This video is sponsored by Crunchyroll, where you can both watch To Your Eternity and read
the original manga. links to both in the dooblidoo. Now, with that legally required disclaimer
out of the way, plus a warning of general spoilers up to the end of the first arc, please
pretend like this video started with a cool, atmospheric cold open.
*ahem*. It learns, and it remembers.
That’s how I’d describe the Protagonist of To Your Eternity, if you’d asked. It
is a perfect, featureless, immortal sphere that can transform into a perfect copy of
any object, or dead life form, that leaves a strong impression on it. It was cast down
to earth one day by some capricious deity so that it can do that, and he can watch.
Thankfully, so can we, in one of the best anime in the best season of anime in what
might be the best year for anime ever – from a viewers’ standpoint. The Animators are
kinda going through HFIL to make all of it. But at least in the case of this hotly anticipated
adaptation of the second big ticket creation of A Silent Voice mangaka Yoshitoki Oima,
that labour is bearing forth some delectable-looking fruit. Directed by Masahiko Murata, Maestro
of the most my favourite sports anime ever made, Baby Steps, with music by Fate Go anime
composer Ryou Kawasaki, and if that’s not JRPG enough for ya, an Opening theme song
by Hikaru “Kingdom Hearts” Utada, this anime is very, very good. In pretty much every
way you’d hope it would be. Its limited animation segments are tightly
paced and strong in their cinematic storytelling – the same directing strength that made
Baby Steps so good despite the clear limitations of its production. And on top of that strong
foundation it dollops generous portions of sakuga; in, action scenes, comedic moments,
and most importantly, all the bits where bits come off our immortal – but very much not
invincible – lead. And then fly back into it, magically sewing the wound back together
like nothing ever happened. Baccano is one of my favourite anime EVER.
As longest-time viewers of the channel will know, it was the subject of the first ever
Mother’s Basement video. Followed by Baby Steps, funny enough, but that’s not the
connection I’m making here. Both Baccano and To Your Eternity are rare examples of
graphic cartoon violence involving immortals. Specifically animated at studio Brain’s
Base. It’s always fun watching Ladd Russo laughing a lot and slaughtering a lot, as
he likes to do, but the real sakuga magic happens when he leaves the room, and the crime
scene cleans itself back up and packs itself away under the newly reformed skull and newsboy
cap of the boy he thought he just capped. This is a very specific kind of animation
that I just can’t get enough of. And that blows because Baccano is the only thing I’ve
seen it in and there are only 16 episodes of that. But now, we’re getting at least
20 episodes of this. Plus all these gorgeous transformation animations… the sakuga goblin
that lives in my noggin is very, very happy with this show. It’s every bit as beautiful
as the masterpiece of a manga on which it’s based.
Thankfully, that descriptor also applies to its story, which pulls off another rare sort
of artistic feat that I personally happen to love.
To Your Eternity doesn’t just use its fantastical premise to show us sakuga-infused supernatural
sights. It asks us to view them, and the mostly natural world around them, through the eyes
of something utterly inhuman. Putting us in the shoes, and mind, of something that can
look like us, but doesn’t think like us at all. A truly Alien intelligence.
It doesn’t have a personality, motivations, or anything else that typically defines a
character, particularly a protagonist. It learns, and it remembers. Changing from blank
slate – or blank marble – to rock, to dead dog, to dead dog owner a couple very
sad weeks of trekking across barren tundra later. Then, after crawling its way out of
that hopeless situation, and dying six times in the process, it gets yeeted off a cliff
by a big angry polar bear with a back full of arrows. Life do be like that. But nothing
gets the immortal down. It doesn’t know how to be down. It only knows how to learn,
and remember. Eventually, someone teaches it how to eat,
and calls it Fushi – derived from Fuji, or “immortal,” which is, yes, very on
the nose, but to be fair, the someone who named it, March, is a literal child. Who doesn’t
have that much time to think about it because she’s being chased by the army of some far
off iron-age empire that demands ritual sacrifices from its less fancily-smelting vassal tribes.
