Tsurune’s anime twist on archery will have your mind racing through time

In a nameless town on the border between town and country, at a nondescript high school like any other, arrows pierce through the idyllic landscape, hit their target and echo over a meadow. The martial art of Kyudo, Japanese archery, is the focus of Kyoto Animation Tsurune. The anime is currently at the end of its second season, Tsurune: The connecting shot (which you can watch on HIDIVE), and while it may sound like any other sports anime with a bit of coming-of-age drama for spice – a tried-and-true genre of the medium – Tsurune draws the viewer into a nostalgic dream world that vaguely feels like a memory of a life you may or may not have lived. The show’s beautiful visual language evokes a longing to connect, a desire to reach back and relive the warmth of a memory that may or may not be yours. Nostalgia par excellence.

Tsurune is a beautiful show. The Kyoto Animation team put their heart and soul into making this show look amazing. Is it the High action shots of arrows in flight or the attention to detail in the background artwork that brings a local sports center or high school classroom to life, there’s an energy that pulses through Tsurune both in the intense narrative moments and in everyday scenes. Minato Narumiya’s journey back to kyudo after a tragic accident is made all the more impressive by the diligence of series director Takuya Yamamura and his talented collaborators.

Telling a sports story in anime can be a relatively easy exercise. Your youth group has a goal, usually entering a national competition, and they grow and experience life toward that goal. Often there is a rival who has mastered the sport better than the main characters of the story. Tsurune has all these elements. Minato and his Kazemai High kyudo clubmates are aiming for the national title, but Shu Fujiwara and the private school kids at Kirisaki High stand in their way. Yamura Storyboards these cliche elements perfectly

, but they serve a larger philosophy and tie kyudo to something more, amplified by the incredible quality of the animation. Most anime won’t break the budget to make one Train station look photorealisticBut Tsurune does. Art director Shoko Ochiai has been creating beautiful background graphics with Kyoto Animation for years, but Tsurune is the first project in which she has taken on the artistic direction. She spent her time perfecting her craft in other Kyoto animation shows like Violet Evergarden And Sound! euphonium shines through here Tsurune‘s superbly composed landscape.

On the way to becoming a beautiful sports anime, Tsurune also picks up on the special emotional resonance of restorative nostalgia. When we think of nostalgia in a modern (mainly Western) framework, we envision remakes of popular 80’s or 90’s TV shows, or taking the aesthetics of earlier eras and remixing them in the present to create something with a retro vibe. This is referred to as reflexive nostalgia because it draws on the individual consumer’s feelings towards the nostalgic cultural assets that are presented to them. It is a relationship between you, your feelings and the thing. See the original cast of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers back together, wake you up in your feelings and remember your childhood? If so, then that’s reflexive nostalgia.

In an anime like Tsurune, the nostalgia you associate with isn’t necessarily just yours. It is linked to a collective set of nostalgic ideals that often take the form of some sort of national identity. It works to restore something that was feared to be lost, or is about to be lost. In this case, it is a Japanese identity swept away by modernity and the influence of globalization.

Restorative nostalgia in Tsurune is everywhere as the show is imbued with a certain notion of what it means for a city to be a Japanese city. To be a person living in this Japanese city. To know the feeling of deep Be in this Japanese city. Crucial is this third part, the feeling, in which Yamamura and his collaborators excel. And it presents itself in a way that is both obvious and subtle.

The first is the environment itself: the nowhere-but-everywhere city. Tsurune takes place in an unnamed city based on actual locations in the very real city of Nagano. A show that seeks to revive the classic idea of ​​a Japanese identity is never set in Tokyo. The sprawling cosmopolitan city is far too cosmopolitan to be the backdrop that needs aesthetic, restorative nostalgia to thrive. Kyoto Animation knows this, and for years the studio has used real-world locations that exist on the border between town and country. The coming-of-age drama of 2012 Hyouka was based on the city of Takayama in Gifu Prefecture. 2013 Free!

used the city of Iwami in Tottori Prefecture (Japan’s most sparsely populated prefecture) as the setting for his anime “sexy boys do sexy swimming”. I once visited the city of Nishinomiya to see locations from Kyoto Animation’s 2006 classic The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. My Japanese friend was completely confused as to why I had to visit this boring suburb between Kobe and Osaka. Even after an explanation, he still received no objection.

