With Someday’s Dreamers, it was love at first sight. For a slice of life fan, could it have been any other way? In all honesty, the narrative left me underwhelmed. But for an atmosphere piece, Someday’s Dreamers is something special. It’s Shimoda Masami at his best.
It’s also a love letter to Tokyo. Very few anime series that take place in Tokyo truly capture the feel of the city. See, Tokyo is disorienting not in its uniformity, but in its diversity. Bustling commercial strips give way to quiet residential neighborhoods with the turn of a corner. Skyscrapers in clean rows tower over a chaotic patchwork of rooftops and narrow streets. The rumbling of the Chuo Line does battle with the sizzle of a yakitori vendor’s grill. The sizzle of the yakitori vendor’s grill does battle with the never-ending sound of footsteps. People walking to work. People walking home. People walking to school. People walking just for the sake of walking. This is the Tokyo of my memories. It’s the Tokyo of Someday’s Dreamers.
And it’s the Tokyo of my fifth music video…
Perfect Day (50 MB XviD AVI)
Of course, just as Someday’s Dreamers impresses as an atmosphere piece, it also impresses as a character study. Such is the purpose of this music video. At heart, it’s two character profiles in vignette form; Tokyo is merely the glue that holds it all together. There might be a narrative there, or there might not. My intention, really, was to allow the original material the opportunity to speak for itself. I wanted to capture and share the feel of Someday’s Dreamers. Nothing more.
But, you know, just as atmosphere pieces don’t make for popular anime series, they don’t make for popular music videos. In many ways, this video was a response to my previous video, Forever and Before, which had performed surprisingly well at the previous year’s AMV contest at AnimeCentral in Chicago. For the first time, I pushed myself to finish a video within a certain timespan, hoping to make the submission deadline for that year’s contest. And I did. But when the convention and contest came and went, and the list of featured videos was released, Perfect Day was nowhere to be found. Much to my dismay, it had been cut from the contest pool entirely.
I was annoyed, no doubt. But, in retrospect, it’s not worth being annoyed about. AMV is LOVE, and all that jazz.
And, besides… here I am, almost three years later, sharing this video and a little slice of a show that’s especially dear to me with each and every one of my readers. I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Except, of course, that you stick around for the next and final installment of this series…
I saw Someday’s Dreamers as featuring a strong storyline, atypically strong even! Its narrative was one of the big selling points when even creators of Kamichu can’t resist the siren call of “episodic” anime. Episodic, my butt. What a pathetic excuse for milking the premise.
Not being to the real thing, I may be missing some important details, but also it seems to me that Someday’s Dreamers do not portray Tokyo any differently from, for example, Chobits.
I don’t remember a lot of the plot of Someday’s Dreamers, or even the names of the characters, but I do remember that it was one of the few anime which made me cry. It was in one of the earlier episodes, when the main character gets homesick.
It matched my current situation then (heading across half the world to university), and I just lost it.
I like slice-of-life to an extent. What would you say the main selling point of Someday’s Dreamers is other than that aspect?
The video is pretty good, though the switching between letterboxing and “full screen” was a bit distracting.
Well, the slice-of-life is the show’s primary appeal. Like I said, I didn’t find the narrative all that spectacular, but Pete obviously feels otherwise. That doesn’t surprise me, however… the show is pretty open-ended, and will affect people in different ways. Since I’m such a slice-of-life junkie, it’s the atmosphere that ensnared me.
That said, the show has a fairly strong cast. Yume (the protagonist) is a pretty admirable character, and you can’t help but feel sympathy for her given the trials she faces. I also think the whole “bureaucratization of magic” element is clever. It’s an interesting change of pace, either way.
I just can’t help to associate with characters, so I felt terribly oppressed by the governement in SD. So they give everyone a tracker ring, like Nazis gave yellow 6-spike stars to Jews. Woops, a Goodwin law violation — but it’s true nonetheless. There’s no justice and the whole merciless machine is only maintained by kind Mr. Edo’s who hide letters of apologies (At their own discretion, naturally. And some gripe about prosecutorial discretion in America). To add to it, Yume has to study some incredible hogwash about advancement of magicians’ rights. The creators put it in for purposes of exposition, but it really fit in. Later, it looks as if the poor people who were chewn and sput by the monster are there (at the tea) as some kind of grotesque portrayal of denial, keeping cheerful, and “gambatte spirit” in the face of post-traumatic stress. Inoue is the only one who has any sense for the injustice, but his spirit is completely broken by the bureaucrats and the brainwashing. He only dreams about being a mage of the streets, never doing anything about it. I don’t know how Angela can take it without going crazy, she wasn’t born into the same hell as other characters. She’ll be all gray before she’s 40.
If we just ignore the consequences of the world creation model and look at everything through eyes of Yume, it’s a nice enough story.