#to be fair she showed up pretty early last time too Yuzuki was the one I waited until dark for 👻

[mofffun]

Erica is walking the TGC Kitakyushu runway today!

vid 1 at 01:38, vid 2 at 02:48

[ladyloveandjustice]

Winter 2018 Anime Overview: A Place Further Than the Universe

Mari “Kimari” Tamaki is worried she’s wasting her youth and wants to go on a big advenure. She meets a girl name Shirase who is mocked for her obsession with going to Antartica. It turns out Shirase wants to go there because her mother went missing while on a research trip there three years ago. She invites Mari along. With the odds stacked against them, the girls begin the long, difficult journey towards Antartica- and make a few new friends along the way.

It’s going to be hard to do justice to just how GOOD A Place Further than the Universe (or Sora Yorimo Toi Basho) is and put it into words, but I’m gonna try my best. Bear with me.

I’ve heard plenty of folks say this is the kind of anime you can reccomend to people who don’t watch anime to let them know how good it can be, and that is 100% true. It’s such a grounded and genuine series that treats its characters with respect and never takes the easy way out. Where a lot of shows rely on shortcuts and lazy archetypes, A Place Further than the Universe always treats characters as complex people.

Take Shirase. At first blush, you might peg her as the typical stoic dark haired girl with a squishy center, but she proves to be so much more than that. She’s withdrawn, but also extremely blunt and expressive. She’s got a confident presence, but is easily embarrassed over certain things. She’s a skeptic who takes a while to trust, but once she makes friends she is fiercely loyal and ready to fight for them. She has a temper, but not in the typical over-the-top anime way- her anger is always warranted and treated seriously. She’s openly vindictive and spiteful. She takes satisfaction in proving people who hurt her or her friends wrong and rubbing it in their faces. She’s knows she can be a jerk and she’s proud to own it. She can also be silly and rush in without thinking- she’s not at all as mature as she first comes off.

She has a complicated relationship with her grief over her mother- she’s resentful, she’s lonely, she has a lot of questions, she wants to understand, she’s in denial about the unlikelihood of her mother being alive, she doesn’t know how to feel towards her mother’s friend...and that’s not even scratching the surface of the character. She has so many contradicting qualities yet they all feel organic to her, like they would to a real person. I love her.

And she’s not the only great character. All of the main four are very distinct, with their own character arcs and unexpected qualities and motivations. Whether it’s Shirase dealing with her grief, Kimari’s struggle to break out of being dependent on her friend and the conflict that causes, Hinata coming to terms with the reason she dropped out of school or Yuzuki trying to make friends for the first time, they’re all interesting and emotional to watch in their own ways. They all come together beautifully for this coming of age story.

On top of all that, the series has absolutely gorgeous animation. There’s beautiful scenery and direction, and the art style is just super pleasing. The solid, thick lines, the interesting colors, the beautiful eyes, the relatively realistic proportions- I just very much love all of it. Especially since all the girls actually look like high schoolers. And they act like them too- they’re adorbs, but they’re never cloyingly cutesy and they don’t have their rough edges sanded off. There were so many messy emotions in this show, so many real interactions- the girls really felt like friends who talked shit with each other, had trouble communicating, sometimes clashed but nevertheless had a strong connection.

It also obviously super awesome this series is about teenage girls going on a scientific expedition thanks to their determination and tenacity. But the series also has plenty of adult women in prominent roles too!

The most prominent scientists leading the Antarctica expedition are women, who go up against incredible odds to get their expedition launched and mentor these young girls during the trip. We see women working together and supporting each other as scientists, explorers and businesspeople, just as a matter of course. It isn’t a world where men don’t exist- they’ve got men working under them- it’s just the ladies are the ones in charge.  Seeing independent, self-reliant, awesome women take command and go on an amazing science adventure was such a treat!

A big aspect of a later part of the series is Shirase’s relationship with the head of the whole project, who is her mother’s best friend. (There are heavy quotes around “best friend”. Shirase has two moms.)

(See, it’s canon).

Gin is still carrying a heavy burden of guilt for losing Shirase’s mom during their last trip, and obviously has a lot of conflicted feelings about this one. Shirase’s relationship with her is complicated and damaged, with Shirase feeling resentment and jealousy but also a deep bond with this woman and a desire to connect to her mother through her. Both of them are prickly and bad at communicating, so it really is a journey for them to try to understand each other. It’s great to watch their relationship deepen and grow, and see how Shirase was shaped and inspired by both her mother and Gin.

This series also does a great job representing all the small and big struggles and obstacles the women have to go through to get to Antarctica. There’s a lot of attention paid to the red tape and prep work, representing what a pain it is without being boring about it. The unglamorous aspects of the trip are not glossed over- there’s an entire episode where the girls are horribly seasick throughout. There’s such an attention to detail and commitment to realism that I really felt like I learned something from watching this series and like I gained a good idea of what one has to go through to journey to Antarctica. I can really tell a lot of research and care went into this show.

In addition to physical realism, there’s so much emotional realism in this show I really appreciate. This series expressed a lot of things I’ve never seen expressed much in fiction, yet that I’m so familiar with and feel so keenly. Like when you want to do something so badly and working so hard, but when you get there, it’s underwhelming. Not because there’s something missing, but because it just doesn’t click like you expected. Going to a beautiful place and thinking “well, this sure looks just like the pictures. Pretty. yup. Not sure what’s different about actually being here.” Not wanting to take the last step of a journey because if that ends up disappointing you, you couldn’t handle it. The self satisfaction you take in having someone depend on you and how it can be hard when that dependence stops.

The series also has a lot smart, unusual resolutions and morals that really made me respect it. One episode shows you don’t have to forgive people who hurt you to move on and that it’s perfectly justified to want those people to live with the knowledge this can’t be fixed, to not want to see them let off the hook. There’s such a strong message here that it’s okay to be a little selfish, and petty sometimes, it’s okay to be sharp and blunt sometimes and it’s okay to want the satisfaction of showing up people who doubted you and wanting to rub your victory in their faces! Spite can be a great motivator! In a world where girls are encouraged to always be sweet and accepting, it was pretty cathartic to see that. APFttU is a warm and lovely series, but it also recognizes the importance of “unattractive” emotions.

On top of all that, this was just a well crafted story. It had really sharp dialogue, it was genuinely funny and all the emotional beats landed really well. This series bought ALL the feels. It’s not too often I cry at anime, but I super cried over the second to last episode. The raw and poignant depiction of grief there was just too much to handle.

Other than the fact it deals heavily with grief, the only thing I can really thing that could be affect people badly in this anime is a moment in an early episode where a mom gets mad at her daughter and approaches her with a ladle in hand, while the daughter screams in fear. It’s played as a joke and there’s no indication that she actually really beat her daughter, but I understand that just the threat and implication can be hard to watch, so fair warning. The series is otherwise not skeevy at all- aside from Hinata’s boobs bouncing a couple times (non-exaggeratedly) and her commenting on them there’s nothing I’d really qualify as fanservice.

Basically, I can’t recommend this show enough. It really is something special. What a  wonderful and moving coming of age story. It’s Atsuko Ishizuka’s first original anime, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. So support her and this series!  Show it to your friends! Show it to everyone! This show deserves to be better known.