jaegerryzky
I had a sneaking suspicion that Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho might be good. For the record, I focused a lot on Ishizuka Atsuko's directing, and how her amazing track record (along with Hanada Jukki on series comp) made me sit up and pay attention when the premise didn't grab me. Not to toot my own horn too much (note: some tooting will happen), but this was my called shot. I thought if anything would be a dark horse this season, this would be the one. Boy, how right I was.YoriMoi is quite possibly one of my top five anime of all time. And I've seen a few anime. I'd have to do the math to give you an exact number, but I can't imagine it being less than top ten. I know I say this after having just seen the finale, and that these feelings do fade, but I've suspected this would be the case for a while now, if the series continued to avoid faltering. Not only did it do that, it kept exceeding expectations. That's a tough feat when expectations get as high as they were by mid-season, but Ishizuka-san and her team kept managing it. This was a stunningly well told story throughout.There are so many reasons why this series worked so well. One of them is its relationship to its premise. "High school girls go to Antarctica" isn't especially compelling, but it takes this premise and treats it seriously. For a near-reality story like this-as opposed to crazy sci-fi or bonkers fantasy-that's important. There's basically only one change between the real world and this world-the Shirase I in the anime was sold to civilians-and it clearly approaches the difficulties of getting four high schoolers on a boat to Antarctica. That's typified in how they tried to buy their way onto the expedition-and how it didn't work. Even then, getting them on the boat was probably the shakiest part of the whole series, since it required the writers to introduce a golden opportunity in the form of Yuzuki. That and Hinata's hasty decision to join in on the quest are about the weakest elements of the whole series, and they don't even make for bad episodes! They're minor issues at worst. That's stunning in and of itself.Another thing this series does really well is accurately depict what it's like to be on an expedition to Antarctica. Some of the scenes we saw were shot-for-shot recreations of actual pictures or film of Antarctic expeditions. Basically, any time they were outside refueling or working on an experiment or cleaning, it was faithfully reproduced from real Antarctic images. Only two elements-the civilian expedition and the high school girls in Antarctica-are fantasy. Everything else is extremely faithful to the truth. The same is true of the episode in Singapore. It shows an attention to detail that you can use as a selling point to convince your friends to watch. Someone who cares enough to get all the little details right will probably care enough about the big story beats. And convince all your friends! Please. I want the industry to make more shows like this.But the biggest reason this show is so damn good is the characters. Kimari, Shirase, Hinata, and Yuzuki all have their own arcs throughout the story, and they have a collective arc too-like Shirase says in the finale, Antarctica is a place "where you have no choice but to overcome things with your team, with nothing else to get in the way." All the Antarctica stuff matters, but the writers also picked a premise they thought they could work with-characters striving for a grand goal is strong fodder for a good story, indeed-and then crafted characters who would both not only be the type of people who would opt into this journey for one reason or another, but who would grow and change through their experiences there.Kimari's arc is early. The very act of deciding to do something, rather than continuing to drift through life, is her big decision point, and the fact that she keeps not giving up culminates in her victory (of a sort) when Megumi comes clean about spreading rumors and tries to break up as friends. (That Kimari doesn't accept the break up speaks volumes about her as a person.)Yuzuki's is all wrapped around how her job has prevented her from making real friends, and if the writers hadn't followed this thread through to its conclusion, it would have been incredibly frustrating that they used this to get the girls on the boat in episode three. But they did, with Yuzuki's uncertainty and naivete in friendship coming up many times, until it culminated in a delightfully messy dissertation on the nature of friendship.Hinata's had to do with how much she doesn't like to be a burden, doesn't like others to worry about her, and the scars she gained from her so-called friends betraying her in the past. Hinata is an incredibly difficult character to write because she's naturally predisposed to defuse conflicts, which is why the writers were so wise to often pair her with the uber-stubborn Shirase, who barreled through her defenses