Even from our extremely limited starting viewpoint, it’s clear as day that this this is a vast
world we’ve been dropped into, comprised of many different rich, clashing cultures.
The first two we encounter, Yanome and Ninannah, are as alien to us as they are to Fushi, though
we can at least infer some things about them and the people there through our knowledge
of history, and basic understanding of how a human sacrificey situation like this would
feel if it happened to us. And we share this naïve, yet relatively informed view of these
events and the world with the first arc’s co-protagonist, March herself. Who is violently
aware of how unfair her lot in life is, but also hasn’t lived enough of it to give up
hope entirely Her story is a short and bitter tragedy, made
all the more painful by how sweet and innocent its hero is. March is at that age where her
sole ambition in life is to be a grown-up, more specifically, a mommy. Something she
does get to experience, however briefly, with Fushi, teaching him the bare essentials of
life – Food, and Gratitude – before hers runs out, far too soon.
And he and we are left with only the memories. Only the specifics of that fate are spoilers.
Untimely death is the sad inevitability faced by everyone who befriends the undying thing,
though it comes to some far too sooner than others. In time, it will learn to grieve each
of these losses. But before that, it remembers them, right up to their final moments, which
it can replicate perfectly, right down to the wounds that killed them.
March is agonizingly human, and her point of view gives her part of the story the emotional
context we need to become invested. because again, Fushi, the character whose point of
view we will be sharing for the entire span of geological history this story covers, is
very, very not human. Though in time it will learn to pretend well enough for us to relate
to its eternally mounting grief. The naïve think of immortality as a blessing;
once you’ve lived enough, you understand that, unless you share it with literally everyone,
it’s an incomprehensible curse. A life with no lasting companions, no fixed purpose, and
no end. This isn’t the first story to explore this theme by a long shot – the Xbox 360-exclusive
Sakaguchi masterpiece Lost Odyssey covers a thousand year’s worth of it in some of
the most beautiful writing you’ll ever read in a video game – but To Your Eternity still
stands apart by letting us follow its lead through each excruciating loss from the very
beginning of its overlong life. In that beginning, we have zero frame of reference
for connecting to or understanding Fushi. It’s a boy that was a dog that was moss
that was a rock that was a ball that was nothing. It has no parents, no friends or relations
or earthly attachments of any kind. No context for what it’s experiencing save for the
handful of things we’ve seen it experience. We may cry when the boy dies, but it doesn’t.
It doesn’t know how. Though it doesn’t take a psychic to predict that it will one
day. Because, thanks to the series remarkable writing,
we are able to grasp how it thinks. How it learns and remembers. How its thirst for more
raw information drives it until it knows enough to actually care about the stories happening
to it, and work toward more complex goals. It grasps food and gratitude, then manners,
then pain. With help, it learns language, to better understand and express what it learns
– and by the way, the scenes where he does it make for excellent beginner-level Japanese
practice, if anyone needs some. We’re Eight episodes in now and Fushi is
very much still learning to be human, but he’s getting there. And if you’re paying
attention, the anime helps you understand, perfectly, how he got there. One shortcut
the series takes to make this happen is connecting his development to stages of childhood through
the other protagonists whose perspectives we share. March is but a wee babby, while
Gugu, still gregarious and curious, is somewhat older and wiser when we meet him. As they
both relate to Fushi in his various stages of growth, it helps those of us who also had
childhoods do the same, and remember a bit of the learning process he’s going through.
But Fushi is still very much learning to be human, and there is that truly alien, raw
information-collecting process, uninfluenced by instinct, at the core of its consciousness.
Strong character acting in the animation helps to convey that, and once he starts talking,
equally strong voice acting on the part of his Seiyuu, Reiji Kawamashi, adds to the inhuman
effect – the way he talks kind reminds me of Migi from Parasyte. But we still need some
context for even that much to make sense. Lest we end up with another Balan Wonderworld.
