ZENSHU.

Episode 7

The term “life-changing” gets bandied around a lot, but I think it's rare for a movie to truly change the trajectory of someone's life. When I was 12, I saw Princess Mononoke, and it cemented my love of anime as a medium. But did it truly change my life, or did it simply push me further down the path I was on? In “FIRST LOVE,” however, we see how Tale of Perishing was life-changing for Natsuko. The episode tells the story of Natsuko's life as an animator, and as her elementary school friend narrates, Natsuko was always a little weird, but Tale of Perishing created a single-minded obsession in her.

Yamazaki and Ueno create a charmingly multilayered narrative in just 20 minutes, exploring who Natsuko was up until her fateful encounter with a clam through the eyes of the people she met along the way. Her friend in third grade who watched her draw obsessively, the boy in Natsuko's middle school class who became her pet subject for life drawing, the wannabe animator college student whose project she took over when she was just a high schooler, and finally, the producer Naomi, who assigned her the project of directing a romantic comedy.

The Natsuko they see is singularly obsessed with not just becoming an animator, but a virtuoso. She pays no mind to the fact that Tale of Perishing was a complete flop; she idolizes its director, reading interviews with her and following her advice to the letter. Her passion draws them to her to the point that they fall in love, though it probably also helps that she's conventionally attractive; one of the unintentional lessons of the episode could be that if you're pretty enough, people will put up with a lot of weirdness from you. They want to be seen and acknowledged by her, but she only has eyes for her goal of becoming a virtuoso director.

In some ways, the episode is about the beauty of passion in the same vein as Look Back, which features a similar montage of a young woman sitting at a sketch pad as her peers move around her; or Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, whose characters also obsessed over observing the world around them. After all, Natsuko's single-mindedness has served her well in many ways! Tinkly piano music plays as she focuses on her sketchbook or stares intently at her classmate's adam's apple as he drinks his milk. She's risen to the top of her field while only in her twenties, entrusted with a major project that could make or break the studio despite never attending art school.

But there's a dark side, too. Her obsession has left her unable to connect to people, giving her blinders only to document life instead of experiencing it and forming relationships. The last real relationship we see her form was her elementary school friend, to whom Natsuko gifted a portrait next to a drawing of Luke. It's a charmingly realistic gift from an artistic young child: here's a picture of you and a picture of the thing that I'm really into. After that, she treats everyone she encounters as a subject, from the boy she focuses on drawing to the team of college-aged animators whose project she takes over to producer Naomi. She doesn't really have an interest in any of them as people, and even as she leaves her mark on them, they fail to leave a mark on her. She doesn't even remember the name of her poor middle school classmate.

All of this has left her isolated and arrogant, able to draw and create stories about the fantastical but left clueless about human relationships. She may be more skilled than the college animators, but when asked to do in-betweening, she just throws everything out and draws new key frames. She gets away with it because she's talented, but if her confidence had been the slightest bit unearned, she would have been kicked out on the street. While I don't think the nail that sticks out should be hammered down, even brilliant people need to learn to play nice with others, and nobody has ever done Natsuko the favor of helping her develop social skills. By the time the animator snarls at her that she's not the only one working on the movie, it's too late.

The truly brilliant thing is that it's all framed in such a romantic way! It feels like a commentary on how we idealize genius and, in the process, spoil people who style themselves virtuosos. Until the point where she's struggling with her rom-com movie, it's all Shinkai-style tinkly piano, Blue Blazes burning spirit, golden hour lighting, and seishun-style narration. It would be possible to go through the episode and think of it purely as a demonstration of how, even if Natsuko hasn't experienced her own first love, she's inspired the feeling in plenty of others. And that wouldn't be entirely wrong, either, because it is that. It's a story of how Natsuko's talents drew others to her and how those same talents left her increasingly isolated.

And for all she grouses about not understanding first love, I do believe she's experienced it. It doesn't fit in the shōjo manga framing she's trying to learn from, but her tears at the end of Tale of Perishing and her single-minded devotion to the art of animation betray her. Her first love was animation. It was Luke Braveheart, it's always been Luke Braveheart, and her love for him now drives her to try to defeat the Void.

And she's fixed now, right? She wakes up from her dream surrounded by friends getting ready to enjoy a meal together. The sun is shining, and everyone is laughing. It's joyful. She knows how to work as a part of a team and how arrogant she was to believe that she could do everything on her own. To believe that she should do anything on her own.

But the story's not over yet. The spectre of the original director, who poured her heart and soul into creating A Tale of Perishing, the story that Natsuko wildly altered, has cast a shadow over the story this whole time. And now, it looks like she's here to roost.

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