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…