To Your Eternity is the rare piece of visual media that I think would be utterly incomprehensible
without a narrator. A statement that I expect will be weirdly contentious. Some anime fans
– dumb anime fans, in my opinion – have knocked the series for having a narrator at
all. It’s one of those things that people who don’t actually write but know some of
the “rules” of writing see as an automatic sign that someone’s doing it wrong. But
like all tools in a writer’s kit, even the most ruggedly-overworn ones, it does have
its purpose. There are narrative functions that only a narrator can serve.
If you read, or listen to audiobooks, you already know this all too well.
I’m reminded of a framing device used in Cibola Burn, book 4 of The Expanse saga, on
which the Amazon Prime sci-fi show of the same name is based. It’s basically Gundam
without the robots, if you haven’t seen it, but even if you have, I’d also recommend
reading it, because while the novels may not have its fancy high-budget set design, they
offer a much deeper look into the characters’ thought processes.
Normally I’d say “into their heads,” because it’s a better turn of phrase, but
the particular character who thinks the passage I’m about to quote – from infrequent interludes
between the chapters proper - doesn’t have a head. Or body. Or thoughts of its own. Though
it does contain them. It’s a self-reproducing molecular computer that incorporates organic
life into its operational structures in order to… well, that’d be a big spoiler. And
all I want to highlight here is how its thought processes – or programming patterns – translate
into prose: “—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches
out it reaches out— One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches
out. It is not conscious, though parts of it are. There are structures within it that
were once separate organisms; aboriginal, evolved, and complex. It is designed to improvise,
to use what is there and then move on. Good enough is good enough, and so the artifacts
are ignored or adapted. The conscious parts try to make sense of the reaching out. Try
to interpret it. And it reaches out.”
I’ve thought about those sections almost every day since I first heard them. When the
concept was first introduced it seemed almost impossible to wrap my human mind around the
idea of an inorganic computer wrapping itself around a human mind, yet through those carefully
chosen words, that think and emote within the bounds of rigid, mechanical, repetitive
mental processes, I’m able to comprehend it.
If language is the source code of the human mind, then narration allows us to inspect
any element of any character that it touches upon. Though I suppose in To Your Eternity’s
case, it’s more like reading comments as we watch the code execute, since the narration
comes courtesy of Fushi’s as yet unnamed creator, and as such, offers insights into
how both of them look at the world. Now, I won’t deny that Narration is the
writer’s equivalent of a power tool, and it can very easily be miss-or-overused to
the point of doing more damage than it fixes. But given how vast the gap in general understanding
is between us monkey meatsacks and undying mimic balls made by absentee deities, not
to mention the gods themselves, we need the help in bridging it. To Your Eternity understands
the power it’s wielding, though, how easily it can render redundant any visual storytelling
elements, and as such uses it sparingly. Only when no dialogue will suffice, and only to
represent that One powerful voice. All these tools combine to give us a fascinating,
unique perspective on a story that seeks to impart a different kind of perspective; a
true sense of the scale of a world, building up from a single rock, and the meaning of
eternity. What this series is attempting is already audacious and ambitious enough without
literally alienating its audience from their main traveling companion at the long journey’s
outset. Yet that Audacity, and the empathetic aplomb with which Yoshitaxfraud Oima pulls
it off, ensures that these first steps will be as strikingly memorable as its hard-earned
last. When it… eventually reaches them. The inhuman POV also makes each relatable,
human face we do get to spend time with feel that much more special and significant. Helps
to mark each one in our minds, like soot on the wooden wall of an old boat turned hut.
Proof that they lived then and there, so that through each of the wildly different and experimental
stories the series tells, we, like Fushi, can Remember, and Learn.
You might remember, in the part of the video I told you to forge, that crunchyroll is today’s
sponsor. If you’d like to watch the series, or read it, there are links to do both in
the dooblidoo. And if you don’t have crunchyroll yet, you can sign up for a 14 day free trial
to start doing either by heading to crunchyroll.com/basement. Lemme know in the comments below who your
favourite immortal in anime or manga is and why. And while I’ve gotcha here, I implore
you to check out my recent videos exploring the power of cartoon violence, and asking
how much anime is too much. Until next time, or until you click one of those, I’m Geoff
Thew, Professional Shitbag, Signing out from my mother’s basement.