personality trait (more often than not, a hobbyhorse of some kind). Another form of distortion used by Anno is the abrupt translation of a character’s body from a harmoniously proportioned and smoothly articulated physical frame to a rubberized doll—this is especially useful in communicating emotional helplessness or sheer fatigue. At the same time, a character’s own warped perception of her or his environment is frequently conveyed by means of exaggerated perspective, for instance, in frames in which the character in question is shot from below and the only portion of the body one can see is a pair of seemingly huge thighs looming over tiny feet that appear to be yards way from the hips: a distinctively Alice-in-Wonderland look.
It would, of course, be preposterous to deny that numerous formal experiments undertaken in the execution of the show were partly due (especially from Episode 15 onwards) to Gainax’s notorious tendency to run out of funds about halfway through a series (both the 39-episode Nadia and the 26-episode Evangelion provide illustrious antecedents, in this respect). Nevertheless, the financial constraints faced by Anno and his team indubitably constituted something of a blessing in disguise insofar as they were conducive to some of the most dexterous feats to have graced the screen in the entire history of anime. These include the use of paper cut-outs of characters attached to and moved about by means of sticks (Episode 19). The same technique, incidentally, is also deployed to great dramatic effect in Kenji Kamiyama’s Minipato (2001). Additionally, whole segments of the narrative—most notably in Episode 26—are told by recourse to manga panels extracted directly from Tsuda’s original. The manga-style sketches, in their unsurpassed simplicity, are a lasting testament to the potential held by a lovingly crafted drawing to express more than thousands of words ever could.
It should also be noted, in this respect, that although the show owes its uniqueness as an anime experience to Anno’s directorial touch, “Some have argued that Tsuda Masami’s wonderfully lively and energetic manga translates into anime form almost by itself” (“His and Her Circumstances”- Anime Academy Review). As Fred Patten maintains, moreover, the anime’s alternation between contrasting graphic modalities is deeply influenced by Tsuda’s own style. In his review of the second volume of the manga, in particular, the critic observes: “The art seems to flip-flop between realistic and super-deformed styles, and this sharply differentiates between when the characters are letting themselves be controlled by their emotions ... and when they are acting thoughtfully—a visual sliding scale between the id and the superego” (Patten, p. 186).
Also notable is the employment of stylishly understated grayscale drawings with overtly two-dimensional qualities as backdrops against which a more solidly rendered presence in full color can be made to stand out for dramatic emphasis. The alternation and juxtaposition of still images and animated frames are concomitantly brought into play to achieve a variety of effects depending on contingent circumstances. They may lend the action a farcical edge in scenes in which they display the repercussions of violent collisions (often laced with jocular hints at various martial arts) and of severe vexation, or else they may be deployed to evoke particular emotions with minimalistic restraint and even convey a sense of epiphanic disclosure.
Anno’s visual cocktail is simultaneously spiked by the integration of myriad glowing lights, twirls, whorls and spirals, as well as swathes of both even and graded watercolor washes and impressionistic splotches or splashes of pure pigment. All manner of media bolster the show’s graphic density—pencil, pastel, wax crayon, chalk, charcoal, felt-tip—as indeed do numerous tools, including brushes, palette knives and airbrushes. Slow pans across banks of stylized roses are recurrently utilized to connote a romantic mood (for both serious and comical purposes), while hearts are incorporated into various frames to symbolize not only romantic attraction but also affection generally (including toward siblings) or the sheer appreciation of beauty in another person (both of the other sex and of one’s own). A succinct summary of the show’s graphic adventurousness is offered by the following review: “The animation is an integral part of the story and in many ways functions as a completely independent character with its own personality and point of view.... Quite often a character will say one thing only to have the art or text contradict or twist the meaning, providing a deft and efficient method of adding nuance to the story” (“His and Her Circumstances Anime Web Turnpike Review”).
