Real Worries: Wandering Son Anime Review

And welcome back to Otaku No Video. As always, thank you very much for joining me. For today, I'm reviewing the anime series Horo Musco Wandering Son, a 2011 anime TV series. Now, there's this philosophical meaning of the word perfect. So, I might call this pen perfect. It does not mean that it has no flaws. It means that its flaws are not significant to what I use it for, and that all of its strengths are completely manifest, i.e., this does everything that I need out of a pen. In that sense, Horo Musco Wandering Son is perfect. It explores gender through its characters, all children just entering adolescence in their first year of middle school. The story focuses on Shu, a young boy who has developed a taste for girls' clothes, and a girl, his best friend, who is something of a tomboy and is increasingly frustrated by her developing figure. From there, things get complicated, as you might imagine. Nearly every character in this reflects some aspect of gender, from stereotypical boys' behavior to stereotypical girls' behavior to homosexuality and even transsexuality. And then characters start getting crushes on each other, which throws the whole gender thing into even stronger relief. I mean, what does it mean when a boy sees a girl for the first time, falls in love with her, and then finds out that that girl is actually a boy who's cross-dressing? Who is he falling in love with? Is it a boy or a girl or what? And these issues are beautifully counterpointed by the characters' inevitable physical developments. The boys' voices break, they have wet dreams, the girls start to develop physically, and the tomboy character just cannot stop developing breasts. And is that fair? Well, what is fair? And, of course, these kids' plight is furthered by Japanese social standards. Now, I do want to pause here to point out that there is a common misconception in the West that Japan is a strongly conservative country. It is certainly conservative, and there are these very specific male and female roles. That is not as true today as it used to be, and it's not as true as the stereotypes present it. However, it is certainly there. There are strong gender expectations for men and women, boys and girls, in Japan. And that is something that the characters certainly have to deal with. And this is doubly true for the fact that all these kids are in middle school, an era and a place where everyone seems intent on torturing each other. And this brings me to a remarkable element of Wandering Son. All this social pressure to conform to boys' or girls' behavior comes almost entirely from the other kids, not the adults. In contrast to the vast majority of kids' stories, the adults in Wandering Son are not enemies, they are gentle assistants. In fact, when Shu kind of comes out to his parents about liking girls' clothes, they react with mild surprise, followed by complete acceptance. They're totally cool with it. Even the other adults, the teachers, react more with surprise and confusion when they see some of these kids wearing, basically they swap school uniforms at one point. And they're just sort of, why are you doing that? But there's no condemnation. Now, there is one sequence near the end where adults are showing some disapproval of all of this. However, it's worth noting that it's not actually shown on screen. It's all done off screen. We're merely told that it happens. And so, consistently throughout the series, whenever you see an adult on screen, they are sources of helpful advice and information, not disapproval or condemnation. And this gets to the show's approach to its theme. The writers show characters with problems and how the world reacts to those characters. So, while the writers are clearly sympathetic to Shu and his plight, they don't go the opposite direction and portray everyone else as stupid or evil for reacting to Shu. Moreover, the writers demonstrate that behaving in a way that is against societal norms is painful. Full stop. No moralizing about whether that's right or wrong, whatever. Nothing about the failures of society or whatever. Just that this is difficult. This is hard. Anytime that you go against the prevailing wisdom, that's hard. And wringing your hands about it really doesn't get you very far. The point is to deal with it. It's a refreshingly mature approach, really. We don't have long sequences where Shu stands up and makes a big speech, or other characters make big speeches about how terribly they've been treating him, or anything like that. It's just characters reacting to each other. It's life. It's normal. You don't get a scene a la The End of Evangelion where a character stands up and says, and here's what I'm going to do. It's just, you know, life. And this is why I feel ambivalent about labeling Wandering Son as some kind of non-conformist, somewhat revolutionary story. A lot of people have been surprised by Wandering Son, as one would expect, and have been labeling it as this sort of shocking expose. Not really so much. Now certainly it portrays Shu as moving against societal norms, and it also portrays gender as a mostly social construct, i.e. something that we all make up. And that certainly would have turned some heads in Japan, and it turned some heads over here in the West. However, Shu's story is basically a hero's journey. He has some problem, he goes to resolve it, and he pushes through. He actually is more similar to, say, Naruto or Kenshin Himura than any sort of revolutionary hero. So in that sense, it's in many ways a traditional story. Anyway, Wandering Son makes strong, deep points with a complex story that left me pacing back and forth afterwards trying to collate all this information in my mind. So certainly, well done there. Now, the animation is remarkable for its subtlety, primarily. There are no action sequences in Wandering Son. There's never even a physical fight. So the animators instead, smartly, focused on subtle emotion. These kids go through a wide range of feelings and emotions, anger, regret, sympathy, all sorts of things playing out on their faces. I was actually really amazed by how much I felt I understood about the inner life of the characters and what they were thinking and what they were feeling. Despite the fact that there's comparatively little dialogue, actually, and a lot of the subtle emotions come out in sequences where characters are silent and reacting to each other by not talking, otherwise, you know, not talking, as opposed to big physical movements or dialogue to say, I feel angry at that. So I was actually very impressed by that. Now, the story can be difficult to follow. It often jumps in the middle of a conversation to another conversation. So you'll have two characters talking in a bedroom, and at the end of one line of dialogue, it'll jump to very similar-looking characters sitting in a different bedroom. Now, this is actually accurate to the original manga, which will do these jumps even in the middle of a page. And initially, I was confused by that, and then I realized that it is serving to really juxtapose the different characters' viewpoints and illustrate how arbitrary their viewpoints are. One character will say something, and, oh, I don't believe in that, they will say. Then it'll jump to somebody else, and you'll say, wait, they don't believe that. Oh, but they're that other person. Well, why did that other person say they were strong about that? So it actually serves a purpose. Again, it is hard to follow, but I think it's one of those things where if you sit back and just relax with it, I think it definitely works, and there's actually a lot of complexity to it. Now, I listened to Wandering Son with Japanese language and English subtitles. There was no dub available. And I don't know Japanese well enough to be able to truly judge the effectiveness of the voice acting. I can say, though, that the voices were effectively subtle and quiet. I think that's more to do, though, with the show's direction. This is not a show about characters screaming at each other. In fact, characters rarely even raise their voices at each other. There are no fights. There are no big arguments. And that's because, frankly, that's a TV trope. That's not real. When was the last time you yelled at one of your friends? We just don't do that. So that's, in fact, one of the ways in which Wandering Son is realistic. And if I was going to pick one adjective for Wandering Son, that would be the adjective I'd pick?