Part One of the Aria retrospective, if you need to catch up
In my life, I have watched the entire Aria saga through multiple times—at least three that I can remember. And every single time I did, I would burn straight through Aria: The Animation, get through the first three or four episodes of Aria: The Natural, and then just suddenly lose all will to watch the show. I would put off moving on to the next episode for weeks. I would sometimes watch other shows in the interim. I would consider ending my run early. And I had no idea why. Those first few episodes of The Natural were good, I thought. I loved them, I thought. They were just as good as anything in The Animation, I thought.
Conceptually, those first few episodes of Aria: The Natural are amazing. Carnevale, leading into a dance through a darkened city following a mysterious figure in a cloak. A treasure hunt where the real treasure is Neo-Venezia and its people. A luxurious afternoon coffee in the piazza. A night watching a meteor shower atop the roofs of the city. So I was always mystified why I had such a hard time getting past them, when the enthusiasm they created should have carried me through the next few. Watching the show again, I finally understood why it was that I always had such a hard time making it past Episode 6 or so: much more than the other two series, The Natural has episodes that are badly paced, overstretched, and boring.
The Saggy Middle of the Saggy Middle
I always used to blame Episode 5, another two-parter which I think of as “the Alicia duology” since both stories focus on Akari and Alicia spending time together. But this time, I enjoyed Episode 5. At least, I enjoyed the second story, “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…”, which follows Akari and Alicia on a picnic into the inlands, where they spend a day discovering old train tracks, an abandoned train car, and cherry trees in full bloom. It’s a nice little story that reminds me of exploring the mountains near my house when I was a kid, where there were also abandoned train tracks.
No, the first bad episode of Aria: The Natural is actually Episode 7, “To the Kingdom of Cats…”, which illustrates the biggest storytelling vice of Aria: The Natural: dragging a story out way longer than the material can actually sustain. “To the Kingdom of Cats…” is based on a manga story that was one of the earliest hints in the manga towards the magical ghost cat subplot. Aika and Akari see President Aria going somewhere by himself in his little boat, so they decide to follow him. They end up stuck in a loop in a mysterious abandoned canal where they go through a gate and come out into the same room they just left. This continues until President Aria comes out and helps them get free. That’s it. Episode 7 stretches this story out to 22 minutes. It achieves this mainly by showing Akari and Aika stuck in the loop for what feels like fifteen solid minutes. Whether it’s actually that long, it becomes so boring that it feels much longer.
Looking back at my notes, though, I still cut “To the Kingdom of Cats…” some slack at the time. I wrote that it was “Kinda boring but okay.” I became much less forgiving of this flaw as the show continued to do it. Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” has a real story but mercilessly pads itself, adding in pans and tracking shots that feel pointless even in light of the new definition of “having a point” you have to adopt when watching Aria. On the other hand, Episode 11 has one of the stronger messages of all the episodes of Aria, addressing Neo-Venezia’s own history independent of Venice on Earth that it was built as a replica of, and whether that history has value of its own. So I still cut it some slack as well.
Episodes 16, “Parting with that Gondola…”, and 17, “After That Rainy Night…”, received no such regard.
By this point the show had already started to become a bit of a slog. And Episode 16 follows on Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle…”, my personal pick for worst episode of any Aria, bar none, so my charitable feelings towards the show were running low. Then it decided to spend two entire episodes showing Akari say goodbye to her gondola, which has become old and needs to be replaced. Yes, two entire episodes devoted to bidding farewell to a hunk of floating wood.
In hindsight, it’s a little bit genius. For all its faults, which I’m going to continue enumerating at great length, Aria: The Natural masters themes and messages. It chooses more complex and more unique messages than the other two Aria shows do, and it symbolizes those themes in interesting ways that tie seamlessly into the world of Neo-Venezia. Episode 11 uses art snobs’ attitudes towards Neo-Venezian glassmaking to explore the city’s odd relationship with the city it was built as a replica of, and Episodes 16 and 17 use Akari’s old, beat up gondola as a symbol for how much she’s been through since coming to Aqua, and how much her life has been defined by it.
