"The story of the painful and incredible "second first love" that connects the past and the present" is the slogan of "The Man Who Knows the Blue of the Sky" (hereinafter referred to as "Sky Blue").
The story of "Sky Blue" revolves around two sisters, Akane Ai and Aoi Ai, who live in Chichibu City, whose parents died in an accident thirteen years ago, and who, in order to take care of her sister, gave up her agreement to go to Tokyo with her boyfriend Shinnosuke and chose to stay in the town to take up employment and take care of Aoi.
Many years later, Shinnosuke returned to Chichibu with the famous singer, but at the same time, another "Shinnosuke" appeared in front of his sister Aoi, crossing time and space to the current 18-year-old "Shinyuki", which triggered a series of stories.
Okada Kori as a screenwriter, the sister setting of the heroine and the second daughter, coupled with the "incredible four-corner relationship" promoted by many media before the release, many people think that "Sky Blue" will be a work that is "really chaotic in your circle" and makes people "stomachache". But this time, Gang Mama did not show too much "medicine power" in "Sky Blue".
Complex characters in small circles
Sky Blue, "We Still Don't Know the Name of the Flower We Saw That Day" (hereinafter referred to as "Flower Name"), and "The Heart Wants to Shout Out Loud" (hereinafter referred to as "Heart Shout") are all stories created around Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture, so it is called the "Chichibu Trilogy". When it comes to these three works, their core production team "ultra-peaceful busters" is an unavoidable topic.
From left to right are Shoga Tanaka, Okada, and Nagai Ryuyuki
After the release of "Sky Blue", Makoto Shinkai tweeted praise for this work and the "super peace busters": ""Sky Blue" supervised by Nagai Ryuyuki is a very pleasant movie, and there must be many people who feel that 'this is the movie I made for'. Mr. Nagai, Mr. Tanaka, and Ms. Okada clearly expressed what only they can make, and from "Dragon and Tiger", they are the objects of my vision. ”
What is something that only "ultra-peaceful busters" can manifest? From the perspective of the "Chichibu Trilogy", it is a meticulous description of the characters' mood and feelings, the description of the entangled character relationships, the communication and confrontation between the characters, and what they are best at is what producer Hiroyuki Shimizu wants to do "a youth story that can shake people's hearts, an animated film that can make the audience sad and cry."
Like most works in which Okada Ryori works as a series member or screenwriter, Sky Blue tells the story of a small group of characters within a small circle. This is also what Gang Mama is best at, telling the complex relationships of members of a small circle and their emotional collisions.
The heroine Xiangsheng Aoi is a very straightforward girl, her actions and words will not go through too much thought, and she will immediately implement it at the thought of it, which also makes her look unpleasant.
She would lash out at Chika after misunderstanding what had happened to her classmate Chika Otaki and Shinnosuke.
After knowing that nothing had happened to the two of them, he would immediately apologize to his face.
She also has a delicate girlish mind, and when she realizes her feelings for The Cautious That Appears Through Time and Space, she also behaves shyly, subconsciously hiding her feelings and caring about the distance between herself and the Prudential.
But her straightforward personality makes her expression of emotions more direct, and when asked by Chika if she likes caution, she directly says "Yes, I like it!" In the face of Caution, Aoi directly said all his love.
Aoi is such a real and slightly reckless girl, but this self-centered lifestyle also causes her to be affected by the fact that she can only receive limited information in her judgment. Her changing thoughts about helping Old Dao or Shinnosuke, as well as her misunderstanding of Akane, are also caused by her personality.
In contrast to Aoi, sister Akane is a quiet and gentle person. She didn't have much mood swings either when she was reunited with Shinnosuke or when confronted with Aoi's harsh words.
This personality also allowed her to hide some words in her heart and not to show them. The hardships of raising her sister alone, the expectations she had for Shinnosuke in her heart, she didn't say anything.
She is also a strong, independent woman, in the film she has one of the few emotional fluctuations scenes, one is the old way to deliberately invite Shinnosuke's band, want her to make a knot with the past, she said with some anger: "So far in life, I have chosen by myself, decided by myself, I never feel at the mercy of others." 」 ”
The 18-year-old Shenzhi is like a little sun, optimistic, with dreams, and believes that anything can be accomplished by hard work. Treating others, especially Aoi, he always conveys positive signals and encourages Aoi, which also leads to Aoi finally falling in love with him.
Faced with the time travel of confusing conditions, he also quickly adapted to the situation. So even in the face of the future is completely different from the "self" in the belief, prudence can motivate him to continue to move forward.
The 31-year-old Shinnosuke was smoothed out by life and went to Tokyo for his dreams, but was limited by reality and gradually gave up his dreams, paralyzed himself with the excuse of "having worked hard", and lived a chaotic life.
He is cold to things, mean to people, like an uncle who has lost his dreams.
However, there was still a little remnant of the dream fire in his heart, and his reaction when he heard the song "Gandhara", which he liked in his youth, also laid the groundwork for him to break out of the cocoon later.
These four characters are the small circle that "Sky Blue" focuses on, each with distinct characteristics, and there is a tangled and contrasting side.
Okada's specialty of expressing meticulous emotions is vividly used in the production of this small-scale group portrait drama. For example, the famous "Stomach Pain" animations "Tears of Truth" and "From a Calm Tomorrow" are both focused on the emotional entanglements in a fixed small circle, and both achieve impressive results. When it comes to the animation of "your circle is really messy" and "stomach pain", I believe many people will think of these two works.
At first glance, the story of "Sky Blue" also seems to have the feeling of "your circle is really messy", but when you actually watch it, it does not make people feel this way. The characters have emotional entanglements, but there is no emotional conflict.
