Melancholy is underrated as an emotion in fiction. Used properly, it can be immensely powerful, but the danger is always that it’ll slide into sentimentality. There were two shows this year that attempted to walk this tightrope and both managed to succeed. Of the two, She and Her Cat: Everything Flows was always the most likely to succeed. It is after all based on an Makoto Shinkai short movie, who you may know from the recent mega hit movie Your Name. The series takes the overall story of the movie and expands on it, taking a four minute film and turning it into four seven minute episodes.
As the title indicates, this is the story of a young woman and her cat, living together, as told from the perspective of Daru, the cat. It starts when the woman has just started her first job after college and the cat is already at an advanced age. Which means you spent the whole series anticipating and dreading Daru’s death. It’s the nature of cat stories and it is what gives this series its melancholy mood, underscored by Daru’s reminiscences about the past with Her. Available over at Crunchyroll, watching it will take you less than half an hour but if you’re a cat person like me it will leave you an emotional wreck the rest of the day.
Planetarian tackles a more grandiose sort of melancholy. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, a man who calls himself a Junker wanders into an abandoned city only populated with killer robots to scavenge for supplies. Chased by one such robot, he ends up at an old department store and when exploring it comes across the store’s old planetarium and its caretaker android, still functioning thirty years after the staff evacuated. Said android is incredibly moe, cute and cheerful, but the Junker is not impressed. Too young to have know life before the war, he has no use for planetariums, cute robots or anything not related to survival. The android, Hoshino Yumemi, on the other hand knows nothing but the planetarium and doesn’t realise why no customers have visited in 29 years and 81 days.
Needless to say, the junker’s attitude gradually softens over the course of the five episode series, helping Hoshino restore the Zeiss projector and get the planetarium up and running again for one last show before the emergency power that had kept it and Hoshino active runs out. Hoshino gets her show in episode three and it’s the heart of the series. Here we are, in the middle of an abandoned city on a planet torn apart and devastated by war, where survival is all that people are capable off, being shown everything humanity lost by an android that was the peak of human achievement, unaware of the depths her creators have sunk to. It’s a poignant scene that echoes through the rest of the series. As with She and Her Cat, you know Planetarian will end in tragedy but even if Hoshino died, it was enough that she got to play that final show for an audience she could never have expected to have.
This was day nine of the Twelve Days of Anime. Next: Fune wo Amu.