That was absolutely amazing. Oh my god, Aoi Bungaku was already my favourite series of this season… and this episode just blew every of its episodes so far out of the water. What a roller-coaster of emotions this turned out to be! Ryosuke Nakamura. That’s one name to remember, because this guy is destined for greatness.
Unfortunately, he’s also destined for unexposure in the western anime fandom because his series are just so damn hard to translate. Why are there still no subs of episode 9 out at this point, even though the previous episodes were subbed without any problems (in fact, even the double-episoded feature of episode 7 and 8 got out faster than this). It’s the same with Mouryou no Hako: we’ve got ourselves an absolutely fantastic director here, and yet because his dialogue is so damn complex it takes much longer for the subs to come out!
In any case, enough ranting and onto this episode. Just when I already thought that the previous episode was full of emotions, it was nothing when compared to this one. The whole story by Osamu Dazai came together wonderfully. Thoughout a majority of the episode, you keep wondering why his friend abandoned him. When the answer finally comes, the shock hits hard, and yet it makes complete sense: the guy was about to die from heart failure. Especially after all of the things that the lead character called this guy for betraying him.
But the visual direction was absolutely amazing. The animation was just incredible, and especially the part where Melos is fighting on the desk, as the main character is writing his story is nothing short of gorgeous. Anime animation cuts corners?! Hah, this episode has so much emotionally powerful movement in it. THIS really shows what you can do with the animation medium.
And to think that Aoi Bungaku still isn’t finished. The wait is going to take two whole weeks, but after that we’re going to see two stories adapted at the same time. I have no idea what to expect from that. The director is going to be someone completely new, and I have no idea what to expect from this guy. Again, this is a great gamble by Madhouse by putting a new guy in front of such a big project, but who knows? Perhaps they found themselves yet another talent here.
Rating: **** (Fantastic)
Now I feel like reading the novel.
I wish someone encoded these last two episodes into a format that I can watch. :/ My computer hates hd.
hey psgels the subs aren’t out because A.niger fansubs quit after subbing 7-8, and the other subgroups just haven’t caught up yet.
Why’d he quit ? He was doing great work,and handing us all,wonderful encodes to.
Ah, so it was real-life issues combined with other subbers also starting to cover this series. Makes sense.
Aoi Bungaku is amazing!!! It’s so compelling, that forced me to see the raws with my nonexisting japanese… XD… Thanks for blogging this show… Nice job!!! It’s always a pleasure to discover these hidden pearls of anime…
U can read about why A.niger stopped subbing Aoi Bungaku: http://anigersubs.wordpress.com/
Well I can’t wait to catch up on this when the subs come out!! T_T
I’ve been watching this series with Korean sub and I can’t even imagine the effort and skills needed to translate into English. The lines are just… so complex and emotional. At least Korean is extremely similar to Japanese in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. In order to preserve the beauty of the original dialogue into English, well… I have nothing but respect for the English subbers, so please keep it up subbers!
By the way, I love your blog, psgels!
Hi, Psgels, is it? I read your blog posts about Aoi Bungaku and just wanted to say – THANKS! This is the most interesting and good looking anime i’ve seen ever. Keep writing! Cheers.
great series have only watched 3 episodes, reminds me a little bit of the old school godard films, with the surreal cuts, sense of randomness, strong directorial presence etc.
Usually, these kinds of shows are a bit preachy about their conversions from their novels or have awkward pacing (read: Many WMT shows and Erin) at odd times, but with so few episodes to work with, they have to be thrifty and put a lot into a few episodes and man, did it pay off so far.
Also, the totally fearless jump into animating it so vividly something that doesn’t really conjure up vivid imagery in classic Japanese literature is really amazing too.
One of my issues was that although Mouryou no Hako had amazing writing and occasionally beautiful animation and very consistent animation at that, they really weren’t tasked to put many action scenes or dynamic scenes.
But wow, this show really had Ryosuke Nakamura going with putting animation where you usually wouldn’t not find it. If it did it it in the status quo of animation, you’d only see mouths being animated and not too many liberties taken with the visual ferocity as seen in this show.
It doesn’t seem like you’ve heard, but the whole thing with the writer and his friend isn’t part of the original work. Only the play, which was based off a Greek legend as well as a German reworking of that legend, was written by Dezaki. No idea who wrote the new material unfortunately, be it Nakamura himself or someone else.
I didn’t like this episode as much as the last one, personally. Even besides the fact that Joushima was damn lively for someone with a heart disease, it was a sudden and hardly creative reason for the guy’s actions. It remained a fairly good story, though, and the only fault I have with the visuals is the over-use of the cherry blossoms.
Awesome story…I like this story the best. It’s not so dark as the 1st story and I liked the lighting and animation better.
It’s awesome to have literature adapted into anime rather than having the manga adapted…we’ve seen too many of those. But having literature adapted is a refreshing. Thank you creators for a wonderful job!
Haha this more like it, amazing piece of work
The animation is great, and a great ending to wrap thing up
Has every story been written by someone different? I didn’t know, but I guess it is, it’s just that each story has the same amount of darkness and gloom in it.That’s why I thought all the stories were at least taken from the works of the same author.
It’s actually been written by many different authors, although Osamu Dazai wrote both No Longer Human and Hashire, Melos.
I found this episode quite moving, so moving that I teared up. Considering how emotional it was, I’m not surprised that some may not have enjoyed it as much as I did. I thought the heart disease seemed logical but it surely was a cheap excuse for ‘abandoning’ Tadaka. Ahh, I’m so in love with this series, and am so bloody glad I finally got my hands on the subs. I seriously don’t know what I could have done without them.
decided 2 drop aoi bungaku at ep 4….i know its a good anime…a good anime that can somehow ruin my mood..that just shows how good it is….but 4 some reason i dont wanna feel that way and think about the anime even when i fall asleep…..i somehow regret deleting all episodes… …its a shame that im letting such a master piece walk away, but its a path of no return… but still TT………..
I thought every story would end really depressing. This one shocked me. Though there was a lot of sadness, there was a lot of true joy at the end too.
This is my favorite story so far! not only is the plot depicted really well, but I loved the drawing style as well (Melos is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO cute!!!!! inner fan girl in me was screaming every time he was on screen), and the animation was awesome. and its defining point, again, the way the stories were entertwined and depicted = just plain awesome. It’s also my favorite cuz it has a happy (or bittersweet) ending.