Wandering Son
May. 28th, 2011 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanetThere are a whole lot of popular anime and manga out there with cross-dressing or gender-switching themes. From Princess Knight to Ranma 1/2, Revolutionary Girl Utena to Ouran High School Host Club, we can trace this theme so clearly that it's practically a sub-genre. I love shows like this dearly. But here's the thing that piques me: when cross-dressing or gender-bending scenarios come up in anime, they're almost always treated at best as allegorical fantasy, and at worst as mindless gags.
Wandering Son is something different: a quiet, thoughtful, gently-paced show about gender identity issues, as lived in contemporary Japan. No epic battles. No magical powers. Not even a lot of slice-of-life wackiness. Just confused kids trying to grow up, to grow into themselves as best they can.
Wandering Son. Dir. Aoki Ei, based on the manga by Shimura Takako. 2011.
Nitori Shuichi is a quiet, kind boy who loves to wear cute dresses and longs to be a girl. His best friend Takatsuki Yoshino is a tall, athletic girl who is more comfortable dressing like a boy. "Shu" (as everyone calls Nitori) has a crush on "Takatsuki-kun" (as everyone calls her). But she does not like him as anything other than a friend, and has refused to date him. Meanwhile, their mutual friend Chiba Saori (who knows about the pair's trans leanings) also likes Shu and is openly jealous of Takatsuki. Their spats and reconciliations affect their wider group of old and new classmates as they enter their first year of Jr. High, including Shu’s best male friend Ariga Makoto, who thinks he might be gay, and the outspoken, individualistic Sarashina Chizuru, an eccentric girl who also wears boys’ school uniforms sometimes, though more for the shock value than as an expression of gender identity.
As this summary might suggest, Wandering Son leaps directly into some fairly complicated personal interactions. If it has one fatal flaw, it's that the director assumes that viewers know the manga, and starts some ways in to the original manga's story, compressing a lot of the action along the way. This has had the effect of confusing newcomers and irritating long-time fans. (At least, that's what I understand from online forums.) At any rate, it can be hard to know at first who the characters are or where they stand.
If you can get past the first few episodes, though, and work out who everyone is, the show is rewarding precisely for its layered, pyschologically-nuanced characterization. Carlos Santos, in an otherwise glowing review on the Anime News Network, has criticized the manga for having its characters take an "unrealistically mature attitude" about "issues above their grade level." I'd disagree with that, first because it underestimates what young people today are capable of, and how much gender and sexuality issues have come to the fore even for young teenagers and older preteens. And second, in the anime at least, I did find the characters' portrayal overall to be emotionally realistic.
At base, these are young people who don't really know what they want yet. Shu will admit to friends that he wishes he were a girl, but when asked outright if he thinks he will have a sex-change operation when he's older, he can't quite answer. It's clear that he hasn't fully thought through the realities of his body yet. Increasingly, though, he has to confront those realities, as his voice is changing and he worries about pimples ruining his complexion, hindering his ability to pass effortlessly as an innocent young girl. Even the issue of favouring the "naturally pretty" person as a model of femininity is questioned by Shu's friend Ariga, a bespectacled, "boyish" looking boy who feels badly about himself for not being cute like Shu. When Ariga struggles to play the role of Juliet in a gender-reversed class play of Romeo and Juliet, it is more realistic than if he, being "gay," would automatically be "feminine," or if being "feminine" automatically equals being "cute." The result is that this isn't a show about "coming of age" and attaining an identity so much as a show about questioning. If they don't know themselves, it's a productive not-knowing-yet: a becoming.
On the formal level of the animation, too, the soft, diffuse colour palettes, sedate tone, and restrained classical scoring all work to mellow what could be an overwrought sob-story in different hands. The visuals may be too washed-out for some, but I found they shifted the tone towards a vague, wistful confusion, and away from anything garish or sensationalizing. It makes it easy to sympathize and laugh with the characters rather than laugh at them. I admit, it may be an idealized portrait of Japanese transgendered life in some ways, if only because the characters are able to be so open about it. But I think it is the kind of image that's needed for people dealing with these issues.
