My love for anime has been a bumpy ride, with peaks and valleys, zeniths and nadirs, apexes and azimuths, local minima and maxima, but during one of the highest heights of love for anime I’ve ever had, I considered Aria, the show about female gondola tour guides in an exact replica of Venice on Mars in the 24th Century, to be one of my favorite anime ever, second only to Bakemonogatari in my esteem.
It’s been a long time since I watched it. A few months ago, I figured, it’s fall, I’m old, what else do I have but to relive younger, happier times through media? Why not go back and watch Aria again? If it was still good, I could have the pleasure of nostalgia satisfied; and if it was terrible, I could once again feel the ache of a part of my youth crumbling into an ash of bitter disillusion inside me. What else do we live for but that feeling, after all?
In the end it was, as ever, more complicated than that. Re-watching Aria—by which I mean all the episodes, across all three series, plus the OVA—gave me a lot to think about, in every way and on every level.
When I think about art, I do so roughly on three levels. There’s the level of my personal experience with it, the emotion I felt while experiencing it. Then there’s the level of how this piece of art is constructed. How does it use the tools of its medium? Is it made skillfully or clumsily? When you read a film review and the critic gives it a rating at the end, it’s usually based on some combination of these two: whether the critic enjoyed the experience with the film, and whether it was constructed well. There’s also the more symbolic level: what’s the subtext? What are the implications? What is this trying to tell us, either implicitly or explicitly? This is how literary analysis looks at works of literature. These three levels aren’t discrete or even easily separable, of course. In practice they’re more like parts of a tree. The symbolic aspect is the root system. It’s not always easy to see and you’d be excused in some cases for thinking it doesn’t exist. Sometimes it doesn’t go very deep, and it’s not essential to the art that it go very deep, but trees with shallow root systems are prone to blowing away in storms or getting eroded out of the ground, and I’d argue the same is true for art. The construction aspect is the trunk. Without a trunk you don’t have a tree, and without the construction of art you don’t have art. The trunk is the most conventional part of the tree; there’s some room for variation, but mostly it just goes up and supports the rest of the tree. The construction is the most conventional part of a piece of art; try to get too outside the box with how it’s constructed and you end up with utter nonsense. And the emotional experience of individual people is the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Its shape varies a lot, it’s very subjective, and it’s simultaneously the most superficial and the most important part. Giraffes love eating the leaves of the acacia tree; humans don’t, but we love eating apples, and we love looking at cherry blossoms. For a work of art, the emotions it creates are the reason people want to experience it, so they’re important, but they’ll be different for everyone. Some people might be scared of a movie, and others might laugh at the same movie.
Aria, it turns out, has enough going for it at all three tree-parts that I couldn’t write one coherent post covering all of them, so this first part covers the leaves and the branches and the trunk; to start with we’ll be going over the construction of the show’s art and narrative and the emotional journey of revisiting it. But even that produced enough material that I’m going to split it into three parts. In this part we’ll talk about Aria: The Animation. In the next part we’ll discuss Aria: The Natural, and in the final part we’ll go over Aria: The Origination and Arietta. In a future post I’ll talk about the root system. There’s a lot going on around the edges of the world of Neo-Venezia that deserves to be unpacked. But for now we have the much easier task of answering the obvious question:
Is Aria actually good?
I hesitate to say Aria is good. Not because it isn’t good. On the contrary, it takes a lot of creative risks that pay off spectacularly. It has charming characters and a beautiful world and incredible visuals. But it is flawed. So flawed that I hesitate to call it good, even though in aggregate the things it gets right are so large and the things it gets wrong are so small that it almost doesn’t seem to matter that it has flaws, it might as well just not have them.
But I didn’t watch the show in aggregate. I watched it one episode at a time, one day at a time, and at that level, I have to say, Aria has flaws. It has storytelling flaws. It has technical flaws in its art and animation. It has some flaws in its character writing that I’ve decided, after some consideration, I can’t put down to “it was accurate to the character’s personality”.
If you’ve never seen the show and you want me to tell you whether or not you should watch it, I’ll tell you yes, you should watch it. You should not expect action-packed excitement. You should not expect a laugh riot. You shouldn’t even expect moe; Aria is not, despite appearances, a “cute girls doing cute things” show, though you’re least likely to be disappointed if you go in expecting that. And you should not expect perfect storytelling or unimpeachable animation. You should not expect to enjoy every episode. You should also be prepared not to like it. Whenever a show does its own thing as confidently as this one does, it always risks some people not liking it. But you should watch it. And you should watch it now, before you read the rest of this post.
Aria: The Animation: Setting the Tone
The first Aria series came out in 2005, the same year as Tsubasa Chronicle, Strawberry 100%, and Negima!. It had one job: beat us over the head with so much suteki that we’d go punch-drunk. It did its job.
