Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thinking we’ve all earned a little rest and recreation time, a brief retreat from all of the world’s unrelenting terrors. While I often gravitate towards stories that feel like undergoing fully conscious open heart surgery, I also have a tremendous appreciation for the tales that answer our need for comfort, offering through fiction a sanctuary from the troubles of the everyday. As such, I’m happy to be returning to Kamiina Botan, as our young heroine experiences the twin pleasures of collegiate freedom and casual inebriation.
Our last episode was a truly stunning display of animation acumen, offering a wholly distinct vision of Kamiina’s world defined by loose, personality-rich character acting and ostentatious, SHAFT-reminiscent comedic flourishes. It’s always a treat to see an animator’s personality expressed through their work, and the combined storyboarding/animation direction of Gin-san told a clear story of aesthetic inheritance and synthesis. With this coming episode featuring animation direction by Idolm@ster and Twilight Wings veteran Norie Igawa, and key animation by a host of new-gen darlings, I imagine the feast will only continue as we resume our journey. Let’s see what gentle pleasures await as we return to Kamiina Botan!
Episode 4
We open on a car trip featuring the whole dorm crew. Close-up establishing shots of the wheel and stick are accompanied by a revving of the engine, building an immediate sense of expectation. Slice of life dramas tend to revel in moments like this – sequences designed to highlight, celebrate, and ultimately recontextualize the everyday occurrences of life, thereby guiding the audience towards finding fresh joy and wonder in all of their theoretically mundane activities. I don’t feel a sense of “let’s go on adventure” every time I start my car, but sequences like this remind me that there’s no reason not to
Then again, going on a car trip with new college friends actually does feel like an adventure, with the combination of unfamiliar company and total freedom of destination making car trips feel new and strange again. We are generally creatures of habit, and entering into college means your ingrained habits will be colliding with the distinct assumptions of a thousand new faces
Apparently they’re heading to Mitsumine Shrine
This OP is of course itself a thesis on the precious, fleeting beauty of allegedly mundane moments. It’s as good of a two-minute summary of slice of life’s appeal as you’re likely to find
They’re seeking a “sea of clouds” at the shrine
Akane is apparently a bit of a gearhead. She lightly gripes that her parents forced her to get a manual license, but it’s clear how their decisions have influenced her personality; her motorcycle seems like another reflection of a life spent closely engaging with automotives
That feels like another incidental, authentic observation about college life – it’s often a student’s first chance to spend significant time with “fully formed” strangers of their own age, who carry a lifetime of baggage informing their current personality. You’ll absolutely meet people who gripe about their parents’ preferences while clearly embodying the outcome of those preferences in their own behavior
Hearing Ibuki marvel at Akane’s talents, Gujo immediately insists she must prove her own driving abilities. This show is absolutely ruthless when it comes to Gujo’s doomed romance
Three minutes in and Gujo’s already suffering through an Ashita no Joe meme. Brutal
Love these cool blue tones and hushed sound design. You can really feel the chill of the early morning
Jeez, they really are emphasizing Gujo’s unrequited feelings this time. As Ibuki and Kamiina once again disappear on the party, we hang over Gujo’s clenched fists, a private frustration hidden behind her back
The morning mist over the mountains truly is breathtaking. Sea of clouds indeed!
Kamiina’s reaction faces just keep getting more exotic by the episode
I quite like how these compositions consistently strand the characters in the bottom or corner of the frame, emphasizing the scale and beauty of this landscape enveloping them. It also just makes for fundamentally active compositions, where the eye is drawn across the vast natural angles in search of the subject
The pair find a couples shrine, where you write your name and twist it together with someone else’s to ensure a future together. Once again, the sound design does remarkable work here – love the long silences between Kamiina’s statements as Ibuki is distracted texting, building towards Ibuki’s dawning realization of the nature of Kamiina’s question
Ibuki’s affirmation is met with glorious aesthetic ornamentation, as the sun at last rises over the mountains, and Ibuki reaches for the slip with movement so fluid it seems to be animated on 1s
Oh my god, why would you cut right to Gujo from that. This show is so mean to her!
