When was the last time you watched an anime that really had an effect on you? No, I'm not talking about the last anime you enjoyed The last time you had a cute waifu or husbando you cheerfully followed along with. The last time you laughed or cried during a show. I'm talking about the one that really made you rethink something in your actual life. One whose area of effect extended beyond the confines of the screen you are watching it on. That's. . embedded itself deep into your psyche long after you had finished watching it. It's a bittersweet feeling whenever you get it because as you grow older, that feeling becomes increasingly harder to find. Mostly because the older you get the more you learn about yourself and the world around you that it becomes rarer for you to find something that really makes you reflect on an aspect of yourself in a different light. So, today, I wanted to share my experiences around the latest show that managed to have this effect on me and... That was with "A Place Further than the Universe." now if you've kept up with the anime seasons or even just my Twitter, you probably already know about this show as it's made its rounds on the community as the "New critically acclaimed show of last season." But you know past all the hype and the praise of its writing and direction and technical aspects that people normally talk about. For me it was one of the most inspirational anime I've ever had the pleasure of viewing. It's been a long time since I've seen the show that's affected an audience on such an intimate level And I was definitely one of them and all it is is about a group of normal high school girls that journey to Antarctica, [Chuckle] which many people have already happily pointed out that is still very much within this universe. Here's a little tangent about myself as a person. As a kid, I was a daydreamer. I'd spend so much of my time in my own head that people thought I was this really quiet uninteresting Asian kid that didn't have too many friends because in my head I daydreamed about going on these grand adventures and doing something exciting one day [Chuckle] even though I was just a lazy nerd who rarely got out of his room. But I think that was why I was so drawn to the escapism in anime and why I was so intimately drawn to this show right from episode 1 when we are introduced to one of the girls who wakes up one day and realizes that she feels... like she's wasting her youth. She hasn't done all the crazy things she wanted to do and cliche as this may be, I'm sure it's a feeling everyone's had at least one time in their lives. You have these plans, you have these ambitions that you tell yourself you'll eventually get to someday. . . . . . Someday. . . . . . But not today. Today you have school, or today you have a job, or you're just not feeling up for it, or you have commitments, or it's just not the right time then days past, weeks, months, then eventually years and That someday never becomes... today. A lot of the times we are just waiting for that one thing to push us over the edge and many of us never stop waiting. But in the show's case she meets someone who couldn't be more different from her. Someone who had the craziness and eccentricities she didn't, who was not going to let anything or anyone get in the way of achieving her own ambitions, which was to go to Antarctica. That was her push, that was her signal and seeing her take that first fearful step towards the journey she always wanted hit me So much harder than I thought it would and plastered this smile on my face that wouldn't be removed throughout the whole show. I remember thinking "Man, if they get to Antarctica in Episode 3 and this turns out to be a moe show about a bunch of cute girls dicking around with penguins, I'm going to be SO disappointed." But luckily it only expanded on moments like this on the journey that they undertake and the bonds that they make. It's so energetically captured that spirit of youth and adventure, seizing the day and all that cheesy inspirational crap you've heard before, but portraying it in a way that feels so close to home. Not as a quest with stakes bigger than people involved but as a personal journey one shared with the friends you hold most dear with a destination that was as breathtaking as the journey that took us there. There's this scene in Episode 7 I think, where the girls are on this ship to their destination, and it's the first time they've travelled by sea, so of course it's the first time they've experienced sea-sickness and it's just an absolutely awful time. They can't sleep, they can't eat, they're constantly feeling like complete crap and yet it turns into this little.. bonding experience for the group. Like the girls just start laughing because they're having an absolutely awful time but they're having an awful time together and that's what doesn't make it so bad. I love this scene. Anyone who's been on a trip with friends knows that nothing goes exactly to plan. Something always goes wrong and you may end up experiencing new things that you're... you're not [x2] too fond of but, It's sharing this experience, this journey through its ups and downs with the people you care about that really secures the bonds you have with them. It's those moments that you'll look back on together in years time and laugh at that as a tender memory even if at the time you absolutely hated it and that's kind of the beauty of this show that it manages to hit on such a... A human level. It isn't an incredibly deep show, but it is a tender reminder of aspects many of us can find in ourselves. Whether it'd be the feeling like you're wasting your youth that you need to do something to come to terms with an event in your life, putting on a brave face even though all you want to do is kick and scream on the inside, or never finding the friends who really cared about you. Watching these characters grow over the course of their journey and fill in these aspects that they were missing in their lives has this incredible power to ignite this desire to fill in some of the gaps in your own life. And that to me was way more powerful than the seas of motivational posters, quotes and speeches I've seen floating around on the Internet, but I guess that's just it. We've become desensitized to a lot of the things we see through a screen. Reality shows commercialize their relatable sob story. News turn tragedies into compelling narratives Social media has put a glossy filter over everyone's lives that it's hard to distinguish what's real anymore. It's so easy to become cynical with the amount of bullshit we are exposed to in this ever more connected world. But maybe that's why something as innocently fake as four cute anime girls felt way more real and was able to blindside the cynical voice in the back of my head that tells me not to get swayed over something like this. When the show ended, I was greeted with a bittersweet void I hadn't felt in so long. I didn't want to watch any other anime I didn't want to immediately log online and share my opinion. I just wanted to let it sink in and truly reflect on the experience it had given me and... When I realized that, I just thought How long has it been since I've felt this feeling? How long has it been since I truly cherished what a show could do and really let it run its course And that brings me to what I was saying at the beginning every so often you find that anime, or that movie, or that song that has a profound effect on your life and makes you think deeper about yourself, and it really sticks with you for a while That feeling is becoming harder and harder to find in this day and age, not just because you get older But because we consume so much media now that new things are constantly pushed in our face that we don't even have time to reflect on the last thing we watched to let it sink in and I don't know if I'm being old-fashioned in feeling like... When you always have something to move on to immediately. You forget to hold on to the things that you find truly special and I think it's something we're slowly losing in this modern world of abundancy. So I decided to do something stupid I decided to let myself BE inspired by this innocent show. Go on a journey to a place I've never been before and do things I had never done without any pressure to keep up with anime or the internet. Because I wanted to remember. Remember why anime had such a big effect on me when I was younger. Remember the craziness I felt when I abandoned my career to pursue this medium as a job. Remember that it shook me more than just a commodity we watched discussed and forget and cement myself that just because I felt inspired by a fictional constructed story of four cute girls doing something amazing with their lives. It doesn't mean the experience was any less real for me. Because it wasn't. [Music] That's really what I wanted to get off my chest. I'm not sure if I was trying to say anything aside from, "Hey I think this is a pretty good show and you should give it a shot." But for me it reminded me a few things I might have known but have forgotten over the years. It reminded me that I value looking at the world through an optimistic lens. It reminded me to value the bonds I've made with the friends that I have and as someone who did do something as reckless with their life as quitting their career that had sunk years of their life into for an Internet job It was my personal reminder that I could turn that someday... into today. The End