By setting anime in a city like this, the balance between nature, cultural tradition and modernity forms a perfect nostalgic relationship that maximizes recreational potential. TsuruneThe unnamed city of is an even more striking example of this phenomenon, as the viewer can imagine that the series could be set somewhere in Japan. While there are fearless Anime location hunters running blogs and posting on Twitter with their findings, the anonymous everywhere helps the general viewer relate to the show’s themes, as they are less likely to get bogged down in the details of the city in the background.

Art Director Ochiai and frequent collaborator Azumi Hata, who acts as Tsurune‘s color designers have a keen eye for turning these unassuming, everyday places into inhabited works of art. They share a love of giving age to the objects in their animated worlds and capturing the worn, authentic feel of places and spaces. When the series flashes through again Minato’s years of Kyudo practice at home it shows the wear and tear of the hardwood. It is a visual manifestation of a memory that evokes feelings from the past for Minato’s father. Touches like this make attitude Tsurune

intentionally beautifully nostalgic. It’s happening all over this show. A school hallway with dust particles filtered through sunlight, the local shrine cloaked in maple trees, or even the vending machines outside the train station at sunset call out to the viewer, perhaps to evoke memories of the time spent in these spaces in his youth, or perhaps to establish a connection to a certain aesthetic ideal that someone in a one-bedroom apartment in the concrete jungle of Tokyo might have lost touch with.

When you put the martial art of kyudo on this stunning background, Tsurune reinforces the nostalgic longing for a national identity by centering the story around a Japanese art with centuries of history. Kyudo has evolved throughout Japan’s history from a learned martial art to the present day, where it is taught as an art of discipline. Kyudo has a spirituality that might be vaguely linked to Buddhism or Shinto (though never explicitly) and that spirituality and philosophy is seen through the show’s narrative and aesthetic motifs. Yamamura is careful to emphasize the precise movements and distinctive aesthetics associated with Kyudo-In Tsurune. Finding beauty in the drawing of a bow or in the ritual steps an archer makes entering the archery hall. The sound of an arrow striking a target, the ripple and flap of traditional hakama pants, and the gliding of split tabi socks on waxed hardwood floors are all presented as part of this nostalgic package.

Once the narrative focus is on the kyudo philosophy and the lives of high school boys, Ochiai and her team can get to work with aesthetic flourishes and accoutrements to reinforce their message. Softly falling cherry blossoms, the chirping of cicadas and mysteriously favorable gusts of wind signal a closeness to nature, the rattling of a coffee can from the machine, the shopping street with mom and pop restaurants and shop windows or the quiet neighborhood street where Minato lives are incredibly beautifully done and make it so Everyday Extraordinary. It fuels a nostalgic longing for the everyday.

There is a stubborn pride in this idea of ​​a uniquely Japanese aesthetic, and Kyoto Animation is determined to keep it alive Tsurune. The show is a coming-of-age drama embedded in a sports anime that ponders whether we’ll ever really “grow up.” When does growth stop? Isn’t it a rather cyclical process of conflagration and rebirth, of demolition and rebuilding? When you think about it that way, the relaxing nostalgia that runs through the series makes sense. If we only look ahead we may grow, but we lose our connection to the past. Japan will just be one giant Tokyo. If instead we look back at that history, staying connected to that collective aesthetic and the identity that it projects, might that make our growth richer? Tsurune demands this of its viewers through its visual storytelling, creating a world of almost surreal beauty, yet somehow tapping into a relatable, familiar nostalgia that is nothing short of magic.

Tsurune can be streamed on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE. Tsurune: The connecting shot streams on HIDIVE.