On that note, I have to add that when I watched this program streaming online, I found it really discouraging to see the many pages of vicious, ignorant homophobic/transphobic comments that cropped up on the comments boards right below the video. I won't quote, but they were horrific. If even something like this can’t arouse sympathy or understanding, what can? Haters gonna hate, I guess.
Wandering Son is something different: a quiet, thoughtful, gently-paced show about gender identity issues, as lived in contemporary Japan. No epic battles. No magical powers. Not even a lot of slice-of-life wackiness. Just confused kids trying to grow up, to grow into themselves as best they can.
Wandering Son. Dir. Aoki Ei, based on the manga by Shimura Takako. 2011.
Nitori Shuichi is a quiet, kind boy who loves to wear cute dresses and longs to be a girl. His best friend Takatsuki Yoshino is a tall, athletic girl who is more comfortable dressing like a boy. "Shu" (as everyone calls Nitori) has a crush on "Takatsuki-kun" (as everyone calls her). But she does not like him as anything other than a friend, and has refused to date him. Meanwhile, their mutual friend Chiba Saori (who knows about the pair's trans leanings) also likes Shu and is openly jealous of Takatsuki. Their spats and reconciliations affect their wider group of old and new classmates as they enter their first year of Jr. High, including Shu’s best male friend Ariga Makoto, who thinks he might be gay, and the outspoken, individualistic Sarashina Chizuru, an eccentric girl who also wears boys’ school uniforms sometimes, though more for the shock value than as an expression of gender identity.
As this summary might suggest, Wandering Son leaps directly into some fairly complicated personal interactions. If it has one fatal flaw, it's that the director assumes that viewers know the manga, and starts some ways in to the original manga's story, compressing a lot of the action along the way. This has had the effect of confusing newcomers and irritating long-time fans. (At least, that's what I understand from online forums.) At any rate, it can be hard to know at first who the characters are or where they stand.
If you can get past the first few episodes, though, and work out who everyone is, the show is rewarding precisely for its layered, pyschologically-nuanced characterization. Carlos Santos, in an otherwise glowing review on the Anime News Network, has criticized the manga for having its characters take an "unrealistically mature attitude" about "issues above their grade level." I'd disagree with that, first because it underestimates what young people today are capable of, and how much gender and sexuality issues have come to the fore even for young teenagers and older preteens. And second, in the anime at least, I did find the characters' portrayal overall to be emotionally realistic.
At base, these are young people who don't really know what they want yet. Shu will admit to friends that he wishes he were a girl, but when asked outright if he thinks he will have a sex-change operation when he's older, he can't quite answer. It's clear that he hasn't fully thought through the realities of his body yet. Increasingly, though, he has to confront those realities, as his voice is changing and he worries about pimples ruining his complexion, hindering his ability to pass effortlessly as an innocent young girl. Even the issue of favouring the "naturally pretty" person as a model of femininity is questioned by Shu's friend Ariga, a bespectacled, "boyish" looking boy who feels badly about himself for not being cute like Shu. When Ariga struggles to play the role of Juliet in a gender-reversed class play of Romeo and Juliet, it is more realistic than if he, being "gay," would automatically be "feminine," or if being "feminine" automatically equals being "cute." The result is that this isn't a show about "coming of age" and attaining an identity so much as a show about questioning. If they don't know themselves, it's a productive not-knowing-yet: a becoming.
On the formal level of the animation, too, the soft, diffuse colour palettes, sedate tone, and restrained classical scoring all work to mellow what could be an overwrought sob-story in different hands. The visuals may be too washed-out for some, but I found they shifted the tone towards a vague, wistful confusion, and away from anything garish or sensationalizing. It makes it easy to sympathize and laugh with the characters rather than laugh at them. I admit, it may be an idealized portrait of Japanese transgendered life in some ways, if only because the characters are able to be so open about it. But I think it is the kind of image that's needed for people dealing with these issues.
On that note, I have to add that when I watched this program streaming online, I found it really discouraging to see the many pages of vicious, ignorant homophobic/transphobic comments that cropped up on the comments boards right below the video. I won't quote, but they were horrific. If even something like this can’t arouse sympathy or understanding, what can? Haters gonna hate, I guess.
