Anime Lovers

AND DA AND has outdone itself this week with it’s best episode yet, perhaps even the best episode of this anime season writ large and certainly one of the most impressive episodes of anime I’ve ever seen. Direction, music, voice acting, pacing, and nearly every aspect of the episode were fantastic down to the finest detail. Last week’s episode was impressive in its own right, introducing a new character properly and mixing a blend of budding romance between Momo and Okarun with some action as they and Aira were confronted by the yokai Acrobatic Silky. That episode was one that I found impressive because of its mix of emotion and action, with the former being something prior episodes had in spades in the context of budding romance and feelings of longing and yearning. This episode, in a bit of different way, maximizes feelings of sadness, empathy, and at times even despair.

I have only praise for episode 7. It even has some actions sequences similar to those in Episode 6 that are worth praising, with some decently complicated choreography and high quality animation. But the emotional section without question is the highlight. This is one of the rare instances where I’d give something a 10/10 without a moment’s hesitation.

Spoilers ahead for AND DA AND episode 7

Counterattack

The first portion of the episode actually begins not with an immediate continuation of the fight from last week but with a short burst of memory from Acrobatic Silky as she franticly runs around a town, jerking her head in different directions and pulling our perspective along with it. This brief 25 seconds, ending with an outstretched arm and transitioning to the same motion in the present, set the tone for the entire episode and I immediately knew that it was going to be different than the others. Kikuko Inoue is a fantastic voice actor, this is known, but it takes extraordinary skill to communicate such a strong feeling of desperation without using any words at all. This also added to the other brief bit of Acrobatic Silky’s past that we saw in the prior episode, but it humanized her a lot more because of how frantically she was searching for something in that memory. I mention that because seeing things from her perspective affects the way the action that followed was communicated; it no longer seemed like a spirit meddling with human affairs but like a person. Director Yamashiro emphasized in my interview with him that the show wanted to remind people that yokai especially have emotions and used to be human. Scenes like this one did that and changed my perspective on the action immediately.

That action was great though. This environment and terrain didn’t give the opportunity to see Okarun moving at the incredibly high speeds that we saw in Episode 4, but it still gave some chances to see him acting with more control of Turbo Granny’s powers which was nice. Silky was the star of the fight, using her hair like a series of strings (they even had the same sound effects typically reserved for wires in anime) and dancing through the steel beams while flinging attacks at Okarun. It’s no surprise she eventually won that game of tag, even if she ended up tying herself down into place in the process. Topping all of that off was Okarun’s full throttle attack against her, lining up perfectly with the background music and producing an entertaining effect of the screen flashing back and forth between Silky’s pinkish color and normal, almost signaling her going out like a light.

A Mother’s Memories

To give some perspective on how much special care the AND DA AND anime took with the scenes of Acrobatic Silky’s human past, the first 5 minutes of the episode adapt a single chapter, that being chapter 15. In the AND DA AND manga, Silky’s past is only 11 pages, making up just about half a chapter. But, it translates to almost 10 minutes of screentime within the anime, with additional scenes added, existing scenes elongated, and all of it beautifully enhanced with careful direction and perspective changes. Small details, like the sound of rain fading as Silky is embraced by her child and transitioning into music as the door to her home opens to light, go a long way here. Sound and light communicates the contrast between the low points in Silky’s human life working multiple jobs (including being a sex worker, which becomes relevant) and the high points as she spends loving time with her daughter.

The piano is an intriguing mixture of melancholy and joy, communicating the feeling of remembering something precious but fleeting; it was the perfect accompaniment to a sea of memories like this one where we know the end result is something tragic and clearly ends with the loss of her daughter. In case it wasn’t clear what happened, Silky made the choice to use some of the money she earned as a sex worker to buy her daughter a new dress, a cute scene with the already heartwarming scenes of said daughter wearing Silky’s ballerina pointe shoes and dancing alongside her. Presumably, the men who came after her are either pimps or sex traffickers of some kind, coming to collect on whatever money was missing, attacking her and taking her daughter in the process. That throws us back into the contextual scene from the very beginning of the episode, as the music which played during happy moments before is now mixed with the sound of the rain as Silky frantically chases after the men who have just abducted her daughter. This scene is from her perspective, but that also has the effect of making us oblivious to her intense injuries in this moment, almost mirroring how her concerns must have been laser focused on getting her daughter back. In her despair, she performs one last, haunting, gut wrenching dance on a rooftop, remembering her daughter’s thankful words before leaping from the rooftop and ending her own life. The anime concludes that scene with a resounding thump that absolutely destroyed me.

Curiously, the anime made the choice to change one aspect of the scene where Aira mistakes Silky for her mother. Rather than have Silky take the appearance of the yokai in the red dress, they have her appear much closer to her human form, bloodied and cut up as she would have been on the night her daughter was taken away. I think this change was a good one in the sense that it better implied that Silky was in a sort of transitory state, having lost her memories after death. This way, it’s almost as if she was still like a human before being possessed by the warped desire to protect Aira, turning into a yokai as she pledged to do so.

Following the conclusion of the memories, I was a bit surprised at how callous Turbo Granny was being. Even without seeing the memories of her past, I felt like it was pretty clear from the beginning that the sort of regrets which led Acrobatic Silky to become a yokai were related to the loss of a child. Given how Granny protected women who were brutalized, you’d expect a bit more empathy from her. But, her attitude matches the sort of cold, cruel aspect of what’s actually happening to Acrobatic Silky as she fades away into nothingness, doomed to not achieve nirvana or rest in peace but instead basically cease to exist and fading into nothingness.

This is an episode I think I’ll be thinking about for quite some time. Like I mentioned above, every aspect of its execution felt near flawless to me. Emotionally, it’s the kind of episode that will bring tears to anyone’s eyes, even the most diehard shonen fans out there. It was easily worth watching multiple times, and each time the ending hits like a ton of bricks. Any outcome where it isn’t top of our weekly poll would be a tragedy.

© Yukinobu Tatsu/SHUEISHA/DANDADAN Production Committee