Also worthy of notice, from a stylistic point of view, is the employment of live-action footage in the closing credits of several episodes. These primarily feature high school interiors shot from intrepid angles. The closing-credit sequence for Episode 19 is among the most dramatic, as it presents cels from the installment being set on fire. Also memorable are the live-action image of a toy train moving through an auditorium-like space filled with dangling lights (Episode 24) and the shot of the ship sailing through icy seas (Episode 26). An overtly self-reflexive moment is supplied by the next episode preview placed at the end of Episode 23, which focuses on a Gainax employee at work in the studio. The next episode previews generally feature the voice actresses for Yukino and her younger sisters Tsukino and Kano reading the script in the recording studio. From Episode 15 onwards, the scenes are starkly minimalized, offering solely the performers’ voices over images.
Although some of the more daring stylistic strategies come into play once the show has advanced past the halfway mark, there is plenty of evidence that experimentation had been a vital part of Anno’s aesthetic agenda right from the start. This is clearly borne out both by the opening-credit sequence and by Episode 1, “Her Reasons.” The former constitutes an adventurous visual preamble of autonomous artistic value, regardless of its thematic connections with the show itself. All of its key images either counterbalance or supplement one another by moving in either opposite or analogous directions. Ascending and descending patterns of motion are concurrently alternated, as are vertical and horizontal orientations. Elegant chromatic harmonies and contrasts aptly enhance the tag’s visual impact in conjunction with compelling variations in the pacing of shots.
The theme of Yukino’s and Souichirou’s duplicitousness provides the sequence’s leading thread. This is assiduously communicated through classic visual tropes typically utilized in the articulation of the divided-self topos: doubling, pairing, shadowing, splitting, mirroring, parallelism, juxtaposition and contrast. Additionally, these motifs are interwoven with a plethora of images alluding, contextually, to the characters’ cultural setting and, intertextually, to Gainax’s own creative trajectory. For example, a portion of the sequence is filled by intensely solarized stills from the live-action footage proposed in the final part of End of Evangelion, with its distinctive snapshots of the urban environment at its most prosaic—lustreless buildings, pylons, billboards—as well as a memorable cat that could be regarded as Anno’s own avatar.2
Episode 1, in turn, instantly proclaims the director’s penchant for intrepid juxtapositions of scenes shot in a relatively realistic fashion (by anime standards, that is to say) and jarringly experimentative shots. At times, the transitions from one modality to the other are smooth, even gentle, and the audience is therefore comfortably eased into the action’s shift of pace and tenor. At others, they are so abrupt as to feel almost like assaults upon the optic nerve. (His and Her Circumstances is most definitely not, incidentally, an anime to be watched in excessive proximity to the screen.) The opening episode offers some paradigmatic examples of such brusque transitions. For instance, we are first introduced to Yukino by means of a fairly standard “corridor scene” of the kind one often comes across in school-comedy anime, as she is being profusely adulated by her peers and condescendingly “accepting” their flattery. Then, suddenly, we are treated to a highly stylized rendition of Yukino’s self-idealizing mania in which her image rises, literally larger than life, above a crowd represented in the guise of anonymous cardboard cutouts.
A further abrupt shift occurs as Yukino’s normal mien is snappily subject to super-deformation: a concomitant of her ire at Souichirou’s popularity. Likewise notable is the later scene in which the protagonist admits to being a “fake” and a “lie”: as the Yukino one sees in the school sequences, whom she describes as “the elegant me,” swiftly turns, the screen changes to an SD version of the coarse and obnoxious Yukino one sees in the domestic domain. The two types of images are also vividly contrasted at the graphic level: while the shots focusing on the “public” Yukino exude an eminently cinematic aura, the SD shots of the “private” Yukino come across as overtly hand-drawn and almost artlessly pigmented.
