Remembering the Names of People Who are Kind: Skip and Loafer

Welcome to this week’s installment of ANIWIRE! This week we’re talking about one of my favorite anime of the spring, Skip and Loafer. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• A new Godzilla film has been announced titled GODZILLA MINUS ONE, directed by Takashi Yamazaki (Stand By Me: Doraemon). I don’t know where I stand on Yamazaki; his CG films are very popular in Japan but have divided critics abroad. Godzilla looks great in this new film, though!
• Polygon Pictures is working on Spider-Man: Freshman Year, a series first announced by Marvel Studios back in 2021. Polygon Pictures’s 3D character models have historically been poor compared to their stellar art direction, but they’ve steadily been improving over the past few years. Here’s hoping this is their best yet.
• GKIDS is bringing Ghibli’s How Do You Live? abroad under the new title The Boy and the Heron. By the way, the film is out in Japan right now! It has a theme song by pop star Kenshi Yonezu.
• Mangasplaining has announced that they will serialize Atsushi Kaneko’s manga Search and Destroy via their paid newsletter, and that Fantagraphics will print it in 2024. Kaneko hasn’t been published in the United States since Bambi and Her Pink Gun, so this is excellent news.
• The eccentric science fiction anime Sabikui Bisco is getting a second season! The first season played fast and loose with the source material, so I’m curious to see what happens next.

Bookmarks

• How Do You Live is in theaters so of course everybody is talking about it. I recommend checking out this piece by Alicia Haddick in Verge, Matteo Watzky’s write-up in Full Frontal, and Melos Han-tani’s spoiler-filled reflections.
• For SakugaBlog, Kevin Cirugeda wrote about the fantastic first episode of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, how its themes reflect the staff’s own work experiences, and whether the rest of the show can equal its premiere (probably not!)
• For AsiaPacificArts, Kalai Chik interviewed the makers of Trigun Stampede.
• For The Canipa Effect, Callum May discussed my problematic fave Heavenly Delusion’s fantastic anime adaptation.
• For Shelfdust, Steve Morris wrote about the last issue of Chris Hastings and Gurihiru’s cult classic Gwenpool.

AMV of the Week

Here’s “karekano amv” by babynut.

Anime has a great track record when it comes to capturing the highs and lows of adolescence. But many recent series refuse to plumb their depths. I blame high school nostalgia. Folks tune into these shows to reminisce about student councils, culture festivals and young love. I can’t blame them for looking for solace. But while it’s tough to be an adult, it isn’t easy to be a teenager either. The stories about high school I like the most dig into the messiness of those years. Just Because, for instance, does a great job evoking the pettiness of high schoolers. Revolutionary Girl Utena portrays teenagers driven by dreams and desperate selfishness. In the manga world, Kyoko Okazaki’s River’s Edge tracks the inner lives of fatalistic Japanese teens after the 80s economic bubble crumbled.

One of my favorite recent high school stories, though, doesn’t quite fit in this rubric. Skip and Loafer began as a manga series by Misaki Takamatsu about a teenage girl  from the countryside who moves to Tokyo and makes friends with a city boy. It was adapted to anime this year by a team led by the perpetually underrated Kotomi Deai. Throughout the show’s airing, I couldn’t help but notice a split in discussion surrounding the series. Some folks loved the show for its empathetic characters and their ability to communicate. Others disliked the show for that reason. High schoolers aren’t that empathetic, they said. Why aren’t the cast of Skip and Loafer fighting like regular teenagers do?

Personally speaking, I like that the cast of Skip and Loafer are grounded. The heroine Mitsumi isn’t much like the “student council member” cliche you see in anime productions. She’s closer to the kind of student council member you’d meet in real life: hardworking, dedicated and kind of a dork. Only a few members of the cast channel the melodramatic energy that made shojo manga famous. Still, though, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Skip and Loafer is free of adolescent drama. My favorite characters in the series are the problem children. Mika, for instance, lashes out at others due to her lack of self-confidence after being bullied in middle school. Makoto dislikes her stylish, popular classmates, but is led by that bias to dismiss folks she shares things in common with. Mitsumi’s friend Sousuke is easy-going on the surface, but his lack of personal conviction leads him to make decisions that hurt people close to him.

