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Anime alice silent clock5/19/2023 ![]() In one fantasy scene, the supposedly grown-up girl sings an “old” idol song – again, a piece of the past driving her hopes for the future – while she has visions of being a fairy-tale princess. In some ways, it’s a shame Nazuna isn’t the main viewpoint character, and forced to evaluate her own decisions, which are far more complex and contradictory than Norimichi’s. Nazuma also projects herself into the future, striving to look and act older than she is – she scolds Norimichi for talking about “running away”, which doesn’t sound nearly as grown-up as eloping. The girl character Nazuna may be running away from her parents, but she’s inspired by the actions of her mother, which led to Nazuna’s own birth. In similar vein, the film makes play with curved and corrugated glass, suggesting mystic windows into reshaped worlds.Ī huge proportion of anime centres around teenagers, but Fireworks catches the feeling that adolescence is when one’s future is most open-ended, when your future could diverge the most depending on the decisions you make, the character you build – do you dither, or do you act? The film also suggests subjective kinds of “time-travel” for teenagers looking into past and future. They stand for love and passion, of course, but also for magic as perceived by children, and those who’ve not left childhood behind. The titular fireworks appear in multiple shapes and geometries through the film. Some motifs pay off in retrospect, such as the myriad water droplets scattering from a sprinkler, a hose and Nazuna’s own hair as she shakes it in the sea. ![]() Sometimes their significance is obvious, such as the huge rotating wind turbines in the backgrounds, recalling the hands of a giant clock. While Fireworks is more mainstream-looking, it’s full of recurring visual motifs. However, Fireworks boasts the ornate presentation of the Shaft studio, famed for such series as Bakemonogatari and Madoka Magica. Most viewers will have seen this kind of story – Fireworks comes out the same year as at least two American time-loop films, Happy Death Day and Before I Fall. Before the sun sets, he’ll see her at her most alluring, talking temptingly of running away then he’ll see her hopeless and helpless, being dragged off by a stern parent.īut then a miracle happens, and Norimichi gets the chance to turn back time, and try again to help Nazuna… and then to try again… and again. ![]() Norimichi loses – mostly because Nazuna’s beauty scares as much as attracts him – but he’ll bump into her again. He finds her lying by the school pool and she challenges him and a male friend to a swimming race. Gradually, Norimichi’s day coalesces around Nazuna. These oddballs are middle-school kids, in a town by the sea called Moshimo (a Japanese name that can be read as “What if?”) At first, we mostly see a band of boys they race to school on bikes and skateboards, ogle girls shamelessly, and argue about such matters as whether fireworks look flat or round when you see them from the side.īut one of the boys, Norimichi, notices a female classmate he likes, Nazuna, standing by the sea, looking isolated and forlorn. For a large part, though, it’s another film about oddballs mucking around. Or take a series like Steins Gate – it gets “big” eventually, but much of it takes place in one unglamorous room in Akihabara, where oddball characters do silly experiments with microwaved bananas.įireworksis another “small” film, though its final scenes have playful suggestions of a realm where scale is meaningless as tiny as a droplet, as vast as a galaxy. Think of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a story with no cosmic disasters or flying cars, just a girl hopping around a few hours or days. And yet, anime often goes for the small time-travel tale. After all, T-Rexes or Terminators aren’t more expensive to animate than present-day Japan. In Britain and America, time-travel is often the pretext for a big story, and doubly so in animation.
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