A Fantastic Children Anime Reflection

Admittedly, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, twiddling my thumbs figuring out exactly how I want to do this. Do I delve deep into the plot, and spoil major arcs and details to tease out some of the greater themes? I’ve been vacillating over how to do this correctly for a couple of weeks, wondering if I shouldn’t just do something else in the meantime. As per usual, I just couldn’t bring myself to rush this and risk the feeling that I’m manufacturing content, and I also couldn’t let this be something else I put on the backburner. Since I went through the absolute wonder of re-watching this anime I had to do this while it was still fresh in my mind, so here we are.

“Fantastic Children” by Takashi Nakamura is truly a masterpiece to my mind, but perhaps not in the usual way. For me it’s a very personal masterpiece somehow, the sort of thing that you perhaps feel at home with right away, or are completely unmoved by. I spent time wondering if I should break down specific elements of the show to support my experience, but I’ve decided to do something a little different. There’s a tremendous amount of things I could choose to analyze, but the show doesn’t really have the same spellcasting effect if you know the major plot points too well before watching the show. I can’t say it’s quite in the usual way, where a spoiler makes the show less enjoyable, rather that you feel like the show is happening to you, if you let it unfold while you experience it.

Okay, so I’ve played it up a decent amount here, but what is it exactly that makes this anime so special? As sort of a running theme on AE, I tend to be pulled into things that are really good at making you apart of their universe. Fantastic Children does a great job at making you feel the character’s emotions and experiences. The combination of the perspective, music and rawness of the situations made it very easy for me to identify with the gravity of whatever was going on in a particular moment.

The other major thing that this anime grapples with, where I think it will lose some people, is the sense of forgetting a familiar place, or a feeling of displacement. Not the kind where you think you don’t “fit in” in a particular town, or at your job, but the sort where you feel unable to identify with whatever it means to be human, because you have fundamentally different feelings. What I just wrote can be interpreted in many different ways to be fair. Some will vibe with it in an ambiguously angsty or melancholic way, which can be the garden variety masquerading as actually being different. Even then my preemptive reaction could be taken as giving oneself an unwarranted special status. Myself, nor this anime are here to argue about whether your feeling is valid or not but to illuminate that any reaction or opinion is not “true.” Whatever story you tell yourself about who you are, or who you’re supposed to be is made up, plausible and perhaps comforting or not. What I love about this anime is that it reminds me of the gravity of getting to decide who I “really” am or supposed to be. Am I a lonely alien looking for their lost home, or an anti-social weirdo who’s searching for a place that doesn’t exist? In actuality both answers are ridiculous, merely for different reasons.

As I said I don’t wish to spoil the contents of the anime, as I think it weakens the experience, nor do I want to wax on about myself, so I’ll leave off with a hook. Does enigmatic, a little too mature for their age, and always searching for something bear any meaning to you? If yes go watch the damn anime, if not, uh, go watch the damn anime.