But as Episodes 16 and 17 illustrate, the show doesn’t always do a good job pacing those stories. They become too heavy, drive the same points in too many times; and they become too overwrought, trying to pack in too many feelings, which in the end becomes emotionally fatiguing and can even make what should be moving laughable. Through flashbacks, these two episodes adapt most of the stories from the early parts of the manga when it was called Aqua that weren’t adapted in Aria: The Animation. Putting this material so late in the series has an odd effect. It loses its original impact because Akari is experiencing all these early, awkward moments as memories that she’s now so far away from that they’ve become fond, even though they weren’t all pleasant at the time. So we as the audience experience these events as Akari does now: as bygone memories, a little wistful, things that shaped who Akari is today. Except when we don’t: having never been aware that any of these things happened, we have little context for them. We don’t know if they happened the day before Episode 1 of Aria: The Animation, or the year before. For me, some scenes survived this disconnect. Watching Akari struggle to row in front of Alicia and embarrass herself rowing backwards, I felt about it as current-day Akari did: a little nostalgic, recalling the rough beginnings that often go with new jobs and new lives. Watching her test to become a Single, I didn’t feel much at all.
By Episode 17 they’re mostly out of stuff from Aqua to adapt, so they start making up original material, and even bring in Alicia’s memories of training with that gondola herself back in the day. Then they finish on what feels like a solid ten minutes of Akari lying in the gondola while emotional music plays (a song called “Amefuribana”) and the exact same clips that we just saw in the first part of the episode repeat, this time cut up in different ways to coincide better with the music. Some of this is artfully edited—there’s a shot I like where they show Alicia cleaning off the gondola with a hose and then fade into Akari doing the same later—but it doesn’t change that it’s a clipshow of material we just saw earlier in the same episode. Not only does this seem either lazy or desperate, it also did weird things to my emotional investment in the situation. Showing a scene more than once is usually a heavy-handed way to emphasize how important that scene is. After two whole episodes of weighty sadness, melancholy, and nostalgia around this gondola, I had no more to give. I was tapped. Repeating these clips, in effect telling me “This is important, pay attention, you should feel sad about this” tipped me over from “no more feelings to feel” to annoyance. The show tried to milk that scenario for just a little bit more emotion than it was actually good for, and in the end, when they needed another five minutes of footage and decided to repeat some from earlier in the same episode, it accidentally brought everything crashing down. At that point in the show, when it had already become a bit of a slog, it couldn’t recover easily from that. And it never really did in my eyes. It started to make amends in its last three episodes, but it wasn’t until Aria: The Origination that I started to really enjoy it again.
Four boring episodes out of twenty-six shouldn’t be a big deal. But the truth is these four weren’t the only boring ones. At least half the episodes of Aria: The Natural are boring on some level. These four were the worst, because they had the most boring story content and were the most excessively dragged out. But sadly, even episodes with great story concepts were made boring, because the animation reaches new lows in this series.
Aria depends heavily on its art and music to convey emotions. There’s also emotion to be had from the characters’ stories, but neither Aria: The Animation nor Aria: The Natural do a great job of getting at it; they both have a ton of episodes that rely on art, music, and story concept with a few episodes that rely on character sprinkled in. The character-based episodes are consistently the best, and this is partially because the staff manipulated things to be that way. The terrible animation, at its worst, is too obvious to miss. There are large sections of some episodes that feel like picture dramas, where we see a still image with a lens flare on it to try and make it look more dynamic and the characters talk over it, but don’t appear anywhere in the shot. When the characters do appear, they don’t move, not even their mouths, they just stand in one pose while the camera slowly pans over them, while the dialogue is delivered in voiceovers. I can’t recall a single time in the character-based episodes—like Episode 6, “The Smile Reflected in That Mirror…”; Episode 13, “Those Really Self-Imposed Rules…”; or Episode 18, “That New Me…”—where the animation degenerated to this extent. But terrible animation completely destroyed Episode 2, “Chasing That Treasure…”, whose finale hinges on the beauty of Neo-Venezia being the real treasure. Episode 23, “That Sea, Love, and Heart…”, which has some nice things to say about how society perceives love and relationships, also made me start looking at my watch towards the end because the bad animation made its pivotal scene feel so drawn out.
In this episode, Akari meets an older man and his wife who’ve come to Neo-Venezia on vacation after years of the husband being unable to get away from work long enough for the trip. He wants to do a ceremony called the Marriage to the Sea to reaffirm his love for his wife. He’s rebuffed, but Akari levies her group of friends and acquaintances to put together a ceremony for him so he can tell his wife that he still loves her. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another anime do a serious story about an older couple’s love like this. It ends with Akari writing Ai a line I really liked, arguing against the ideas of true love and soul mates: “Maybe every encounter is a miracle, and love is really something you have to nurture.” The final scene, which should be a beautiful affirmation of an older couple’s continuing love against the backdrop of a beautiful orange sunset on the ocean, becomes a bunch of drowse-inducing pans over still images in which none of the characters are visible. Voices come out of nowhere and talk over these still images, but we don’t see the people they belong to, or if we do it’s from far away and they don’t move or change expressions at all. The episode, despite its unique message, is all but ruined by this. It especially hurts the squad of minor characters that the main six Undine recruit to fill out the celebration; we never see them, so they don’t add any visual weight, and we only hear their voices as disembodied speech from the ether.
