Tsurune’s anime spin on archery will send the mind racing through time

In a nameless town on the border of urban and rural life, in a nondescript high school like any other, arrows pierce the idyllic landscape, hit their targets and bounce across a lawn. The martial art of kyudo, Japanese archery, is central to Kyoto Animation’s Tsurune. The anime is currently at the end of its second season, Tsurune: the connecting shot (which you can watch on HIDIVE), and while it sounds like any other sports anime with a bit of coming-of-age drama for pizzazz – a tried and true genre of the medium – Tsurune draws the viewer into a nostalgic dream world that feels vaguely like a reminder of a life you may or may not have lived. The show’s beautiful imagery creates a desire to connect, a desire to reach back and relive the warmth of a memory that may or may not be yours. Nostalgia par excellence.

Tsurune is a beautiful presentation. The Kyoto Animation team has put their heart and soul into making this show look amazing. Whether it’s the high-action shots of arrows in flight or the attention to detail in the background art that brings to life a local sports center or a high school classroom, there is an energy that pulses through Tsurune both in the intense storytelling moments and in everyday scenes. Minato Narumiya’s journey back to Kyudo after a tragic accident is made all the more powerful by the care taken by series director Takuya Yamamura and his talented staff.

Telling a sports story in anime can be a relatively simple exercise. Your youth group has a goal, usually competing in a national competition, and they grow and experience life along the way to that goal. There is often a rival who is better at sports than the main characters of the story. Tsurune has all these elements. Minato and his fellow Kyudo club members from Kazemai High aim for the national title, but get in the way of Shu Fujiwara and Kirisaki High’s private school kids. Yamamura storyboards these cliche elements perfectly, but they were created in the service of a larger philosophy, linking kyudo to something more, enhanced by the incredible quality of the animation. Most anime won’t blow the budget making one train station looks photorealisticBut Tsurune do. Art director Shoko Ochiai has been creating beautiful background art with Kyoto Animation for years, but Tsurune is the first project where she has been at the helm for art direction. She spent her time perfecting her craft on other Kyoto Animation shows like Violet Evergarden And Sound! Euphonium shines through here Tsurune‘s beautifully composed landscape.

In the process of becoming a beautiful sports anime, Tsurune also taps into the specific emotional resonance of restorative nostalgia. When we think of nostalgia in a modern (usually Western) frame, we envision remakes of hit TV shows from the 80s or 90s, or we take aesthetics from previous eras and remix them in the present to create something with a retro vibe. to create. This is known as reflexive nostalgia, as it relies on the individual consumer’s feelings towards the nostalgic cultural objects being paraded in front of them. It is a relationship between you, your feelings and the thing. See the original cast of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers get back together in your feelings, remember your childhood? If so, that’s reflexive nostalgia.

In an anime style Tsurune, the nostalgia you connect with isn’t necessarily yours alone. It is linked to a collective set of nostalgic ideals, which often take the form of a kind of national sense of identity. It is working to restore something that is feared to be lost, or in the process of being lost. In this case, it is a Japanese identity being wiped out by modernity and the influence of globalization.

Restorative nostalgia Tsurune is everywhere, as the show is imbued with a specific idea of ​​what it means for a city to be a Japanese city. To be a person living in that Japanese city. To know the feeling of deep being in that Japanese city. Crucially, the third part, the feeling, is where Yamamura and his staff excel. And that presents itself in both an obvious and subtle way.

First, there’s the setting itself: the nowhere-but-everywhere city. Tsurune is set in an unnamed city based on actual locations in the very real city of Nagano. A show that aims to revive the classic idea of ​​a Japanese identity never takes place in Tokyo. The sprawling metropolis is far too cosmopolitan to be the backdrop for aesthetic restorative nostalgia to thrive. Kyoto Animation knows this and for years the studio has been using real-world locations that are on the borderline between urban and rural life. The 2012 coming-of-age drama Hyouka was based on the city of Takayama in Gifu Prefecture. 2013 Free! used the city of Iwami in Tottori Prefecture (Japan’s least populous prefecture) as the setting for his anime “sexy boys do sexy swimming”. I once visited the city of Nishinomiya to see locations from the 2006 Kyoto Animation classic The melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. My Japanese friend was totally confused why I should visit this boring suburb between Kobe and Osaka. Even after explanation, he still did not get the appeal.