This other group is experiencing a very different kind of silence – the quiet of expectation, a space longing to be filled. Without Ibuki here to unify them, they’re not even necessarily friends
A classic expression of contained emotions, as a raindrop forms a tear falling down Gujo’s cheek
After Kamiina gets soaked in the rain, Gujo dutifully dries her hair and offers her a towel. It feels like she’s essentially trying to apologize for her own ungenerous thoughts, proving to herself that she’s a good friend to Kamiina
Apparently Gujo got into retro games via Let’s Plays
“If we work together, I’m sure we can beat it!” Kamiina swiftly demonstrates why she’s had more social success than Gujo – she actually puts herself out there, taking genuine interest in the pursuits of others, and wasting no time in suggesting they make some memories together
“Ibuki doesn’t seem like the kind to drink convenience store alcohol.” In contrast, Gujo perpetually second-guesses herself and waits for the perfect moment to connect, which with that attitude will never actually come
“Is it me, or this character…” “She looks like Ibuki!” Even individual shared reflections emphasize the difference in their characters
More fun movie posters visible in Gujo’s room – we’ve got “Paris Angels Club,” which is mostly riffing on Paris, Texas (down to the director “Vilhelm Venders” and star “Henry” Stanton) with a side of Dallas Buyers Club, and then “Hande uber Katelbach,” a play on Polanski’s “When Katelbach comes”
Delightful character acting as the booze clearly starts to help Gujo unwind
Apparently the co-op game they’re playing involves healing via kissing, a mechanical quirk that obviously appeals to the irrepressibly horny drunk Kamiina
Gujo’s statement that she’d like to do this with Ibuki is contrasted against the reflection of a butterfly under glass. A very pointed image, emphasizing Gujo’s inability to directly interact with the living Ibuki in favor of simply admiring her beauty like a photograph
Oh wow, I love this composition of Gujo recalling when she saw Ibuki drinking before. Bathed in warm light and soft focus, the scene is presented like a framed still life, furthering that impression of Ibuki existing as a beautiful yet ever-distant icon in Gujo’s life
“It felt like she wasn’t playing fair.” How could anyone be so perfect? A terrific way to describe that feeling – like witnessing a scene from a movie playing out in real life, and realizing some people really do have the spotlight upon them
As Kamiina dozes off and leans into Gujo, we get a composition framed from the back of a shelf of Gujo’s bookcase, a shot that both emphasizes their closeness relative to the wide spaces around them, and also conjures a slight sense of surveillance, thus echoing Gujo’s presumed sensation of “oh god, what if someone sees us like this”
With inhibitions lifted and Kamiina asleep, Gujo can at last indulge her frustration at Kamiina’s closeness with Ibuki – however, this hangout has also defused her anger, allowing her to laugh at her own pettiness
Coming back post-break, the reigning physical sensation is humidity, as these partial closeups focused on sweating cheeks and iced coffee making clear
The gang head out to Little Edo, which is still full of Edo-era buildings. This show is doing a fine job of expanding on its admittedly thin premise with a lot of sightseeing, thus capturing the same appeal as something like Laid-Back Camp. It certainly helps that the backgrounds and layouts are so gorgeous!
“Forget about Akane. Since she cares more about band practice than us.” Yaeka remains the least convincing college student of the bunch – her personality is basically that of a middle schooler
Kamiina puts on her best heartbreaker smile as she muses about Ibuki in a yukata. That girl is a menace
They end up stopping at an intimate foot spa hosted at the back of a general store. I love these little urban secrets; a great part of the appeal of The Eccentric Family, one of my personal favorites, is its fantastically heightened illustration of secret sanctuaries across Kyoto
In true tsun-tsun fashion, Yaeka only demonstrates her true feelings for Akane through her insistence that Kamiina can’t use their shared nail polish color. Some things must be theirs alone
As usual, Ibuki’s ultimate chugging of her beer is animated with a much higher drawing count, making the joy she takes in it viscerally clear. One of the signature strengths of animation – exaggerating movement and employing visual embellishments to make it tangible to the viewer what one character sees in another
“A precious color. Do you have something you feel that way about, Ibuki?” Kamiina is relentless
“That nail polish. Can you paint it on for me?” Gujo never stood a chance
And Done
Thus Kamiina continues her quest to make every goddamn lesbian in this dorm fall in love with her, as she pulls off the kind of audacious, inarguably romantic gestures that Gujo could only dream of. This was indeed a suitably beautiful followup to last episode’s playful animation feast, though in a very different way than its predecessor. Here, the emphasis was largely on those wondrous layouts, which were employed both to echo the emotions of the characters and also simply celebrate the inherent beauty of the town and countryside. And rather than revel in superdeformed exaggerations, the flourishes of character acting were focused on detail and delicacy, consistently upping the drawing count to capture the precise moment one individual becomes enraptured by another. Another impressive standout for this lovingly realized production!
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