It’s rare for anime to diverge too drastically from the original work they’re based on, but if a studio was ever tempted to make something over completely, to make its anime adaptation into something entirely different from the source material, they had to have been tempted with Aria: The Animation. In 2005, the popular anime were harem, fantasy adventure, harem, wacky comedy, and harem. Looking over Wikipedia’s list of anime TV series that debuted in 2005, you’ve got My-Otome, which is sci-fi harem; Negima!, which is fantasy adventure harem; Paniponi Dash!, which is surreal comedy with harem elements; Rozen Maiden: Traumend, which is harem about dolls; Shuffle!, which is harem about angels and demons; Amaenaideyo!, which is harem about Buddhist nuns; Strawberry 100%, which is harem about strawberry panties; and Best Student Council, which is madcap comedy with harem elements. (I should mention I have, of course, watched all of these shows at one point or another, because I am trash as a human.) This was the time period when harem shows were starting to transmorph into moe shows, and it was becoming acceptable to do lighthearted shows about a group of attractive girls without thrusting some generic loser guy into the center of the narrative for them to lust over. The elements were all there in the Aria manga. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take on a more jokey tone, show a little bit more skin in the bath and beach scenes, let the camera linger a little longer on boobs and butts, play up the yuri aspects of Aika’s worship for Alicia, and make something that would be a more surefire hit in 2005 in the 1 AM timeslot. But they didn’t do that. They stayed true to the unique spirit of the manga, confidently asserted themselves, and created something people still talk about with great reverence thirteen years later, unlike Shuffle! and Best Student Council, which have faded away.
Aria: The Animation introduces all the characters: our three main heroines Akari, Aika, and Alice; their mentors Alicia, Akira, and Athena; Akari’s low-key love interest Akatsuki, and Aika’s slightly higher-key love interest Al; and last but not least, the three creepy pet cats that each of our heroines keeps as the symbolic president of her Undine company. It introduces the world of Neo-Venezia, a perfect replica of the city of Venice located on Mars, now called Aqua after being terraformed and covered with water. The original Venice, on “Manhome”, as the series calls Earth, sank into the ocean sometime between today and the show’s 24th Century time period. Manhome is not explored very much in the Aria series, and is never actually seen, but we get tiny hints of what it’s like. Machines do almost everything, yet people still work so ceaselessly that one couple Akari meets later on hasn’t been able to get away for a vacation in years. No food grows there anymore. There doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for history, art, or culture. Neo-Venezia is a hugely popular tourist destination, and everyone who comes seems to love it, but then, they have highly trained Undine tour guides to row them around the city, talk to them, and personalize their experience. Reading between the lines, my guess is since all services on Manhome are provided by machines, it’s a great luxury on Aqua to have a person providing a service for you. Undine train intensely to gain skill in emotional labor so they can provide an experience unlike anything these tourists, who are used to talking to machines, have had, and that’s why everyone we see has such an intense positive reaction to Neo-Venezia. We’ll discuss this further in a later post.
In contrast to the image we get of Manhome, Aqua is beautiful, full of trees, plants, water, friendly people, fulfilling work, and the most distinguished art and architecture from throughout Earth’s history. Anime is generally very good at showing the appeal of nature, but Aria also had to reproduce 500 years of Italian architecture, and the staff did so brilliantly. Even though you can tell they were struggling with the confines of a TV animation budget in 2005. The trip to Venice they talk about in the DVD special features really paid off. Other shows have also done an admirable job recreating beautiful European architecture—Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? for example–but Aria‘s special trick was incorporating that into a world that makes sense. The world of Gochiusa makes no sense and goes totally unexplained. Towards the end of series I amused myself by theorizing that it took place in the same world as Aria, on a different part of Aqua inspired by Central Europe. Which then made so much sense that it’s now my head-canon that Gochiusa’s world is another city on Aqua. Aria’s world is so strong, it can even explain other shows’ worlds.
Aria: The Animation also introduces Ai, a young girl to whom Akari writes emails at the beginning and end of most episodes, explaining what’s been going on in her life. This framing device, which was different in the manga, throws off the beginning of the story a little. To introduce Ai in the first episode, Akari had to already be somewhat established on Aqua, so the anime couldn’t adapt the early chapters of the manga where Akari first arrives. On the other hand, it allows Alice to be introduced in Episode 3, whereas in the manga she wasn’t officially introduced for four volumes, very late for one of the main characters. Episode 3 is an anime original, but it serves early on to assert the direction the show is taking. It treats Akari as a symbol of everything the show stands for—its optimism, its welcoming nature, its relaxing atmosphere, its appreciation for the beauty of nature and of art, its reverence for history and human achievement. Then it puts Alice in the place of a new viewer as she slowly discovers that Akari is sappy, corny, wide-eyed “oh gee golly willikers”, a sanguine font of happiness, “transparent” with her positive emotions as the episode title puts it. At first Alice doesn’t understand how someone could possibly be like this, but by the episode’s conclusion she’s begun to understand the charm of Akari’s smile.