Image: Kyoto Animation/Sentai Filmworks

By placing anime in a city like this, the balance between nature, cultural tradition and modernity forms a perfect nostalgic relationship that maximizes the recovery potential. Tsurune‘s unnamed city is an even more powerful example of this phenomenon, as it allows the viewer to imagine that the series is set all over Japan. While there are fearless anime location hunters running blogs and posting to Twitter with their findings, for the general viewer the anonymous everywhere helps them identify with the themes of the show as they are less likely to get caught up in the specifics of the city in the background.

Art director Ochiai and frequent collaborator Azumi Hata, who serves as Tsurune‘s color designer, have a keen eye for turning these unassuming everyday places into living works of art. They share a love of aging the objects in their animated worlds and capturing that worn, authentic sense of places and spaces. When the series flashes on again Minato’s years of kyudo practice at home, the wear of the hardwood is visible. It is a visual manifestation of a memory that evokes past feelings in Minato’s father. Touches like this make the setting of Tsurune intentionally, beautifully nostalgic. It happens all over this show. A school hallway with specks of dust filtering through sunlight, the local shrine draped in maples, or even the vending machines in front of the train station at sunset call out to the viewer, perhaps reminiscing about time spent in these spaces in one’s childhood, or perhaps to making a link to a certain aesthetic ideal that someone in a one-room apartment in the concrete jungle of Tokyo may have lost touch with.

When you put the martial art of kyudo on this stunning background, Tsurune reinforces the nostalgic desire for a national identity by centering the story around a Japanese art with centuries of history. Kyudo has evolved throughout Japan’s history from being taught as an art of war to today where it is taught as an art of discipline. There is a spirituality in kyudo that can be vaguely connected to Buddhism or Shintoism (though never explicitly), and that spirituality and philosophy is seen through the show’s story and aesthetic motifs. Yamamura makes sure to emphasize the precise movements and specific aesthetics of kyudo Tsurune. Finding beauty in the straightening of a bow or in the ritual steps an archer takes when entering the archery hall. The sound of an arrow hitting a target, the ruffle and flutter of the traditional hakama pants, and the slide of split-toe tabi socks on waxed hardwood floors are all presented as part of this nostalgic package.

Image: Kyoto Animation/Sentai Filmworks

Once the narrative focus on kyudo philosophy and high school students’ lives is established, Ochiai and her team can get to work with aesthetic embellishments and accessories to reinforce the message. Gently falling cherry blossoms, chirping crickets, and mysteriously opportune gusts of wind signal that closeness to nature, while the clatter of a can of coffee from a vending machine, the mall lined with mom-and-pop restaurants and storefronts, or even the quiet neighborhood street where Minato lives are impossible. beautifully crafted, making the everyday extraordinary. It sparks a nostalgic longing for the everyday.

There’s a stubborn pride in this idea of ​​a uniquely Japanese aesthetic, and Kyoto Animation is determined to keep it alive Tsurune. The show is a coming-of-age drama nestled in a sports anime that questions if we’ll ever really “grow up.” When does growth stop? Isn’t it a more cyclical process of fire and rebirth, of tearing down and rebuilding? When you think about it this way, the restorative nostalgia that runs through the series makes sense. If we only look forward, we can grow, but we lose our connection with the past. Japan will just become one giant Tokyo. If instead we revisit that history, staying connected to these collective aesthetics and the identity they emanate, could our growth be richer for it? Tsurune demands this of its viewers through its visual storytelling, creating a world of almost surreal beauty but somehow tapping into a relatable, familiar nostalgia that is nothing short of magic.

Tsurune is available to stream on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE. Tsurune: the connecting shot streams on HIDIVE.