eventually. Hinata's anger in episode 11 was so true, and Shirase's big speech that led to Hinata breaking down in tears was catnip to my soul.And then there was Shirase. She in some ways had the most classic arc, centered as it was around the more typical dramatic fodder of a dead parent. Her quest was also classic: My mother died doing X? I'm going to go there and figure out why, to get closure. "Classic" doesn't mean "cliché," though, and Ishizuka-san's team executed the climax well. What I found most impressive was how many layers they gave to Shirase throughout the story-stubborn, mean, wild, nervous, impulsive, implacable-so that, when she finally reaches closure and seemingly changes in the final episode, it all works. All of that was in her all along. It was just twisted, until she could finally begin to heal.These characters were tailor made for this story. That might seem an obvious move, but that's actually really hard to do. This is the promise of original anime: that they'll tell a story we've never seen before that's fit specifically for this medium, and designed to fit the number of episodes they have. There was no wasted space in this series-it was neither too long nor too short. The writers made it so. Even all the secondary and minor characters were full of personality-wise Kanae, forceful Yumiko, aloof Yume, weepy Nobue, flighty Hanami, hopeless Toshio, silent Dai, taciturn Gin-and Megumi even had a stealth arc off screen. Hell, Takako even ended up being a huge presence in the story, not just as "Shirase's mom" but as a character in her own right, and that's a pretty smooth trick considering she was dead before we arrived. (She reminds me of Shiro of The Blue Exorcist series in a way, in the outsized impact she had despite being dead for most or all of the series.) It all really gives you the feeling of a fully realized world. There's that attention to detail I was talking about earlier. I get the feeling that the writers had so much other content they could have used, but they didn't. They didn't try to stuff. They made sure they needed each of the thirteen episodes to tell their story, and then they filled in any small pockets with cool Antarctica stuff.Most of all, what I love about Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho is the messages it conveys. Though not without its dark points-one of the main character's mothers is dead, for fck's sake-this is a story with a relentlessly optimistic worldview. It shows us that persistent effort can be rewarded, that journeys are worth taking, and that taking that first step can lead to amazing things. It shows us the right kinds of friends to be-to be honest and open, to be stern about failures and forgiving of mistakes, and to defend those friends against people who would hurt them, even if it means being a Shirase-level jerk. (That's the best kind of jerk to be.) It shows that it's okay to have dark, petty feelings, and that sometimes, "In you face!" will take you much farther than high falutin ideals. It even shows, with Megu's picture in this last episode, that living your best life can lead to those around you climbing to greater heights themselves.I love this series deeply, and I wish I had watched it when I was a freshman in high school. I was a cynical little bastard, far more so than I am now, because I hadn't yet realized that calling myself a "realist" actually meant I was a cynic who didn't want to admit it. I have a feeling that, had I seen something like this or a handful of other stories that have shaped my outlook-I may have done a few things differently. Great art can do that-it not only gives you something to think about, but can change you for the better, like Terry Pratchett's Discworld series did for me. To take a grand journey, and learn more of what life has to offer while still young... I've taken a few of those journeys, and they're grand. Nothing so impressive as an expedition to Antarctica, of course. But still. If only.If I knew an anime-curious high schooler, or am related to one in the future, I'll be making sure this series gets in front of their eyeballs. This was a marvelous story, from start to finish. The bottom line is this: They took a premise that's better than we thought it was, characters that were tailor made for the situation, and told a story so breathtaking that it kept exceeding expectations up to the last episode. I laughed. I cried. I felt more optimistic because this story now resides in my head.Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho is one of my favorite anime of all time. I couldn't place it exactly right now, but definitely within the top ten, and quite likely within the top five. AOTS certainly, AOTY quite possibly. We'll have to see. What I know is that you should watch it, all your friends should watch it, and any self-respecting purveyor of fine character-focused coming-of-age dramas should watch it. It's one of a kind, and we're lucky to have it.