Yukino’s and Souichirou’s relationship develops so tentatively and ponderously, threatened by setbacks no less often than it is blessed by progress, that viewers may occasionally feel that the show’s animation machinery is sputtering on the verge of switch-off. Nonetheless, the methodically lingering pace adopted by Anno is part and parcel of an intensely realistic portrayal of the characters’ evolving feelings and corresponding attitudes. The realism is never impaired but, if anything, enhanced by the director’s flamboyant forays into graphic stylization. Key to this engaging depiction is the emphasis placed by Anno on oscillations in preference to neatly defined trajectories and unequivocal peripeteias. The action, accordingly, has no choice but to follow a desultory and discontinuous rhythm as it charts the ebb and flow of human interaction.
As indicated in the analysis of Episode 1, this formal trait declares itself from the very beginning of the show. Episode 2, “Their Secret,” for its part, is especially notable in its presentation of the protagonists’ both apparent and hidden motives, on the one hand, and of the inchoate nature of their laboriously evolving emotions, on the other. The installment offers two complementary perspectives on Yukino’s personality, highlighting both her resentment toward Souichirou and her budding attraction to the boy. Fearful that Souichirou, having accidentally penetrated her devious fabrication, will expose her, Yukino is at first immensely relieved when she finds that he is, in fact, prepared to guard her secret. Relief turns into aggravation, however, once the girl discovers that her schoolmate’s silence comes at a high price: She has no choice but to undertake massive extracurricular tasks on Souichirou’s behalf (particularly in the area of tedious paperwork pertaining to the countless committees in which he is involved), which makes her feel as though she had effectively become “Arima’s servant.”
Simultaneously, Yukino realizes that Souichirou’s dubious behavior places him on the same shaky moral grounds on which she herself has been so persistently standing. Yukino further senses that this affinity may indicate that she and Souichirou are somehow made for each other and that she might, ironically, be falling in love with him. Having, up to this point, been in absolute control of all her moves, the girl now dispiritedly concludes: “It feels like I’ve lost touch with reality.” At this stage in the story, the heroine may appear weaker than her male counterpart due to her inner dividedness in the face of his seemingly unequivocal agenda. Nevertheless, nothing is ever black and white in the microcosm of His and Her Circumstances (as in the macrocosm of Anno’s opus at large), and it soon transpires that the boy, who has liked Yukino for quite some time, is actually using his blackmailing ruse as a pretext for spending more and more time with her as they wade through mountains of forms, documents and data.
In Episode 3, “His Reasons,” it is Souichirou’s turn to step to the foreground as his own murky past is unsentimentally exposed. In a particularly moving sequence, we are presented with a shot of Souichirou as a small child, huddled and weeping in a dark room as the rain comes pelting down, followed by images of the toddler getting brutally spanked and then sitting alone in a snowfall. The frames derive considerable pathos from the alternation of a gloomy grayscale in the representation of the interiors and of the snowy scenery, and lurid juxtapositions of red and black in the depiction of a gnarled tree and of ominous metallic structures. From this point onwards, rain, concrete and steel rendered by recourse to those chromatic schemes will recur as objective correlatives for Souichirou’s depressive episodes. It is also noteworthy that Anno, revamping a ploy previously utilized in Evangelion, portrays infantile and teenage versions of the same character within a single scene as an economical means of evoking the sense of a split personality. This is clearly borne out by Evangelion’s Episode 22, in which the strategy is applied to the depiction of Asuka as she is about to touch her psychological nadir. The sequence is also intensely redolent of the playground scenes from End of Evangelion in which a toddler-sized Shinji dispiritedly erects and then knocks down a sandcastle to the unnerving accompaniment of a steadily oscillating swing.
Souichirou’s ghosts also take center stage in Episode 8, “Her Everyday/Beneath the Blooming Forest of Cherry Blossoms,” in which the character reflects on the numbing sense of loneliness that haunted him prior to meeting Yukino despite his unparalleled popularity. Echoing Shinji’s account of his life before becoming an Eva pilot, Souichirou observes that in the pre–Yukino days, life tended to go peacefully by without any real emotions ever coming into play.
