What would you do if one day you found a 4-year-old living alone next door? If you can't help your curiosity and concern step by step into his life, find that the child is even more mature than you, and use the simplest pure goodness to find an outlet and an answer for your rotten life, how do you feel? If you slowly get to know this child and find that his maturity, strength, and understanding hide painful memories far beyond what a child can bear, how can you introduce and explain this cruel world to him?
"Kotaro Lives Alone" received a high score of 9.1 on Douban
In March, Netflix launched a tear-jerking healing animation "Xiao Taro Alone Life", just ten episodes, the painting style is simple and clear, small and fresh like a fairy tale, the story is also warm and contains light, but it is a very gentle tone, telling people a tragic story.
The Japanese drama of the same name adapted from the manga also received high scores last year, but such a story that is extremely inconsistent with common sense seems to be more appropriate in the form of animation in comparison.
"Kotaro Lives Alone" poster of the live-action drama of the same name
The bright and soft colors and the more exaggerated posture of the adults around them also make the whole plot appear more lively and robust on the surface, and the black tone in the core of the story has a greater contrast tension.
Kotaro suddenly appears next door to the down-and-out manga artist Kano, and the two gradually become acquainted with each other's lives from bathing, and the bonds in life gradually accumulate. Gradually, this child who lives alone, always speaks wildly, sometimes has money and willfulness, and sometimes makes people nervous, constantly gathers around adults who intersect with it for various reasons.
Kotaro has a maturity beyond his age
Why does Kotaro live alone? His background is not simply explained from the beginning, but like a puzzle, through the perspective of different people, with similar or echoing life experiences, reflecting each other. Mizuki who escaped domestic violence but did not know how to break up, Tian Maru who could not see her son after divorce, the kindergarten teacher who was obviously unhappy but could not help but smile, the sister of the insurance company who did not know how to communicate with her children...
Stills from "Kotaro Lives Alone"
In just over twenty minutes of each episode, the adults restore the causes and consequences of The current situation faced by Kotaro with the eyes of onlooker concern, and also learn from Kotaro the truths of the intrinsic goodness of human nature that are too simple to be ignored.
This process of mutual companionship and treatment makes a group of adults facing their own difficulties form a family of different surnames around Kotaro as if they can support each other. Even if some people come and go like passers-by, the adults who pass by this station seem to have regained the courage to face life, and can calmly accept those things that they were originally unable to face.
The more sensible the four-year-old Kotaro is, the more distressing it becomes. "Kotaro Lives Alone" discusses many serious marriage and parenting issues from the perspective of a child. Regarding love, violence, and the responsibility of parenthood... "Unfortunate people heal their childhood with a lifetime", the adults around Kotaro have actually become vivid examples of this sentence.
After all, the child's world is limited, but it is also because of this limitation that the plot of the whole play is more heartfelt. In his original family, it is full of cruel details that people can't bear to look at, and these parts are whitewashed by a child's innocence filter with a soft light, which makes people unbearable to pierce.
Children do not want to hate their parents, so Kotaro constantly wants to make himself strong, because strong, he will not be hated, hurt his father can come back to live with him. He also once prevented Mizuki's boyfriend, who had violently inflicted violence on him, from calling the police, because his own personal experience had led to the experience of "turning the person he loves into a bad person".
Knowing that others had cheated him of money, he still chose to believe it. For "it is more pathetic to believe than to betray those who want to believe," something like this, as if the author had clearly and unambiguously marked the softest part of the human heart, and then stabbed it straight into that mark.
Over the years, there have been some "loneliness level index" behavior tables on the Internet, from one person eating hot pot to one person doing surgery, corresponding to different levels. And "Kotaro's Life Alone" portrays the loneliness in the eyes of a child to the extreme, it is extremely unique, almost every behavior or discourse is told in a very daily and bland way, but people have to pinch their own people.
Heartbreaking scenes, such as Kotaro buying a lot of paper towels in the supermarket, because when he was hungry at home alone, he once ate paper towels and came to the terrible conclusion that "the taste of paper towels is actually sweet";
On the way, he encountered someone giving balloons, he constantly changed his outfit, "tricked" to take balloons of different colors, not the greed of a child, but turned to the cartoonist to paint him the faces of his parents, brothers and sisters on the balloons, so that he could have a "family" for a short time and play with him.
He also ordered many newspapers and instructed the newspaper delivery man, "Because I live alone, if you find that the newspaper at my door is not received in two days, I may have something wrong, please take care of me..."
Kotaro treats everyone around him kindly, but also shines through people's hearts like a mirror. For example, the child who comes to play with him is not because he likes him, but in the eyes of his parents, he is a "child of others" who is not as good as himself, in order to escape the unsatisfactory in reality.
Kotaro became a very powerful child, and the adults became more vulnerable. And children change all adults with the enthusiasm of the little sun. The simple plot is a daily vegetable and a meal; the relationship between people is that each person has the courage to try to illuminate others.
Although the protagonist is a 4-year-old child, this is an anime that adults can better understand. Kotaro is easy to let people break defenses, because in such a simple line, simple plot of the animation, adults can also see the injured, lonely, hard to bear want to become strong, loved and loved, but also want to embrace the world of their own ah.
As an anime that is essentially healing, everyone who lives in Shimizu's apartment is a gentle and good person. So, so good that like a fairy tale, these good people put one or two bad artificial scars and sewed them up to mend. Although it is still very angry to think of it, those dull and sharp gentleness, after all, make Xiao Taro's original wooden and defensive eyes have a light, and it seems to be saying to the people off the screen, "To be kind to the world, to be a warm adult!" ”