March comes in like a lion

Episode 5

Today's March finally gave us a clearer picture of Rei's childhood, framed through two incidental present-day experiences that pulled him back into the past. Those framing devices pointed to one of this episode's greatest strengths: framing our relationship with the past in the way it actually felt, long after the fact. The show's ways of accomplishing that began with the episode's very first moments.

We opened with a black screen, accompanied by the sound of some mechanical device being engaged. After a brief moment, the source of the noise was revealed to be a gas stove, presented through an extreme closeup allowing nothing else in the frame. As the scene continued, these extreme closeups continued as well - of Rei's eyes, the eyes of his shogi partner, the board itself, and the incidental details of the room around him.

These shots were ostentatious, but they also smartly represented the way we often remember the past. Full scenes aren't always clear - instead, we remember key images and sensations, like the sound of a stove being lit before a treasured moment with a family friend. Beyond that, our relationship with the past is often dictated by minor details of the present. Treating a minor scrape of Momo's reminded Rei of his lost sister, and noticing a rip in a treasured sweater brought him back to the home of his adoptive father.

The full story of Rei's past was lengthy and heartbreaking, a multi-step tragedy that consumed this entire episode. After losing his parents and younger sister in a car accident, Rei ended up being adopted as an apprentice by his father's shogi rival. In that house, shogi was everything. If you wanted “father's” attention, you had to impress him with your shogi abilities. And so Rei found himself disrupting an uneasy home life with his mere existence, as his need to cling to shogi caused understandable resentment from his master's other children.

It was brutal to see these children fighting for their father's approval. In truth, their father was the clear villainous party here, but being forced to compete for their father's love at such a young age meant these children were forced to take their frustration out on each other. A match between Rei and his new sister Kyouko was a particularly heavy sequence, with the consistent focus on their match clock emphasizing Kyouko's desperation and inability to compete. Having Rei straight-up compare his own presence to that of a cuckoo bird was a little on-the-nose, but I think the choice worked. The show needed something to shake Rei from his melancholy stasis, and the stark imagery of the new chick pushing the original eggs from their nest made for a blunt but effective evocation of his own self-image.

While I loved the base nature of this episode's structure and narrative material, some of its execution choices definitely left me cold. March's comedy continues to be intrusive and broad, reflecting a strangely conservative philosophy of adaptation that's totally at odds with the show's general embracing of the SHAFT style. One particular moment in this episode, when Momo and one of the cats both told a lie and the screen literally labeled them “liars,” felt like an utterly amateurish failure of adaptation. Jokes where characters are visibly labeled in panel very obviously do not translate to animation - those are cheap gags you can only get away with in manga because of their convenience in that medium, and faithfully adapting them only underlines their initial weakness.

At other times, it was March's embracing of its own anime style that lead to issues. March has made a steady motif of portraying Rei in grayscale to evoke his depression, but moments of that clashed heavily with this episode's overall color palette. SHAFT's overbearing love of melodramatic head tilts did this episode no favors, either. Tricks like that can occasionally be effective for conveying an air of mystery, but applying them to Kyouko, a blunt and no-nonsense girl who always lays everything on the table, made no sense at all. Aesthetic flourishes can't be one-size-fits-all - you have to match your embellishments to the innate qualities of your underlying material, and many of the SHAFT mainstays used here simply didn't apply to this narrative.

That said, the underlying material here was strong enough that I left the episode relatively satisfied. Besides, the show's execution wasn't all bad - there were a number of striking individual shots throughout, and sequences like Rei dressing Momo's scrape created a powerful atmosphere as well. March is an uneven show, but its base strengths are evident even when it stumbles.

Overall: B

March comes in like a lion is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.