There’s a scene early in Skip and Loafer when Mitsumi and Mika are practicing volleyball together. Supposedly Mika’s doing it to help Mitsumi improve, but really she’s using Mitsumi in order to get closer to her friend Sousuke. When two upperclassmen pressure them to leave the gym, Mika puts their names on her personal hit list. But she’s amazed when she learns that Mitsumi’s first reaction wasn’t to declare vengeance on these upperclassmen, but instead to be grateful towards the teacher who told the upperclassmen to leave. “While I learn the names of people who piss me off,” Mika says, “[Mitsumi] remembers the name of someone who was kind to her.”

An uncharitable person might argue that this scene is reductive. Forgiveness is a deeply personal thing. Should Mitsumi’s optimism be preferable to Mika’s fierceness? I wouldn’t say so, because the author Misaki Takamatsu confesses in an interview (translated by shinkanes) that she sees herself as more like Mika than Mitsumi. The volleyball scene was inspired by her own experiences at driving school. Takamatsu hated her instructor and decided to review them poorly in the final questionnaire. When she asked a fellow classmate what they wrote, though, she was surprised when that classmate had only praise for her own instructors. Just like Mika, Takamatsu realized that her first impulse was to criticize people she hated rather than praise people she liked. What would it take, she thought, to learn the opposite approach?

Mika’s personal flaws are potential strengths. Her cynicism allows her to navigate situations that Mitsumi is unprepared for. Her willingness to change herself lets her bounce back from failures that might crush other kids. She’s a lot more awkward than she wants to admit. But as Mitsumi’s aunt Nao says, “having a little bit of a cringe side will make you more endearing.” Over the course of Skip and Loafer, Mika learns to better manage her insecurities. That doesn’t mean that she flattens out into an easy-going high schooler. Instead she learns how to get along with others even as she retains her inner prickliness.

Skip and Loafer turns the typical high school drama on its head. Problems are rarely caused by miscommunication or an unwillingness to talk. The characters are all too willing to say what’s on their mind. But living in a community of friends requires constant negotiation. Mitsumi isn’t cynical like Mika. She doesn’t judge other people like Makoto does. She completely lacks Sousuke’s ability to read the room. Mitsumi learns to get along with these people, but there will always be a part of her that confuses them. In the same way, there’s plenty about these people that Mitsumi herself cannot understand. That’s the daily struggle of living in a society: adapting to the needs of others on a daily basis as they do the same for you. There is no victory and no clean break. It never ends. Adulthood is no different in this respect.

It’s worth noting that Skip and Loafer is published in a seinen magazine (for older men)  rather than a shojo magazine (for young girls.) Manga romance for teens positions the “camera” behind the eyes of the young cast. The audience experiences their feelings through their eyes. Skip and Loafer does the same with Mitsumi and Mika's personal feelings. But it also lets Mitsumi’s aunt Nao point the camera when necessary. Nao is bewildered by Mitsumi’s fashion sense, identifies with Mika’s insecurities and is initially suspicious of Sousuke. She provides a bird’s eye view of high school drama, living proof that a world exists outside Mitsumi and her friend group. Similarly, we keep in touch with Mitsumi’s family and friends in the countryside, who continue to live their lives away from Tokyo.

I’ve seen Skip and Loafer described as a cozy series, the anime or manga equivalent of a warm bath. Part of me hates that kind of thing. Adolescence wasn’t a warm bath. It sucked! But the highs and lows are themselves a part of its mystique. It’s a time when personal experience feels uniquely big and important. The cast of Skip and Loafer don’t live big, important lives. Instead their worlds are shaped by small decisions made again and again by their peers. What makes Skip and Loafer great is its ability to portray in granular detail how these quirky characters choose each day to live alongside other people. It’s not easy work and it isn’t always fun. But they have to keep at it.