The split-self trope foregrounded in Episode 3 is again invoked in Episode 24, “Different Story 1,” in which Souichirou feels increasingly dragged back into the tenebrous past in which nobody wanted him—or even tolerated his presence—and recognizes with trepidation the ever-escalating degree of his dependence on Yukino. In the episode’s most poignant moments, Yukino gently but forcibly encourages her companion to enter the dreaded psychic territory—symbolized by a pitch-black sky ruptured by blood-red clouds—in which Souichirou’s infantile incarnation is stranded, utterly alone and dejected. Souichirou at first tries to order the child to emerge from the dismal space in a peremptory tone, which only causes his younger self to cry harder. Yukino reminds him that this is not how he would have wished to be treated when he was indeed a small kid, and Souichirou gradually realizes that his sole hope of rescuing the weeping toddler—in other words, of allowing his submerged self to surface and accepting it once and for all—is to break through the barrier he has so carefully erected between his current and former personae and reach out to the bereft child with kindness and tenderness.
The frustratingly gordian nature of Souichirou’s and Yukino’s romance is incisively communicated by Episode 4, “Her Problem,” where the protagonists are shown to have reached an awkward phase in their relationship in which they are obviously more than just friends, yet less than a dating couple. Although they have bravely resolved to drop their masks, they are so used to playing roles in preference to acting spontaneously that an affective barrier persists. Yukino, who has always accomplished anything she ever set her eyes upon rapidly and with panache, can barely believe how arduous it is for her to confess her feelings without disaffecting Souichirou or else getting hurt. Yukino’s sister Kano wisely opines that Yukino’s emotional deadlock is a corollary of her constitutional tendency to give precedence to her personal feelings over anything else.
The extent to which intersubjective duties weigh upon the main characters’ personal lives is vividly demonstrated in Episode 5, “Days of the Labyrinth,” in which Yukino and Souichirou are required to supervise the preparations for the school’s “Sportsfest,” which inevitably draws them apart. To further complicate matters, the character of Hideaki Asaba begins to interfere with the relationship, claiming Souichirou for himself. Yukino initially detests Hideaki, not least due to his brash remarks on her unalluring looks, justifying her feelings on the grounds that the boy intends to “use” Souichirou as his “wingman” in the construction of the ultimate harem. The truth, however, is that Yukino sees Hideaki as a competitor threatening to take Souichirou away from her. Having got off on the wrong foot, Yukino and Hideaki spontaneously befriend each other the moment they realize they are not so dissimilar after all but actually share some vital personality traits—primarily, a shamelessly manipulative streak.
Having expanded its purview with the addition of the peacocky Hideaki to the cast, His and Her Circumstances ventures further into the realm of interpersonal relations in Episode 9, “Atonement for the Moratorium,” and Episode 10, “Everything from Now,” in which Yukino discovers a lethal enemy in the person of her classmate Maho Izawa. Maho suspects that Yukino has been merely playing a studiously scripted part all along, and never truly acted in accordance with natural inclinations. By means of astute argumentation and persuasive rhetoric, the girl manages to convince her classmates of the veracity of her account and, relatedly, of the validity of her character assassination. Yukino, accordingly, is rapidly cast in the role of the class pariah. With refreshing humility, she accepts her fate and tersely states: “I brought this down on myself ... I deceived them ... I guess I have to pay for it now.” As pragmatic as ever, however, the heroine establishes that there is simply no point in morbidly regretting her past actions without initiating any positive change and resolves to disclose her genuine identity at last: “This is the beginning of my real self,” she proudly announces at a climactic juncture in Episode 9. It is as a result of this courageous decision that Yukino begins, at last, to make some real friends who are not exclusively concerned with obtaining her assistance on academic matters.
Anno’s passion for multilayered personalities driven by tangled motives sonorously asserts itself when it later transpires that Maho, too, has been pursuing an unpalatable agenda in her public humiliation of Yukino. Episode 10 indeed reveals that her principal objective has been to manipulate the other girls in order to achieve a position of power over them and that the deceitful Yukino has simply supplied her with a pretext for carrying the scheme through to fruition. When Maho’s own shenanigan is uncloaked and it becomes blatant that she and Yukino are not vastly unlike after all, the two girls commodiously open up to each other. The seeds of an enduring friendship have thus been sown—laboriously, no doubt, but then none of the emotional journeys portrayed in His and Her Circumstances is ever anything other than toilsome.