It only took a few more episodes to remind me why Alice has always been my favorite character. Akari may embody the series, but Alice is the most relatable. A quiet, quirky gondola prodigy, Alice is great at sculling when the series starts, but she has a lot to learn about working with people, including her mentor, Athena, who annoys her by being clumsy and dopey. Once she does establish a relationship with the other main characters, Alice is all the more afraid of losing it because of the work she had to put in to developing it. Alice grows a lot over the course of the three shows and probably has the most satisfying arc of any of the main characters. She also gets all the best lines. In Episode 5, the mentors send the three trainees a mystery invitation promising a trip to “Neverland”. The three show up to find an empty island; when they start speculating why someone would have done this, Alice says “Maybe someone wanted to crush our dreams”.
Aria: The Animation focuses on exploring the world of Neo-Venezia more than on the characters, aside from a couple of Alice episodes (mainly Episode 3 and Episode 6) and some moments in the spotlight for other characters (Athena also in Episode 6, Akira in Episode 7, President Aria in Episode 8, and the three mentors in Episode 11). But the characters are all introduced well enough that we understand who they are, and they stand out as one of the bright spots of this first series in hindsight. Another major bright spot: the art. Every episode is of full of imagery that makes Aqua look warm, pleasant, and friendly, beautiful in an approachable way. Neo-Venezia is not some static shrine full of priceless artifacts that can never be touched (even though, in a literal sense, it kind of is); it feels like somewhere people live, where their lives are improved by the beauty they’re surrounded with every day. Watching the characters harvest chestnuts at a rustic mountain cabin in Episode 9 or take a swim through a ruined mansion in the middle of the ocean in Episode 10 is enjoyable even though there’s not a lot of story involved, and we still see the characters react to the situations in ways that feel appropriate to their personalities, such as Aika’s misplaced competitiveness in Episode 9. There’s a lot more to the art than just faithfully reproducing Venice. The animators love to show images reflected on water, either the ocean or a puddle, and manage to perfectly capture the faded, yet clear quality of such reflections. There’s also a scene at the start of Episode 11 where Akari, Aika, and Alice are coming home from a day of bad weather that uses color more effectively than any other anime scene I can think of. The grey-green color of the sky and ocean communicate the loneliness, melancholy, and oppressiveness of being out in bad weather near nightfall with incredible skill, without a single word of dialogue. When the characters make it inside to the orange glow of a warm fire, there’s such catharsis, such relief, far more emotion than anyone would expect from the first five minutes of an episode, and without a single tear or any yelling. The festival in Episode 13 also wouldn’t be nearly as inviting without the cozy earth tones that make a night in Piazza San Marco with friends look so appealing.
The Groundwork for a Flawed Run
This first series is a microcosm of everything that’s great and not so great about Aria. The charming characters, unique worldview, and amazing art are all there; the bad animation, strained storylines, and some worldbuilding elements that I now don’t appreciate also begin here. I’ll save the discussion of the animation for The Natural, where it got so bad it interfered with the story.
Aria: The Animation’s storytelling is uneven, notably more so than the other two series since the show was still finding its footing at this point. Episode 5, for example, is about the girls having fun at the beach. Later episodes, even within The Animation, contented themselves with showing us the fun and the beautiful imagery and maybe slipping in a tiny, obvious message at the end. Episode 5 tries to have a complex message about remembrance that takes up the last two minutes of its running time and doesn’t flow at all from what we’ve seen so far, which has been the girls having fun on the beach. The analogy between the beach island and Peter Pan’s Neverland is strained and adds nothing to the story. Does this ruin the episode? No, we still get a fun segment of the girls doing intense training and then enjoying the beach in the middle. But it makes it feel choppy, as if we have three separate things going on that don’t actually belong together but they’ve been shoehorned into one episode just because. This episode is an anomaly in the show. I can’t think of another one that’s choppy and lumpy in the same way this one is.
