Review: Akane-banashi – “That Day”

For a manga serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump, Akane-banashi is an anomaly. Instead of a series involving a male protagonist with powers being destined to live out The Heroes Journey, the protagonist starts oi ut as a regular elementary school aged girl with doting love for her father. Akane Osaki is a headstrong fifth grader at the beginning of the episode who worships the ground her father walks on, rakugo performer Shinta Arakawa.

The story sounds pretty threadbare at first glance, but when Akane’s reverence for her father leads her to quietly pantomime her father’s own constant rakugoka rehersals and practice, she inevitably picks up the skills needed to get out of trouble when she gets attacked by a bully in the same classroom after reading her essay on who she respects the most, that person being her dad.

By performing exactly what happened in front of the principal and the angry mother that is otherwise defending the ugly bully that is her son, she demonstrates a natural talent for performance that her father seems to lack, demonstrated earlier in the episode by his constant tension coming across while conducting a low stakes performance at his local Rakugo Cafe in preparation for his Shin’uchi level exam performance.

The performance ends up stunning the judges in attendance for its novelty and the audience, who did not expect such a profound mastery of character voice and mannerism. That is, until the competition suddenly ends without any promotions, as the head of the school  in Issho Arakawa expels all of the participating students for not living up to his lofty expectations. The episode ends six years later, with a teenage Akane chasing her own story to avenge her father’s expulsion, and to forge her own path as a rakugoka.

Since this is being animated by ZEXCS with substantial outsourcing, the sequences depicting audience and performer impact receive the same visual flourishes that wouldn’t feel out of place in a shonen anime. My issue with them stems from the fact that they exist in this adaptation, but it’s a minor complaint. Once I reminded myself that we’re meant to see the performance through the eyes of a child, not only do they make sense, but it helps the audience overall understand the impact of a performance.

I’ve been reading the Akane-banashi manga for awhile now, and go out of my way to collect the series, because it’s one of the few series I know I will re-read in the future. If the first episode is any indication, the anime will not only make rakugo less imprenetrable for children, it may even attract younger and older adults into the art form.

The pacing is perfect and it manages to keep the subject matter compelling thanks to the character drama, while the Akane Small Talk segment at the end of the episode is the perfect capstone that also teaches brand new viewers more specific elements of the art form.

The series premiering on YouTube ahead of its intended rollout on Netflix in May was a wise decision, as rather than let the series die on the vine in terms of visibility, making it widely available for free for a month in North and South America ensures that people will find the series and follow it into next month’s debut on Netflix. I look forward to next week’s episode and it can’t come soon enough.