THE RELAXED THEOS/NAGATORO AND THE MECHANICS OF INSPIRATION

ALEXANDRE HAÏOUN-PERDRIX - Writer, 3rd Year, Philosophy

Spring is the season of beautiful, mannered flowers, that arrange their appearance and keep it for as long as they can; it is also the season of dandelions, with their more erratic behaviour, which like that of Nagatoro finds there their strange charm.

It is frequent for anime to focus on creators. Probably because it is easier for mangaka and scenarists to identify with their characters subsequently, among (many) other reasons. Their creation has to be motivated, and although it happens sometimes that the motivation is intrinsic to the creative processus itself (if not to the concerned “art”, as it is more often the case for anime whose main or proeminent characters are musicians), it is in most of them an exterior element — the creation which they perform thanks to it appears to be “merely” the medium at their disposal to express themselves. This motivation can take tremendous dimensions, to the point that it can look like Platonic enthusiasm — the idea of the character being set in movement by a genial driving force, a godly power. What this “theos”, at the heart of the motion, is, must be at the very heart of the anime, or at least the part of the anime regarding this creative character, for without its being of such importance, it would be hard to justify how much it empowers its possessor.

Such a theos, Don’t toy with me Miss Nagatoro quite demonstrates, with its protagonist requiring it at least as an inspiration for his practice of painting; and since it is a rom-com, it would have been strange to expect it to be something else than love. What is more annoying is how long it takes to “discover” the theos: the series quietly takes its time until the very end of its first season, and even there waits for the second one to really make it a serious issue in its scenario. Indeed, the new focus brought to it leads to a transition which might be qualified, at least, of quite awkward: the anime shifts with an unforeseen rapidity from a vaguely romantic comedy towards a pleasingly comic romance. Much is gained for sure, but the way in which this gain is made is dangerously nonchalant, and the identity of the series itself seems to be at least a bit altered, rather than merely improved.

More annoying perhaps, more interesting certainly, is the transformation of the relationship that the anime maintains with the art of painting. This latter knows a progressive but quite effective decrease in its preponderance as the milieu in which everything was to happen: the art club room is less and less often the place where the main characters meet, and painting as an activity is in concurrence with much wider a range of situations (indeed, it is even purely missing in more than one recent episod). However, since it becomes one of the main media through which love is manifested (less, nonetheless, in the paintings than in painting itself, in the creative process, that finds there a more exclusive motivation than it used to be), its scenaristic importance is probably increased, and the number of scenaristic functions it can have certainly so — especially when drawing, its preparatory step, becomes for one episode a bond between the two characters, and in a very attractive manner, one that offers the possibility of a wholly different relation on both sides.

This is however disappointing to see such a great potentiality almost forgotten from the following episode. And this is indeed what remains the main problem of Nagatoro: the propensity which this anime demonstrates to show seducing potentialities and soon after to endanger, if not to abandon them. It had sacrificed its romantic potential for the sake of its humorous capacity in the first season, but had brightly done so; it has sacrificed a part of this capacity in this second season to develop its romance, and brings hope that it will be fruitful; but it rarely manages to do it without carrying fear in the process, and by making this latter smooth and discrete.