Better animation would probably improve a huge number of the episodes I didn’t enjoy in Aria: The Natural. Some would still have story problems, but the series wouldn’t have felt like such a slog for so long if some of these plot-heavy, character-light episodes that proliferated at least had some pretty stuff to look at.
Aika Is a Borderline Psychotic Drama Queen and Other Odd Discoveries
Throughout Aria: The Animation and into the first 17 episodes of Aria: The Natural, the only one among our three heroines who really has a character arc is Alice. Almost every episode I think of as “character-focused” is about Alice, oftentimes with Athena as a strong supporting character. We’ll talk more about her arc when we discuss Aria: The Origination, but it’s by far the most full and interesting arc of any character in the series.
Akari never has a character arc, because she follows what this video about characters without arcs calls the “Flat Arc”. Akari starts the series with certain fundamental beliefs, and never changes those beliefs throughout the series. Instead, she changes other people by exposing them to her beliefs and the unique abilities those convictions give her. In Episode 10, “That Heartwarming Town and Its People…”, Akari inspires Aika and Alice to avoid judging others by their appearances, and shows them how powerful her ability to make friends with everyone is. She helps mend fences between a child and his teacher who quit her job to get married in Episode 4, “That Neo-Venezia Colored Heart…”, and helps a glassmaker heal the chip on his shoulder in Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” Throughout the entire series, Akari helps Akatsuki become a better person. He starts out as the biggest jerk in the whole show and slowly becomes a decent human with each time he meets Akari. Though she and Alicia are compared and portrayed as similar throughout the series, Akari seems to inspire others to be better people, whereas Alicia only seems to inspire others in their pants. Everyone who admires Alicia talks about their admiration in physical terms: Alicia is beautiful, Alicia is graceful, Alicia is an untouchable ideal. When people appreciate Akari at all, they appreciate her because she made them kinder or more open or showed them a new way of looking at the world that made it seem brighter and friendlier. That’s also why only Akari could be Alicia’s apprentice. Akari is humble, but not obsequious. She treats everyone like a close friend. While she admires Alicia’s skill and respects her as a veteran Undine, Alicia is a person to Akari, not a physical embodiment of an untouchable ideal. Aika could never have been Alicia’s apprentice, because she would have been so blinded by her admiration of Alicia that she wouldn’t have been able to learn. She would have constantly been chasing the picture in her head of what Alicia is, an impossible image of what an Undine should be, and ignoring the reality that she can never be that, nor does she have to be to be good at what she does.
Unfortunately, the other parts of Aika’s character arc, which really doesn’t begin until the later parts of Aria: The Natural, don’t quite work. Everything the writers try to say about her character is contradicted by evidence in the show, so none of her character beats come off the way they’re supposed to. In the first story of Episode 19, “That Crybaby…”, Aika has come down with a fever, so she misses practice and leaves Akari and Alice on their own. She expects this to be a huge problem, because she thinks Akari and Alice are complete idiots who can’t find their own feet without her. After a few days in bed, she’s feeling better and getting bored, so she sneaks out to go shopping, eat ice cream, and spy on her friends, who are doing just fine without her. Seeing this, Aika has what appears to be a full-blown existential crisis, runs back to her room, and hides under the covers crying because she thinks her existence is meaningless since her friends don’t need her to boss them around. When Akari and Alice come by to tell her they miss her and bring pudding, Aika remembers that life is worth living and immediately rebounds, and the crisis is over.
Aika’s character traits are supposed to be “serious, diligent, hardworking, and reliable”, but we repeatedly see her lose her mind over tiny incidents. In Episode 18, “That New Me…”, she runs away from a barbecue crying because her hair got burnt and now she looks ugly in front of Alicia, and then screams at Akira that she hates her because Akira isn’t sympathetic to her reaction. In the second half of Episode 19, “That Young Girl’s Heart…”, she’s so depressed that she can’t function in her day to day life, because Al, her crush, hasn’t seen the new short hairstyle she adopted after her long hair burned in Episode 18. This doesn’t make her come off as serious or reliable. She’s more concerned about her hair, Alicia thinking she’s pretty, and showing off for the guy she has a crush on than building up her skills as an Undine. Her perception of Akari’s and Alice’s incompetence that we see at the start of “That Young Girl’s Heart…” is completely skewed, to the point where I’d call Aika an unreliable narrator. There’s another episode during The Origination that further erodes Aika’s image as “serious, hardworking, and reliable” that we’ll discuss when we get to it.
