Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Blue Period

Streaming: Netflix

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Yatora is a high school student making his way through life on auto-pilot. His studiousness makes getting good grades easy, and he spends most of his free time pulling all-nighters with his friends to watch soccer. He doesn’t see much value in more artistic hobbies, partly because there doesn’t seem to be much potential for financial success in pursuing them. His frenemy Yuka is also a member of his school’s art club, and her standoffishness toward Yatora definitely has had an influence on his preferences.

When the school’s art teacher assigns the students the task of painting a representation of their favorite setting, it takes Yatora a while to come up something that really sparks his interest. But several times, as he’s emerged from an all-night soccer viewing, he’s marveled at the beauty and quiet of Shibuya before it wakes up for the day. The soft blue color of the buildings as the sun comes up and begins to reflect off of the window glass helps him to feel a sense of peace. When he uses this an an inspiration for his painting, he suddenly finds himself drawn into art, something which he’d originally brushed off as boring and frivolous. As his passion for it reaches a fever pitch, he decides he’d like to try to enter art school. But to do that, Yatora has a long, difficult road ahead.

Impressions: When I was younger, I knew for sure that I’d end up going to art school. I loved to draw and paint, and my budding interest in anime provided me with tons of visual inspiration to help sustain that interest. I’m not entirely sure what happened to me along the way, but I’m sure it was a combination of factors. Art school tuition, which I knew neither I or my parent could afford, was daunting. I’d been told time and again that there was no money or stability in art. I met lots of folks who were just much better than I was, and I lost my will to try and match them. I’m sure it’s a story that’s familiar to many people – one of giving up on your passions and settling into a more stable situation out of fear or duty or what have you.

I’m mostly okay with the situation now; to be honest, going to regular college was a good reminder of how much of a disaster I am dealing with having to study and meet deadlines in that way. I don’t think I could have made it as an independent art contractor or designer any more than some of the more accomplished artists I know could deal with having to work long days in an office. But I often wonder what might be different if I hadn’t been so ready to let people in my life and in society in general talk me out of my naïve childhood dreams.

Yatora is a guy who gets to live life on easy mode. It doesn’t take much work for him to get good grades, something that might very well open up quite a few lucrative options for him as he progresses along the typical pathways toward success. But the allure of a world he’s mostly brushed off to that point, along with the enthusiastic-yet-practical support of his art teacher, mean that he’s able to look at this new hobby as a potential future and as a challenge to be overcome, instead of an impossibility. His parents’ financial situation mean that a public university is likely his only option, and the acceptance rate for the only public art school is dreadfully low. This isn’t an easy situation to overcome. But this is anime! A medium where young men (and often young women) are able to work hard and achieve nigh-impossible feats of accomplishment in spite of ridiculous odds.

I find myself feeling both intrigued by and cynical about this story. Sometimes it’s exhilarating to see someone else succeed where you’ve failed. Other times it feels more as though someone’s turned a mirror toward one’s own inadequacies, mocking those who haven’t found the means to make their own dreams a reality. I can’t say where I am with this series yet. But art in general can be a means for its practitioners to work through their own issues, and for its consumers to relate themselves to ideas and themes that they may find familiar in some way. I’ve spent many years finding kinship with anime characters, navigating my own troubles and triumphs through their stories and emotions. Perhaps one need not directly pursue art in order to gain something from its existence.

Pros: I like how this episode manages to portray the difficulty of translating a feeling into an image on a page. As Yatora looks out his bedroom window one evening as the sun is setting, he finds himself compelled to try to draw the rooftops that he sees. He feels a sense of frustration when his unpracticed pencil lines are unable to do justice to what his eyes can see. That’s so incredibly relatable, even to the things I’m currently working on. I can’t adequately express how often I’ve watched an anime and felt really strong feelings about it, then been completely unable to express those feelings in my writing.

Cons: For an anime focused around art, I would have liked the character animation and general visual quality to be a little bit better. The show looks serviceable – it’s not ugly by any means, and I do like that the character designs allow the characters to look a little closer to their stated ages than some other series. But the color quality is sort of muddy and the animation is fairly average.

There’s also a scene where Yatora repeatedly deadnames his friend Yuka. There’s probably a lot to that relationship that isn’t being explored in this first episode, but even on its most basic level that’s a pretty jerky move.

Content Warnings: Smoking/drinking. Deadnaming a trans/nonbinary character.

Would I Watch More? – I’m curious about this series, and now that Netflix is releasing it in a more reasonable manner it might help me remember to stop back and watch some subsequent episodes.