It’d be a shame if I went through this season without writing something about Aoi Hana. So, here you go. Shame averted!
How about those sketchy, pastel, storybook-looking backgrounds? They began to stand out to me during the ninth episode, but seeing a traffic light illustrated in that manner toward the beginning of the tenth and most recent episode really brought the backgrounds to bear in my viewing experience.
How surreal is that? Perhaps not as surreal to you as it strikes me, but I, for one, am not accustomed to seeing technology treated like this visually. The backgrounds invoke in me a sense of fantasy and romance; consider another recent show with a storybook aesthetic, Kemono no Souja Erin. Given that feel, I wouldn’t have expected there to be a closeup of an electric machine at all. There are cars, of course, but not much is made of them; they’re simply present (and I believe that, like the cell phones, they’re illustrated more like the characters than the background).
But what strikes me is not the emphasis on the stoplight, it’s how the stoplight seems an extension of the natural world. It fits neatly into the space that surrounds the characters — a space into which they themselves don’t seem to fit neatly.
It looks very much as if they’re standing in front of a painted stage backdrop (funny how, toward the middle of the series, we actually see stage productions in this stage-like world). Perhaps this imbues the show with a sense of order, deliberateness, and even dramatic freedom from some of the constraints of reality, but it must be said that Aoi Hana doesn’t exactly beat around the bush in its depiction of relationships. The obvious sexuality variance aside, I’d say it handles the many faces of rejection and the dreaded friend zone in a wonderfully familiar way.
Perhaps the visual duality reflects the dualism (or multiplicity) of certain characters’ love lives. Kyouko and Sugimoto are involved in some way with both a man and at least one girl; Okudaira doesn’t seem to care much at all about gender; we learn in the tenth episode that Kagami has (or had) not two, but three admirers within the Sugimoto family. In most cases, things don’t come together neatly for these people. Fumi seems to be the surprising exception; she was used for a rebound relationship, but she has since made it quite clear that she has no use at all for Sugimoto’s childishness. We might say that Fumi has learned how to better navigate the disjointed world, and though I’ve seen some concern expressed around the sphere as to how the show will manage to wrap up satisfyingly with one episode to go, Fumi’s success is climax enough for me. The rest can be an epilogue, for all I care.
We might also note that being estranged from one’s surroundings is relevant to being a teenager. With that in mind, I’m intrigued by the variety of characters drawn into the show’s tangled relationship webs and shown against many of the stylized backdrops (as opposed to, say, the parents, who are with few exceptions fixtures of their homes). Can we assume that Shinobu, Kou, and even Kagami still have growing up to do? Probably so. I’m reminded of the question raised indirectly in Genshiken: does growing up ever really end?