The kind of dramatic twist orchestrated in Episode 5, with a focus on the enmity between Yukino and Hideaki, is reproposed with variations in emphasis and tone toward the end of the series, when Yukino becomes gradually acquainted with Takefumi Tonami. (This novel addition to Anno’s cast is a transfer student introduced in Episode 19, “Fourteen Days 1.”) Initially antagonistic toward each other, Yukino and Takefumi come to discover crucial affinities in their intrinsic natures. Feeling connected, specifically, by the realization that they both had to conceal their authentic identities for a long time, they eventually become close friends. The decisive shift occurs in Episode 22, “Fourteen Days 4,” in which we also find that in keeping with the dramatic logic pervading the entire composition of His and Her Circumstances, no resolution is without a downside. Thus, although the outcome of Yukino’s and Takefumi’s initially conflictual relationship is positive, it is nonetheless clouded by Souichirou’s suspicion that Takefumi is after Yukino’s heart—ironically, Takefumi in fact regards Souichirou himself as the unsurpassable role model.
The emotional impasse dramatized in Episodes 4 and 5 is partially overcome in Episode 6, “Your Voice That Changes Me,” in which Yukino and Souichirou are drawn closer and closer together. Nevertheless, the two characters’ knotty personalities still prevent them from fully opening up to each other even once they have managed to transcend the original stalemate. Souichirou is baffled by Yukino’s “selfish” and “twisted” disposition, yet incongruously wonders whether he is truly “worthy” of her love. Yukino, for her part, appears to doubt that she will ever fathom the boy’s secret depths. Stylistically, this installment provides an intriguing formal experiment in that it dramatizes the same events from Yukino’s and Souichirou’s points of view by turns, thus embracing a multiperspectival approach that both recalls Evangelion and anticipates FLCL.
Episode 7, “Their Estrangement,” provides an outstanding example of the transformation brought upon the two teenagers by their relationship (and attendant desire to redefine the values and ambitions they treasured prior to its inception), showing that Yukino and Souichirou do not care in the slightest about the mediocrity of their exam results—a consequence of their constant dating. Yukino has dropped to thirteenth position and Souichirou to third, which leads the girl to suspect that her boyfriend has been studying in secret. However, Yukino’s lingering competitiveness does not prevent her from frankly stating her priorities. Hence, although the school authorities regard the couple’s paltry achievements as a very serious problem indeed, maintaining that dating is incompatible with success in life, Yukino responds by persisting in her intention to be her real self at last and accordingly place personal feelings above academic obligations. The situation deteriorates to the point that the parents are summoned. Episode 7 makes it abundantly clear that in the protagonists’ cultural milieu, no personal relationship is allowed to unfold without external interferences resulting from overarching social and moral expectations.
As noted throughout this study and hinted at earlier in this chapter, it is a recurrent component of Gainax’s cachet to depict selfish adults blind to their offspring’s needs and aspirations. His and Her Circumstances is no exception: Souichirou is obviously the victim of parental abuse of the direst order, while the subplot revolving around the supercute but quite unsocialized persona of Tsubasa Shibahime serves to consolidate the theme of familial neglect. Souichirou’s guardians’ and Yukino’s parents’ magnanimous response to the sudden deterioration in their charges’ academic performance provides a refreshing change of tone on Anno’s part. Yukino’s father, whose behavior is typically more akin to that of an older brother than to that of a full-fledged parent, does not at first exhibit an especially mature attitude, insofar as he essentially regards the school’s reprimand as an opportunity to “fight for love.” He does, however, persuasively argue in defense of his daughter’s rights, indicating that it is precisely because he cares deeply about her intellectual and emotional autonomy that he does not wish to dominate her choices. Thinking and feeling for oneself, Mr. Miyazawa believes, far surpasses in value any kind of material or scholastic success. Voicing Gainax’s own philosophy, Yukino’s father adamantly maintains that “a single day in high school is far more precious than a month is in adulthood.” It is through a quintessentially Annoesque touch of dramatic genius that the character is enabled to morph from a peripheral actor bordering on the figure-of-fun category into a full-rounded sensibility.
