Storyboard artist: Morio Asaka
Episode director: Koki Uchinomiya
Scriptwriter: Yasuhiro Nakanishi
Animation director: Kunihiko Hamada
Everyone, whether it’s known to others or not, has a story. A Hundred Scenes of Awajima invites us to experience the stories of those directly associated with or adjacent to the titular Awajima Opera School, a compelling premise backed by an elegant premiere that captures an ethereal, evanescent atmosphere and startles with the vivacity of its animation.
There are two tales in A Hundred Scenes of Awajima’s first episode. The first concerns Awajima newcomer Wakana Tabata (a diffident and breathy Nina Nakabayashi) and her roommate and dorm leader Kinue “Prince” Takehara (Yo Taichi, sounding mature and dependable), while the second story revolves around Kinue and her friend from another high school, Ryoko Ueda. The first is less a stand-alone story and more a light introduction to Wakana’s new world — not in terms of its curriculum, but in terms of the tricky human elements that reside in it. The show essentially spells it out for us, with dialogue that directly mentions such fears and challenges as ostracization and fierce rivalries, although the context for the conversations and the understated tone allow them to feel natural and not painfully on-the-nose.
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
Outside of words, we see a student who is so revolted at the idea of using a shared bath facility that she weeps about it in public. This facet is contrasted by her angelic singing, which transports Wakana and other passers-by into an otherworldly realm of blue and floating lights. At Awajima, breathtaking beauty co-exists with less admirable sights.
Wakana is perturbed by the idea of Awajima’s internecine conflicts, something she shares with her new friend, Momoka. The other thing that stands out about Wakana is her alleged lack of genuine interest in studying opera. The teenager credits her grandmother’s casual remark and her own faddish nature for her decision to enrol at Awajima, but from what we can see, I feel that a natural inclination towards the performing arts in general may turn out to be just as large a deciding factor as well. Given that we won’t exclusively follow Wakana, I wonder how much of an arc we can expect from her, and whether her contrast with the “norm” will simply mean that she offers a lighter presence in the show to balance out some others.
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
Wakana’s half closes with a conversation with Kinue, which also sets up and leads naturally into the Kinue and Ryoko half of the episode. While the first vignette primarily takes place at dusk and at night, Kinue’s is mostly set during the day, lending a natural contrast that also gives the impression of experiencing a bright point in Kinue’s life. This story largely takes place during Kinue’s middle school days, when she and Ryoko are respectively cast as Romeo and Juliet, and explains why Ryoko never followed Kinue to Awajima. The developments are fairly straightforward — the anime’s spoilery character description for Ryoko sums things up in two sentences — but the magical atmosphere woven by the wistful music and smattering of dreamily depicted shots, as well as the confluence of hidden feelings that lead to Ryoko’s decision, imbue it with meaningful weight.
When Kinue alludes to Ryoko in the first half of the episode, the visual depiction of these early hints is stylized in a painterly manner that evokes the slightly faded nature of a past memory, while also having striking hair and fabric movements that indicate how that past is still keenly felt in the present. From an animation and visual perspective, these shots are perhaps the highlight of the premiere, but they aren’t a complete outlier. A Hundred Scenes of Awajima seems to have blue and an autumnal orange as its favored hues, so it consistently feels fleeting and untethered from plain reality. Meanwhile, the animation of the premiere is always robust. Even outside of selected bursts of exaggerated liveliness, the characters, whose character designs give them an air of youthful innocence, simply feel alive. Further confidence is shown through cuts with complex camera movement, like rotations and zoom-ins. I hope that at least some of this quality persists across the remaining episodes.
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
©志村貴子・太田出版／淡島百景製作委員会
On the first episode’s webpage on the A Hundred Scenes of Awajima anime website, you’ll find a large, mostly blank relationship chart, no doubt to be filled in as the season progresses. In Kinue and Ryoko’s story, we saw the effect people can unknowingly have on each other, how hidden feelings exist just out of sight, and how the idea of Awajima can have different connotations depending on the individual. That relationship chart, as well as the characters highlighted by the anime’s promotional materials, tease that there are more such stories to come. I’m greatly looking forward to them.
Adaptation or original: Based on the manga by Takako Shimura
Production credits
• Director: Morio Asaka (Cardcaptor Sakura, Chihayafuru, Loving Yamada at Lv999!)
• Character designer: Kunihiko Hamada (Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, Loving Yamada at Lv999!)
• Series composer: Yasuhiro Nakanishi (Kaguya-sama: Love is War)
• Color designer: Harue Ono (Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End)
• Background art director: Hideki Nakamura (Inu-Oh)
• Compositing director: Junko Sakai (Your Forma, Loving Yamada at Lv999!)
• Music composer: Takahiro Obata (SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary)
• Animation production: MADHOUSE
