CLANNAD After Story 22
The climatic finale of the present story arc is invariably putting a period behind those tear-stained letters some may have penned over the past weeks. It’s a tough job from the perspective of a planner, someone who will ultimately look back at the CLANNAD series and try to see what more could have been done, constructively, to eek out every ounce of emotional attachment and mental capital that we have all invested in over the course of over an year. And many more for fans of the original game. It’s tough because sometimes you just don’t know how it’ll turn out before you make it.
But at the same time, from the perspective of a critic, someone who will ultimately look back at the CLANNAD series and try to put a value on it, we will wonder why we’ve walked this far and how much more should we be following along. I believe this comparison is one that a successful adaptation of CLANNAD will have to suggest to its viewers and potential fans, because it’s one that will take us back and help us remember just why the journey worth remembering. It helps us relive those moments that made you glad you were watching the show. It helped me remember the few moments I even contemplated writing something down about baseball, for example, or the moments that I did more than just contemplate. Even if it’s stupid like the very valid complaints about the aspect ratio.
One more thing did strike me as worth writing about. And it’s more than just how attractive Nagisa is in her older form:
When Okazaki walked down that country path to his ancestral home, I think that is not unlike the repeated scenes of the sad girl (gradually, in snow) over the entire series. But I don’t know. If there is meaning, it’s asking us to find it even if there may not be any. It’s like how the little robot wanted to go somewhere but we don’t even know where it is. The journey completed only through a miracle of understanding, a moment of truth, a whisper from the muse, or whatever you call when inspiration from heaven reaches down. And that is really why CLANNAD is worth writing about, when it evokes those feelings.
That said, these moments are rare, personally. There were maybe just a couple moments when the visual imagery evoked real emotion (damn AR getting in the way), but there were definitely one that evoked some emotion in episode 22, when the invariably controversial reset was coupled with just how pretty the whole affair was, regardless to the affront of any pre-conceived notion of fairness in narratives. LOL. Well, I guess I do miss Sunohara and his easy going humor. Those worked well. I love you too Fuuko, but you are, sadly, no match.
Year in Review: She’s Going the Distance, a Great Feat of Strength
Going to mention a list of 12 lists of 12 items each. So a nested list. All 144 items. Annotated for the most part. Don’t ask me why I use these pronouns the way I do…
CLANNAD Is a Warm Blanket…
…like, on a chilly late-Autumn evening, cuddling to a cup of hot chocolate listening to the November rain beating down on your windows. There’s just a blanket separating you and the freezing path to a lower energy bill. You know better to doodle in front of the seemingly-warm glow of the TV for too long, and morning is just a long blink of an eye later. All the more you appreciate that artificial warmness, that pocket in time and the pocket of warmness where you seemed to finally positioned yourself in that comfortable pose on the couch. Edging your toes outside the blanket is forbidden by your fleshly instinct.
But you don’t remember that blanket once you go back to work the next day, don’t you? That’s the magic of CLANNAD. From the opening notes in the OP to Nagisa’s high stepping, rhythmic beat in the ED, it’s like a magical pocket of time and perception. Suddenly life is better than it seems, and just like a blinking moment later it vanishes out of sight, out of mind. At least that is how I felt After Story is like.
The feeling I get is that the Kara no Kyoukai approach–a series of movies–will do the After Stories…stories a lot more justice than this episodic thing we have here. Ah well, it seems everyone hates the Toei renditions of Key’s properties except a few people like myself.
Imouto no Yousei
This is what happens when you whip out old seiyuu albums and burned mixes on a boring Sunday afternoon.
I defer to WAAAAAGH for his pointed illustration of Mei in CLANNAD. But while reading about it (there and elsewhere …) and watching the particular episode myself, it occurred to me that this was exactly the same, magical formula sans the cheesy 90s pop. This magic formula, I mean–
It’s nothing about feet, even. It is the strange feeling of seeing, say, this–
And the word “no” flashes in my head like the idiot light in my car; the physical embodiment in a warm, glowing yellow, that adorns the traditional sense of caution. I hope I don’t need to tell you what little girls should be afraid of, right?
What I do want to see, you mad lovely MAD makers, is someone chopping up episode 3 of CLANNAD After Story into a minute and half of lovely, well-directed Kyoani goodness that showcases Mei as the lead character to Dinogiga. Heck, all you need to use is the song, and I’ll be a satisfied customer.
CLANNAD the Movie or Incremental Upgrades Leaves the Heart Wondering
I enjoyed the CLANNAD movie. But I realize it became a very narrowly tailored exercise in, well, dramatic reenactment of something that’s probably more powerful.
The problem with CLANNAD, and to some extent the Key anime adaptations we’ve seen so far, is that there is no way to traverse through all the key “checkpoints” without making a mess of the story. The story either loses some of the impact because of that, or the story just gets too convoluted for a straight-faced narrative.
In a more general sense, multi-pathing visual novels are like arcade racing games. Specifically, it’s those games that takes a couple tokens to play where you have to not only beat your AI opponents, but make various checkpoints to get more time. When you run out of time, even if you are ahead of the pack, you basically lose.
In this modular way to look at drama, where trying to hit every gut wrenching twist and turn becomes the purpose of an unstoppable, artfully sly narrative, we should see quite a few of those checkpoints in the duration of the story. But when as applied to visual novels, the difficulty arises when your checkpoints are not dotted across one race track, but in a city of one-way roads that necessarily limits you to only a subset of all possible checkpoints available in the game out of the total.
The approach in a theatrical adaptation is necessarily much more single minded. We want to go in and get it done in an hour-and-half. TV series can pursuit forks in the road, but movies lack the luxury of time to backtrack (so much).
And in exchange, the CLANNAD movie took us deeper and all the way through with Nagisa’s story. But at what cost? Was it worth it?
I think how you answer those questions will be the litmus test to determine what you enjoy the most out of an exercise in drama.
Perhaps more relevantly, with each iteration, each Key adaptation, both Toei and Kyoto Animation do a better job. At least that was my impression.