The liberal outlook embraced by both of Yukino’s parents could at least in part be attributed to personal experience: They married young against the wishes of Mrs. Miyazawa’s father—whose relationship with Mr. Miyazawa is still of a cat-and-mouse nature—and know how crucial it is to learn to recognize one’s authentic feelings and to treasure them against all odds. A prequel to the portrayal of Yukino’s parents presented in Episode 7 is retrospectively provided by Episode 16, “Perpetuating Line,” in which it is revealed that Mr. Miyazawa, like Souichirou, was parentless and left bereft at a relatively young age by the death of his grandfather and guardian—a crisis that his wife to be helped him overcome with equal doses of compassion and courage.
When, in Episode 7, Souichirou’s foster father endorses Mr. Miyazawa’s position, pithily declaring “our son is a gift,” the faculty adviser for freshmen Mr. Kawashima (responsible for convoking the adults in the first place) concedes that he, too, has something to learn from younger people and that he is delighted to be finally dealing with students who can “think for themselves.” The character of Mr. Kawashima will incrementally display a truly endearing personality as the series develops. This shines forth in its full colors in Episode 23 “Fourteen Days 5,” in which he agrees to sponsor the play, written by Yukino’s friend Aya Sawada (a budding author of great promise), in which Yukino, Maho and Tsubasa are meant to perform in the course of the imminent school festival.
His and Her Circumstances gains increasing dramatic momentum with the introduction of the aforementioned character of Tsubasa, her putatively well-intentioned but dolefully immature father and her stepbrother Kazuma Ikeda—a charismatic punk rocker. The Tsubasa story arc encompasses Episode 11, “At the End of the First School Term,” Episode 12, “The Place of Happiness,” and Episode 13, “On the Subjectivity of Happiness.” These installments are replete with humor in the representation of the girl’s father’s utterly irrelevant excursions into film criticism (when he should actually be confronting a major familial crisis), and of Tsubasa’s furious reaction when Kazuma addresses her as “little sister” even though—albeit petite—she is actually his senior. Nonetheless, painful chords are struck by the depiction of the girl’s gradual negotiation of her demotion from unique object of worship on her dad’s part to a rather marginal position within the reconfigured familial structure, and concomitant decision to accept her new role in a brave attempt to be “happy” after all.
An elaborate intersubjective web is incrementally spun as the series progresses through the integration of yet more supporting personae and secondary narrative trajectories. Particularly intriguing is the subplot pivoting on Takefumi and his personal aspirations, articulated progressively over Episodes 19 through 26. This diegetic strand attests to the richness and diversity of the relational tapestry woven by Anno’s show. Quiet, composed and handsome, Takefumi is actually animated by an all-consuming desire for revenge. The object of his machinations is Yukino’s friend Tsubaki Sakura—a tomboy endowed with remarkable athletic abilities but lamentably scarce academic aptitude—who shielded Tonami throughout his early school years from fierce bullying triggered by his obesity. Tsubaki’s protective behavior, misinterpreted by Takefumi as a sign of sincere concern, turned out to be merely the outcome of a teacher’s instructions, and this painful discovery provoked the boy’s yearning for vengeance. Eventually, Takefumi recognizes that his pathological aversion to Tsubaki is, in fact, craftily disguised affection, while Tsubaki herself (having thus far professed a preference for girls) discovers that she reciprocates the feeling.3
A further digression into the broader network of relationships unfolding around the protagonists is offered by Episode 25, “Different Story 2,” in which Yukino’s youngest sister Kano is convinced that she is being stalked by a girl from her school. Kano turns out to be mistaken, her imagination having been arguably overstimulated by the fiction to which she is practically addicted. The humorously overinflated tone in which the adventure is couched, bordering on the mock epic as it does, provides one of the entire show’s most felicitous touches. Most significantly, such “digressions never turn into distractions ... and always manage to add something to Yukino and Soichiro’s [sic] relationship” (“His and Her Circumstances Anime Web Turnpike Review”).