Episode 7 fails in a way that Aria episodes more typically do. It’s adapted from a manga story that was only one chapter, so there wasn’t enough material to fill an entire episode. Thus the story was padded with original material about Akari, Aika, and Alice each using their unique talents to save a gondola ride for some customers of Akira’s. It’s clumsy, feels like the filler it is, and does nothing to develop the characters. It reminds me of an episode of the old Superfriends cartoon. You would always have scenarios where Hawkman, Apache Chief, and Aquaman end up in an aquarium that’s crumbling in an earthquake and have to save people. Apache Chief grows to a large size and holds up the building to help people escape. Aquaman talks to the fish and gets them to jump out of their tanks and let people ride them to safety. Hawkman uses his hawk-like laser eye beams to blast a path free. If you’re curious, the hawk-like laser eye beams in this episode is Alice’s ability to pick locks. It’s never explained why she learned it and it’s never mentioned again. (I have written in my notes for this episode, “Alice, you crafty little bitch! Where did you learn to pick locks?”)
Episode 8, which also fails in a way that would become characteristic of later duds, is two half-episodes starring President Aria. Both are pretty boring. Have you ever watched one of those Nick Jr. cartoons for young children who can’t talk yet? The animation is always very static because it’s trying to avoid overstimulating them before naptime. They can’t talk yet, so there’s barely any dialogue aside from narration, and they can’t really understand what’s going on, so the plot is always about some cute animal trying to find his balloon or something. That’s basically these President Aria episodes. The second one is a little better because we get to see what all the characters are doing with their free time. Junichi Sato, the director of the Aria series, has said in interviews that he had a hard time pacing the first series given such a big world, so many characters, and only thirteen episodes, and he titled the second series “The Natural” because it was allowed to proceed at a more natural pace. Given that, it’s exceedingly strange he would choose to spend an entire thirteenth of a series that was far from guaranteed a sequel, one precious episode from the few he had to tell this unique and beautiful story, following around the doings of a cat who loves food. I do hail the idea of making two-part mini-episodes, though. It’s a great way to avoid what happened with Episode 7 where the story was stretched out too thin. Unfortunately I can’t think of a time in the series where it really worked out.
Ghost Cat: Way of the Gondolier
I had the most problems with Episodes 5, 7, and 8, but the other episodes weren’t perfect either. Episode 4 caused me the most turmoil. The basic story is quite good. Akari receives a long obsolete data disk and a request to deliver it to another island far out in the Neo-Adriatic Sea. She asks her friend Woody, a Sylph who delivers packages on a flying motorbike, to take her out there, where they discover that the island is empty save for a graveyard from the early days of Aqua’s colonization. They find a reader that can play back the disk and discover it’s a letter to one of the early settlers, now long dead. I like this concept a lot: Akari, and the viewers, get to learn something about Aqua’s past and the early days of human settlement, which helps fill in the world a little more and drive home early on that they really are on Mars. On the other hand, the one who gives the disk to Akari for delivery is some kind of ghost cat who transformed into a human form and appeared to her in order to make a request that would allow it to rest in peace. If I recall correctly, it’s implied the ghost cat was the cat of the person in the grave Akari delivers the letter to. This sets off a whole recurring mystic ghost cat subplot that keeps coming back into play all the way up to the end of Aria: The Natural, where it comes much more sharply to the forefront.
Watching the show again, I discovered that I don’t like the supernatural ghost cat material. It’s done with the same mastery of art, color, and atmosphere that characterizes the rest of the show, and it helps put Akari in situations that would have been difficult to create otherwise, but it adds a supernatural element into a world that I don’t think needed it.
The world of Aria is somewhat hard sci-fi. It’s harder than Star Wars by a long way. Its terraforming technology is only vaguely explained, but the show does address how Mars became Aqua and how it’s kept that way. Aqua has its own calendar, based around each Aqua year being two Manhome years; in real life, a year on Mars is 687 days, or about 1.88 Earth years. Since people throughout the series treat coming from to Aqua from Manhome as a regular vacation, something that requires time off from work but not something that requires quitting your job and leaving your life behind, we can assume a trip from Manhome to Aqua takes between ten and forty hours. The spaceship we see Akari ride from Manhome to Aqua in the Aqua manga resembles a modern airliner, with no evidence of sleeping bays or stasis pods, which also backs that up. Mars is, on average, about 140 million miles from Earth, so you could reach it in about forty hours if you could travel around 3.5 million miles per hour, which is much faster than any spacecraft we have today, but still far, far slower than the speed of light (roughly 671 million miles per hour). My point is that Aqua may be on Mars in the 24th Century, but as science fiction visions of Mars in the 24th Century go, it’s pretty conservative and sticks fairly close to what might be possible with our current scientific understanding. Then it throws in a recurring subplot about magical ghost cats. Which, as we’ll see, barely affects the main story at all, but at the same time is framed as not a dream or a delusion, so it taints the straight sci-fi world with supernatural elements. That might have been okay if it had added something more valuable than what it subtracted. But as we’ll talk about next time, for me, it didn’t.
