Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Nana – episode 1

April 10, 2006 on 7:16 pm | In Nana | 2 Comments

As an anime fan, it is my solemn duty to ignore demographics and watch whatever the heck I feel like. Nana is the third Yazawa Ai property I have come to watch, and at last I can understand the complaints about the Paradise Kiss aesthetic. Yazawa Ai has a distinct style that has been animated with aplomb in the forms of Gokinjo Monogatari and now in Nana, the tale of two Nana.

Nana has spent a year working so that she can afford to live in Tokyo. On a snow-logged train, she meets Nana. (Hereafter I shall call the first Nana “Pink Nana” and the second Nana “Black Nana”) Pink Nana and Black Nana talk for five hours – or, more accurately, Pink Nana talks about herself while Black Nana listens – but when the train finally arrives they split without a word.
Pink Nana cannot stay with her boyfriend, Shouji, so she goes looking for an apartment. The apartment that she finds is coveted by Black Nana, and they come to the decision to share their lives (and halve their rent in the process).

I really enjoyed this because it instilled a love for life and a general overpowering enthusiasm that was not visible anywhere in Paradise Kiss. Pink Nana is simply over the top cute with her lust for adventure and new things. Very briefly she falls into the trap of “I want to be content as Shouji’s housewife!” but she realises that this is not a particularly fulfilling avenue to pursue.
Pink Nana is very much a character who exists in a romantic universe all of her own, filled with a general optimism and faith in others. When she has her faith “betrayed”, as it were, by the cynicism of Black Nana, she is hit all the harder by it, which means that her extremes of happiness and reactions to meanness are hilariously polarised.

The show is very pretty, with Yazawa’s semi-lanky designs actually getting their air here, and lots of SD for my enjoyment. It is a very rich looking series, and I certainly hope that they can keep this level of production up. It’s all very stylish and simply a joy to look at.

I’ve read that at one point one of the Nana goes by the name of “Hachi” (ie “eight”). I don’t know; I kind of like Pink Nana and Black Nana. We’ll see how it goes. For now I’m just going to bask in a modern Yazawa series that isn’t entirely bogged down in its own despair and dullness. These characters might not act entirely normally, either, but at least I like them.