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Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.

My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.

I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.

To contact me see my contact page.

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Yukino Miyazawa from episode 19 of the Gainax anime Karekano (His and Her Circumstances)

His & Her Circumstances

This article was originally published on the website "Overly Friendly Squid" in 2019.

Kare Kano was originally a shoujo manga series by Masami Tsuda, and was adapted in 1998 by Studio Gainax and directed (mostly) by Hideaki Anno and bizarrely being released in the West as "Tales at North Hills High" The show itself is a great watch, bucking the trend of 90s romcom and being the last great romance before the genre fell into a gaping VN shaped hole in the 2000s. But in this article I won't be talking about the contents of the show, but rather the strange circumstances under which it was made, the backdrop of the industry at the time and the players involved.

In the late '90s, Gainax was the big cool studio. Since the 1980s they had become the spearhead of modern anime, with their retail store General Products and their co-founding of WonFes, not to mention their actual animation department, defining a generation of otaku with Ota no Vid and the hugely celebrated Evangelion series. Evangelion had been one of the most ambitious TV anime of all time, bringing original shows onto national television. But when you mention Eva, as well as Gainax another huge name in the industry also pops up. Anno. A cultural kyojin who all but disappears from the industry in 1999, which also happens to be during the time at which Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou was airing. My thoughts are that this is no coincidence, but I'll get to that. Basically, hot of the heels of End of Eva and his arthouse documentary Love & Pop, Hideaki was the king pin of the king studio; the once and future otaking. His next project was an anime adaptation of Kare Kano, from what I can tell a highly popular shoujo manga printed in the prestigious Hakusensha LaLa magazine. Being his 4th director role in under two years (Death & Rebirth, EoE, Love & Pop), the man was on some kind of insane roll and ready to implode as he was already known for doing (see Eva 25/26). These are the actors and this is the stage, so in the words of Drosselmeyer: "Now show me a magnificent tragedy!"

Even from the start there were problems, with the original manga being very female oriented, and very focused on girl drama and the romance aspect. Anno, and the very ethos of Gainax, were at almost the exact opposite end of the otaku spectrum. Being Tokusatsu, military and fanservice obsessed: the bombastic animation, left field story-boarding and bizarro directing of Gainax projects seems like a strange fit to such a series. The adaptation very much accentuates the com in romcom, capping the general comedic vibe with quick tone switches into well placed romantic drama scenes, with the animation varying wildly and the show being very loose with following the storyline and keeping scenes in order. The show was fast-paced for a anime romance, your average show might end a cour of episodes with a confession at most; and that's if their feeling daring today. Kare Kano arrives at the hero and heroine (Arima and Yukino) being officially in a relationship by episode 4, a deviation not only from the norm, but also from the source material. With wacky editing and a much more mature feel, all aspects of the relationship are explored in rapid succession, my balls were basically orange (or whatever the opposite of blue is). The actual show's budget was never high. Being non-action oriented and generally more niche than a shounen show, actual animation cuts are rare, but the mastery of key animators such as Imaishi, Tsurumaki and Ishida combined with Imaishi's storyboarding and Anno directing made every frame appealing, due to it being on screen for a long time, it is the perfect show for reaction images. As the show progressed this fact became more and more pronounced, with backgrounds almost completely being forsaken by the second cour, and even the disappearance of lip flapping for conversation scenes. There's even one continuous scene of a game of Uno played by Yukino's family, an obvious ploy to appeal to the fans of Toei's new franchise, YuGiOh.

According to third/fourth hand sources (trustworthy I know, but what can I do as an English speaker), Masami Tsuda was getting more and more displeased with the adaptation, saying that it was focusing too much on the comedic side of her series and not placing enough stress on the emotional scenes. I'm sure she was also not happy with the story alterations, which is brought to a T in episode 18. At this point the symbolic animation was reaching Evangelion levels of ridiculous, Anno had once again brought in Bach as the track and things were heading for something that 90s Japan was definitely not ready for. Anno had two high school characters in a relationship and of age, have sex. Yeah I know, lock the shutters and shut the curtains. The scene was actually sent back to the studio from the TV company for being too explicit (it really isn't but sure). The TV aired version just completely cuts the scene, making a bizarre cut from the two in Arima's room to Arima throwing up in the bathroom and Yukino having just disappeared, the true, uncut version was later included in Japanese DVD releases, but only as an extra. The censored version was also the version released in the US, which is one of the reasons most Western fans have such a bad opinion of the show's ending.

Although it doesn't end there. Masami was apparently so enraged with this, as well as the quickly enclosing TV institutions, that she brought the case to JC Staff (co-producers of the show if I didn't mention before) who persuaded Gainax to persuade Anno to stop being an idiot and direct properly. Anno promptly quit the show. Three quarters of the way through the show he just up and left his position as director. I can only imagine the panic this caused with anime schedules being as they are and Gainax being possibly the worst studio for times of crisis. Hiroki Sato was brought in at short notice, a man who had not directed a thing in his life and hasn't directed a thing since. Hiroyuki Imaishi was also brought in to try to keep the ship afloat as storyboarder. The effect was the infamous episode nine. If you haven't seen it the closest I can explain it is through its obvious similarity to Inferno Cop. Drawings were kept on the original genga for the most part, not coloured, stuck onto lollypop sticks and moved around like a Punch and Judy show. It's top class Imaishi with scenes that are almost identical to some in Kill la Kill, a show that is still a decade and a half away. Despite the consensus, I'm a huge fan of this episode, crazy practical effects, weird storyboarding and set-pieces that'd do better in an episode of Ultraman. At one point Yukino grows to the size of a skyscraper and fights a photograph of a man turning him into a skeleton.

This whole affair ends with the outro, a live action video of the staff at Gainax bringing out all of the episode's cel and genga, putting them into a pile and setting them all on fire. This is possibly my favourite episode of all anime.

The rest of the series is very toned down, the animation quality recovers somewhat and during his time off, Anno apparently secretly made the final episode's storyboards, which was used for the season finale, a completely new story to cap off the show with a reasonable ending. Oh yes, another thing, once Anno had left the project, he went into hiding and changed his name from Hideaki Anno to Hideaki Anno, a fact shown in the updated OP and ED credits for the show's director role:

^[TR: BEFORE- Director Anno Hideaki (kanji), AFTER- Director Satou Hiroki and Anno Hideaki (katakana)]

Anno has never again directed a TV anime, and left the studio several years later. Masami has never again gotten a TV adaptation of her manga either, with Kare Kano being her most popular work. And so here we end the story of a insane man and a controlling woman, two artists who wanted very different things and were both left unsatisfied.

And so these were their circumstances.

His and Her Circumstances...

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Written by iklone. 2018-10-23 15:25:21

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