The Natural also adds some weird and ultimately meaningless coincidences to Akira’s and Alicia’s pasts in what I consider the worst episode of any Aria series, Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle”. In this episode, Akari is enjoying a day off when she happens to run into Akira. There’s a scene between them that I liked a lot, but soon Akatsuki, Al, and Woody show up and the whole thing somehow turns into them all reminiscing about a time when they were children. It turns out that Akira and Alicia were on a field trip to Ukijima when they were young and happened to run into Akatsuki and Woody, who Al was babysitting at the park. Akira and Akatsuki competed at a bunch of challenges and Akira came out on top, leading Akatsuki to spend years thinking he’d been bested by the manliest boy ever. At the end he discovers that it was Akira and that she was a girl. Akari muses how wonderful and mysterious it is that they all met before.
While there are plenty of episodes, especially of The Natural, which are boring or oddly structured, this is the only one I’ll call genuinely terrible. It stomps on its own message: discovering that, by some insane coincidence, Akatsuki, Woody, Al, Akira, and Alicia all spent an afternoon together when they were children doesn’t make the world seem wide and wondrous, it makes it seem small and incestuous. The mere fact that Akatsuki, Al, and Woody all knew each other as children already felt like a huge coincidence since Akari meets them all by chance and then discovers later that they know each other. I also didn’t like the reveal that Alicia and Akira knew each other as children, for the same reason: two childhood friends happening to become two of the greatest Undine of their age makes the world feel narrower and poorer. Are there really so few people in Neo-Venezia that it can just so turn out that all of these people Akari randomly met happened to already know each other from the past? And these existing relationships don’t add anything to any of these characters. Akira and Alicia’s relationship was already well established (and already felt uncomfortably coincidental) by their time as trainees together. Akatsuki, Woody, and Al have no relationships. Even when we see them all together, usually in the festival episodes, we don’t see them interact in any meaningful way. It feels like it was just a convenience so there didn’t need to be a scene where they meet each other—but there already didn’t need to be a scene like that, because they never really talk.
The Cat God
I mentioned last time how much I ended up disliking the supernatural material. The Natural doubles down on ghost cat material and even crafts an odd sort of story arc around Akari’s encounters with Cait Sith, a seven-foot-tall cat god who seems to take a liking to her early on. He first appears in Episode 1, hidden under a robe and mask and playing the part of Casanova for Carnevale. The finale of this episode is a self indulgent-feeling five-minute sequence of Akari and Ai following Cait Sith and his entourage while singing, dancing, and clicking canastas. At the end, he takes off his mask and reveals who he is, fleetingly, from a distance. The entire sequence sums up my feelings about the Cait Sith material in The Natural: it’s artistically beautiful, and it’s well animated, it’s atmospheric, and it adds variety to the show by letting us see things we’d never see in regular old Neo-Venezia, and it breaks the world and it adds nothing to the story and I hate it and I hate that I don’t completely hate it.
The show never attempts to explain what Cait Sith is, beyond Alicia quickly explaining the myth to Akari that he’s a cat god from Manhome. I’ve seen theories that he’s a genetically engineered supercat, which fits into the world, since the Martian cats like President Aria can understand human language, meaning they must be genetically engineered. But late in the series, he saves Akari from a vengeful ghost. In the very next episode he’s seen conducting a magical sky train. And even back in Episode 4 of Aria: The Animation, a ghost cat taking human form handed Akari a letter. Attempts to explain these phenomena within a hard sci-fi, no-magic world get more and more strained, to the point where it’s meaningless to pretend anymore that Aria is a no-magic world. Given that, why overcomplicate things? Cait Sith is a magical cat god, and that’s the end of it.
I tried to justify the magical cat god material as part of Akari’s character arc, since she’s the only one who ever sees him. (Everyone else just accepts that he exists without question, even though I know I’d have some questions if my friend told me she’d seen a magical cat god, let alone been saved from a ghost by him.) But Akari doesn’t really have a character arc. She changes the people around her; she herself does not change. The Cait Sith episodes don’t provide her with one, either. She seems entirely unchanged by her encounters with the giant magical cat, other than the odd quasi-romantic attraction to him she develops in the last couple episodes of the storyline. If we wanted to we could interpret Cait Sith as some kind of out-there symbolism—as Akari’s childhood, as Akari’s sexual awakening, as a sign of Akari’s incipient mental illness, as Jesus, as Satan tempting Akari who symbolizes Jesus—but no matter which symbolic interpretation I tried on, it didn’t add anything to the story that connected to anything else in Aria at all. No matter how I interpreted Cait Sith as part of Akari’s character arc, he was either redundant or completely from left field. In the end, nothing about his presence in the show hangs together. He adds very little, and he subtracts a sense of realism.