While endeavoring to expand the scope of its psychological investigation through the inclusion of a galvanizing gallery of ancillary characters, His and Her Circumstances concurrently offers a bold formal experiment in its periodic recapitulation of the events dramatizing the developing bond between its protagonists in varyingly condensed or telescoped fashions—most notably, in Episode 14, “The Story Until Now (Part 1),” and Episode 15 “The Qualities That Appear Beyond That Voice,” in which virtuoso distillations of the most salient components of Episodes 1 through 8 and Episodes 9 through 13, respectively, are proposed.
No less commendable a facet of Anno’s style lies with his use of humor as a means of preventing potentially oversentimental scenes from deteriorating into mawkish melodrama. A paradigmatic example is supplied in Episode 17, “His Flitting,” by the scene in which Souichirou returns from a Kendo tournament that has kept him away from Yukino for several days and a moment that could only too easily have come across as soap-operatic actually yields a comic flourish. The Miyazawa family dog Pero Pero indeed manages to reach Souichirou and kiss him before Yukino has even fully realized that the boy is on the scene, which renders her characteristically furious. The humor, as is often the case throughout His and Her Circumstances, is intensified by a stylistic shift to the caricatural modality.
The series’ finale, and especially Episode 26, “Fourteen Days 6,” is unresolved. The protagonists have evidently not reached a conclusive stage in their maturation, which, given their ages, could hardly be expected, and are therefore still very much in medias res. This is demonstrated by the fluctuating nature of their reciprocal feelings. Souichirou, having embarked upon his relationship with Yukino as the seemingly more rational and self-possessed party, is now increasingly haunted by his abysmal past and tends to cling to Yukino as his only anchor to reality. As a result, he wishes to possess her and cut her off from the rest of the world even though, paradoxically, he realizes that this longing is utterly incongruous with his admiration for the girl’s freedom of spirit as one of her most commendable qualities.
These meandering emotions drag him further and further into the “darkness” he has so scrupulously sought to keep at bay since childhood. Yukino, for her part, remains deeply loyal to Souichirou and indeed aspires to spend more time with him but her obsessive need for his constant presence little by little gives way to the realization that the boy is a “separate” being with an autonomous existence of his own and that she, too, must foster new interests beyond both her formerly school-driven self and her recently developed romantic life. She and Souichirou may well be together “forever”—accordingly, it is possible that the main characters’ teenage romance will evolve into an adult relationship in the same way as the liaison between Yukino’s parents did.
Alternatively, they may end up parting with or without a modicum of angst to be negotiated in the process. As Yukino puts it in Episode 24, it is feasible that she and Souichirou met in the first place so that they could alter each other for the better through a mutual encouragement to understand and come to terms with their true personalities. However, this does not automatically entail that they will be bound together permanently: as they meet new people and open up to fresh influences, they are destined to continue changing. The development foreseen by Yukino is, therefore, ineluctably indefinite. Anno does not presume to know what will happen to his personae past the series’ closing installment, which is ultimately what makes His and Her Circumstances such an endearing and captivating story.
In its treatment of the murkier facets of human relationality, His and Her Circumstances could be said to echo Evangelion’s own concern with the inextricability of the individual from a tangled network of interpersonal obligations. At the same time, its somber moments bear affinities to the overall tone exhibited by the TV series Rumbling Hearts (dir. Tetsuya Watanabe, 2003–2004). This show’s themes are far more overtly harrowing than any of the narrative ingredients brought into play by His and Her Circumstances. Its take on the interdependence of singular and collective destinies is, however, comparable to Anno’s.
