Kanon Volume 1 Media DVD Region 1 Genre Romantic Comedy Publisher ADV Films MSRP $29.98 Running Time 100 minutes Aspect Ratio 1.78:1 Anamorphic Widescreen Release Date 01/01/08 Age Rating TV PG Website ADV Films Discuss this title in the Forums Submit your own Review

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January 01, 2008

by: Serdar Yegulalp

A reigning masterwork of moe TV gets its U.S. release.

Disc Description: Yuichi Aizawa used to visit his cousin Nayuki all the time when he was younger, but now he can hardly remember a thing about those visits. And upon his return to finish his senior year in high school while living with his Aunt Akiko and his cousin, the blank spots in his memory have become more and more worrisome. After a seven year absence, Yuichi makes a valiant effort to adjust to his vaguely familiar surroundings.

Bits and pieces of his past come back to him, but his memories elude him still. Why can't he remember? What is he blocking out?

Disc Features

• Episodes 1-4
  
• English Audio
  
• Japanese Audio / English Subtitles
  
• Clean Opening / Closing Animation
  
• Previews
  
• Kanon: A Close Look At An Anime Production House, Part 1

Content: (This section may include spoilers.)

I’ll start with a confession: I’m no moe fan. Nossir. Not one bit.

And yet here I am, reviewing a moe story adapted from a bestselling visual novel, chock full of coincidence and long-standing promises and deep connections to the past. Sometimes you can elevate this sort of thing into the realm of art, as Makoto Shinkai did with 5cm/sec (also being released by ADV in 2008). But most of the time what we get is simply content to be a celebration of nostalgia and wistfulness for its own sake.

So, wait, are those bad things? No, and I’d be silly for saying so, whatever my tastes lead me to watch normally. It’s no worse to get a vicarious cry out of a sad story than it is to get a cheap thrill out of watching stuff get blowed up real good. Kanon is (from what I can tell) routinely held up as an example of this sort of thing at its best in another form, and from what it I can tell it’s quite well-done. It hits all the right notes for this kind of material, throws in some goofy comedy to lighten things up, and looks good in a way a lot of other shows don’t, no matter what their subject matter.

The story revolves around teenage boy Yuichi, freshly back in his snow-laden home town to live with his cousin Nayuki (translation note: “Nayuki” is written, somewhat prophetically, with the characters for name and snow) and her mother. He lived in this town before, years ago, with Nayuki as a playmate, but a lot of his memories of that time in his life have grown dim. Nayuki has a bit of spunk to her (especially in the English-audio edition of the show, courtesy of Jessica Boone) and a good deal of repressed affection for Yuichi—which doesn’t always express itself in the best way, as when he mistakenly leaves her waiting around for the better part of half an hour and has to endure her silence all the way home. (Kudos to the show’s director, Tatsuya Ishihara, for the way he visualizes this: he uses a clever matching edit that tells us everything we need to know without being heavy-handed.)

Then there’s the combative and perpetually hungry “Kyoko”—actually, Makoto—who shows up outta the blue and assaults Yuichi on the street, insisting that they have some unsettled grudge from the past which she conveniently can’t remember. Makoto ends up shacking up with Yuichi and Nayuki and she turns out to be not only an armful but a few legfuls as well. We have the perpetually-ill Shiori, waiting on or near the school grounds every day for someone important to her, another conveniently-kept mystery. And then there are some other things brewing in the school’s darkened corridors that I suspect we’ll have to wait until the next volume to learn more about.

These girls (among others) comprise the “harem” surrounding Yuichi throughout his day-to-day adventures, each of them somehow connected to the unremembered events of seven years ago. As with many other, similarly-constructed shows—Tenchi Muyo! is probably the most recent classic model for this sort of thing—the central male character, Yuichi, is the one most people will connect with readily. He’s got a kind of dry, tart humor that he uses for coping with most of the weirdness thrown at him, and that makes him likable. On meeting the then-unnamed Makoto, he snidely drafts her a name composed of the characters EVIL-GIRL-SLAYS-VILLAGE.

I mentioned that the show does a fine job of looking good, although I have one quibble I need to get out of the way upfront. I don’t find the moe aesthetic in female character designs appealing. Give me something a little more sophisticated and mature, like Motoko Kusanagi (or the incredibly underappreciated Kanuka Clancy). That said, while I took a miss on most of the character designs, the rest of the production is stellar by just about any standards, thanks to the meticulous eyes of the folks at Kyoto Animation. The animation itself is expressive and fluid—check out the scene where Kyoko freaks out in the kitchen—and the amount of detail put into the backgrounds and environments for the show, right down to depth-of-focus effects, makes it that much more three-dimensional and enveloping.

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