Moving into The Origination
The Natural finally started to capture my interest again in the last few episodes. Once we moved past the cat god material we finally got back to stories about the characters and their lives. Three of my top episodes of Aria: The Natural are “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”, “The Fruits of That Encounter…”, and “That White, Kind City…”, which all come in here at the very end of the series. All three show how the main trio are advancing as Undine, setting up what’s to come in The Origination, but “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” and “That White, Kind City…” both do it under the simplest auspices. “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” just shows the main trio sitting around speculating about the future, punctuated by Akira getting mad at Aika for trying to inherit Alicia’s special Undine alias instead of creating her own identity. Even though “That New Me…” does this conflict more explosively, it’s handled with a lot more symbolic potency in “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”. An Undine’s alias is custom-made for her by her mentor, and characterizes her style and the experience a customer will have with her. It’s closely linked to her identity as an Undine. For the main trio, being an Undine is a core part of their personal identities, so the aliases they choose clearly express their personal identities and how they see themselves. So when Akira criticizes Aika for trying to take on Alicia’s alias, she’s much more pointedly advising Aika not to couple her own identity to Alicia; otherwise Aika is setting herself up for constant self-loathing and dissatisfaction when she fails to live up to her vision of Alicia.
“That White, Kind City…” is, in some ways, a tempest in a teapot. Alicia pulls off a classic mentor maneuver, answering Akari’s straightforward question about what she values in her job and what motivates her with a long, meandering stunt and a Zen koan. On the other hand, with a show that wears its themes on its sleeve like Aria, a little subtlety can be very refreshing. Ending the series on such a low-key story, where characters other than Akari and Alicia appear only briefly, seems a bit odd, but it works. It’s a fun, sweet episode, the beautiful imagery and focus on the Akari / Alicia relationship of “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…” improved by a strong plot thread and theme.
As we’ll discuss next time, Aria: The Origination is much more subtle, low-key, and focused on character and relationships than The Natural, and these last few episodes start moving us in that direction. They are all the better for it.
My Biggest Compliment for The Natural
Aria: The Natural is inferior to the other shows in story, character, and animation, but it manages to have my favorite soundtrack of all three shows. Since the soundtracks of all three shows are brilliant, this doesn’t quite absolve it of its failings, but it’s a definite point in its favor.
The Natural has the most varied and interesting background music, but it also racks up huge points because one of its endings, “Natsumachi”, is quite possibly my favorite anime song of all time. I have no ear for music, so it’s hard to really explain why, but over the years this song has almost never failed to make me think nostalgically of summer evenings by the beach and lavender sunset skies over the ocean with the stars just becoming visible. Oddly, the only real memories I have of a scenario like that have some unpleasant aspect to them, so the song is making me feel nostalgic for some synthesized thing that’s never actually happened to me. That’s pretty powerful.
The three Aria openings, “Undine”, “Euforia”, and “Spirale”, are almost identical songs in a lot of ways, but “Euforia”, the opening for The Natural, succeeds most at being that song. The Natural does, however, have my least favorite ending theme, “Smile Again”, for its second half. “Smile Again” is far from bad, but to my ears it’s merely pleasant, where the other endings, “Rainbow”, “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami”, and the aforementioned “Natsumachi”, achieve something more stirring. If you translate the lyrics, all four endings are pretty much the usual anime song pablum about romantic yearning and the blue sky, so it’s hard for me to describe what separates them for me. This is where words fail me, and I have to throw up my hands and admit that that’s how I felt about it, but it really is just a feeling.
Conclusion
Aria: The Natural has some of the best material in the Aria series, along with most of the worst material. There are times when it’s boring, and times when it goes in directions that undermine its own world. There are also times when it’s beautiful, and times when it nails a feeling or a theme perfectly. I understand now why I always felt so conflicted about it in the past. It has good ideas and executes some of them very well, and all of them competently, but it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and filling up space a lot of the time, which grew frustrating at times. It may have been better served by a thirteen-episode run, doing away with the cat god story and some of the other filler, to concentrate the good parts and leave behind the less good parts. But in the end it’s part of the Aria saga, and its length, as much as it burned me out towards the end, served some purpose: it bridged the gap from Aria: The Animation, where our three heroines have just gotten into the swing of things and still have a lot of growing and maturing to do, to Aria: The Origination, where they’ve matured a lot, and are now well on the way to becoming Primas.