Instantly distinguished by endearing character designs and impeccably executed backgrounds for both its urbanscapes and its natural scenery, Rumbling Hearts demonstrates how generic formulae can be bent and reimagined when they fall into the hands of an inspired director and a talented animation team. The series indeed sets out as a fairly standard school romance, peppered with touches of slapstick and allusions to sports-based drama and furnished with a fundamentally predictable cast: the cocky teenage girl Mitsuki, her timid female counterpart Haruka, the laid-back youth Takayuki and his sidekick Shinji. However, Rumbling Hearts morphs into something much darker and deeper as the main characters’ whole lives are suddenly disrupted, and their aspirations shattered beyond any hope of repair.
Disaster hits when Haruka, who has had a crush on Takayuki for as long as she can remember and just lately started going out with the boy (largely thanks to Mitsuki’s efforts on her behalf), becomes the victim of a car accident that precipitates her into a three-year-long coma. Plagued by guilt, having indirectly caused Haruka’s involvement in the accident, Takayuki is thrown into a numbing depression. Mitsuki, who also feels deeply guilty due to her own oblique responsibility for the tragedy, endeavors to rescue the young man from his state of inertia, and the two become gradually involved in a tortuous romantic liaison. As they struggle to rebuild their lives, Takayuki and Mitsuki tentatively alternate between a proclivity to hold onto to the past and a longing for fresh beginnings. In the process, viewers are both encouraged to empathize with the characters and to acknowledge the extent to which they are personally accountable for their predicament, acknowledging their altruism, on the one hand, and self-dramatizing egotism, on the other.
On the diegetic plane, the show is most remarkable in virtue of its resolute avoidance of sequential linearity and adoption instead of a multilayered perspective that allows the narrative to travel back and forth in time. This ploy powerfully highlights the emotional tug-of-war at the heart of the story. The interweaving of tropes derived from the time-honored traditions of mythology and fairy tale with a dispassionate dissection of some of the most contorted sensibilities in the entire history of anime imaginatively enhances the series’ density.
Rumbling Hearts pursues the dark side of romantic anime so trenchantly, yet not monolithically, delved into by His and Her Circumstances. Indeed, with the exception of a sprinkling of slapstick gags revolving around Takayuki’s waitressing coworkers, the series is unequivocally pathos-laden. Another popular anime romance of the early 2000s, the TV show Peach Girl (dir. Hiroshi Ishiodori, 2005), based on Miwa Ueda’s cherished manga series of the same title, recalls several of the more lighthearted moments in Anno’s series. The English versions of both Rumbling Hearts and Peach Girl, it should be noted, were directed by Zach Bolton, which in itself invites a comparative assessment of the two programs as embodiments of the conflicting sides of anime romance.
The narrative of Ishiodori’s program pivots on high-school student Momo (the Japanese word for “peach,” incidentally), as she tirelessly endeavors to dispel the image conveyed to her schoolmates by her glamorous looks (including a too-die-for suntan and a flaming mane that result not from vanity but from a staunch commitment to swimming). Branded by many as a tarty bimbo, and cast very much against her will into the role of outsider within the school community, Momo is actually a conscientious and motivated student. Her only friend, the apparently innocent and well-meaning Sae, quickly turns out to be a ruthless antagonist, hell-bent on accruing everything Momo possesses to her own personal image and discredit Momo herself in the process.
Cheesy as this may sound, Peach Girl manages to deliver a dispassionate and realistic anatomy of secretiveness, jealousy, vanity and greed, which is precisely what links it most overtly with Anno’s show. Indeed, it could be argued that in its more intense episodes, Peach Girl’s content is dramatically on a par with the emotional and psychological turbulence explored in His and Her Circumstances. The ethical lesson communicated by Peach Girl, moreover, directly echoes the message promulgated by Anno in his own typically idiosyncratic fashion, namely, the exigency to trust honest and impartial communication as an ultimately more dependable—though no doubt demanding—guarantee of genuine relationality than any amount of Machiavellian scheming.