Therefore, compared with the publicity of the media in advance, the core of the work is obviously not a complex love entanglement, and the "medicinal power" is obviously inferior to okada's previous "stomach pain" work.
Express the power of language
The "Chichibu Trilogy", "Flower Name", "Heart Shout" and "Sky Blue", each has a different focus and conveys different core ideas, but in my opinion, there is one thing that these three works express together, that is, the power of language.
Three Kanban ladies of the "Chichibu Trilogy"
In "Flower Name", the protagonist Ren Tai stayed at home for a long time and did not go to school, basically without communication with the outside world. Before the face code encountered an accident, the rough words he said to the face code in order to hide his shyness became his long-term heart knot. After the face code encountered an accident, the other five people of the green plum bamboo horse gradually drifted apart due to the death of the face code. After that, the ghost of the mask appears, and through her and Hita's efforts, the "super peace busters" regroup, untie the knot through communication, and complete the wish of the mask code together.
"Heart Shouting" is more direct in the performance of language power, the heroine Naruse Shun when she was a child because she inadvertently said something, was accused by her father of causing a family split, resulting in stomach pain when she spoke. Having been sealed in her language, she gradually changed in the process of communicating with her peers in the "Regional Communication and Exchange Association" and was able to make her voice again.
Whether it is the inability to speak because of a word from his father when he was a child, or the contradictions with his classmates because of his inability to speak, they all directly show the importance of communication and language.
In "Sky Blue", although Aoi has always been outspoken and fast-talking, she is actually not good at expressing herself. It is precisely because she is not good at expressing, so she can only say rough and direct words, which is also the reason why she suddenly speaks harshly to Akane in that paragraph, which seems to be a bit abrupt. At the end, Aoi hears Shinyuki's self-confession and makes up her mind, and Shinnosuke communicates with Akane and then steps forward, all of which embody the power of language.
Okada understands the power of language, but he is not a person who is good at communication. Her upbringing was very special, her parents divorced when she was 3 years old, she was bullied due to poor communication in elementary school, she has not been in school since the 5th grade, and she has not attended junior high school and high school several times, just like Renta's squatting state at home in "Hana".
During her squatting at home, Okada was encouraged by her junior high school Chinese teacher to participate in essay contests, and at the same time was recommended by her high school teacher to read various novels with "complicated relationships", which relieved her stress and was also the reason why she was able to describe complex emotions in detail and produce "stomachache" scripts later.
In 2017, Okada published his autobiography, "The Journey of Not Being Able to Go to School Until I Created "Unheard flower name" and "The Cry of desire"," which was adapted into a live-action TV series. From this autobiography, we can see that many of her works have shadows of her own growth experience, especially in the Chichibu trilogy set in her hometown of Chichibu City.
For example, in "Sky Blue", the opening line of Aoi said: "In the end, it is like being surrounded by a wall, and we are locked up in a huge prison."
At the beginning of the autobiography, there are similar words.
Okada can't communicate smoothly with people, but she is very eager to communicate with people well. She had also been saved by her only female classmate, a boyfriend she could accept no matter what, and she knew that language had great power. So, in a lot of her work, you can see the power of language that is magnified into exaggeration. It's like the protagonist shouts that any kind of problem will be solved.
In "From the Calm Tomorrow", the protagonist shouts, and the sea god responds to the protagonist.
In "Heart Shouting", the protagonist shouts, and the class contradiction is resolved.
In "Sky Blue", the male and female protagonists shout, and then break through the wall.
The power of language has indeed been amplified in many of Okada's works, so the resolution and ending of contradictions in many of her works will seem abrupt and hasty to the rational audience.
In "Sky Blue", the emergency of a landslide is taken as the key point to promote the ending, but after that, it is followed by a long period of collision and explosion of male and female protagonist emotions, and this situation of priorities and priorities makes the ending look a little contradictory.
However, this is also the characteristic of Okada's works, the feelings are very delicate, and the contradictory performance is often very direct. The contradiction between the 18-year-old Shinnosuke and the 31-year-old Shinnosuke collided in the form of direct meetings.
Language can destroy a person and save a person; language can cause chaos and untangle complex knots. In Sky Blue, Okada once again shows the power of language.
The blue sky of the frog at the bottom of the well
Before the film's release, producer Hiroyuki Shimizu said in an interview that "Sky Blue" is a story of people standing at the crossroads of life, making entanglements for their choices.
The name of this film comes from a sentence that Xiangsheng Akane likes in the movie: "The frog at the bottom of the well does not know the width of the sea, but knows the blue of the sky."
In the movie, the positive Shinyuki becomes a negative Shinnosuke after going to Tokyo to chase his dreams; Akane chooses to give up going to Tokyo and stay in Chichibu to take care of his sister; Masamichi and Aho in the band become local civil servants and policemen, respectively. So, "Sky Blue" tells us that the frog at the bottom of the well can also have its own piece of blue sky, even if it does not chase dreams, it can also guard its own acre and three points of land to live well? I don't think so.
"Sky Blue" is not a negative work, but it tells us that on the way to chasing dreams, we should not forget the important people around us and those important things.
Loving yourself and the people you love is the blue sky that the film refers to. Akane chooses to give up going to Tokyo to protect Aoi's dream for her own blue sky Aoi. After knowing Akane's efforts for so many years, Aoi finally chose to give up her love and let her sister pursue her own love.
"If you fail to support the wishes of the people you like, you will fall into regret." The frog at the bottom of the well, which is subject to various restrictions, cannot see the vast sea, but it can also see the blue sky above the wellhead, and that blue sky is the person who cherishes.
Just like the theme song "Want to understand, you know the blue sky", some people are brave enough to go forward for their dreams, and there will inevitably be people who choose to pay to support the dreams of others. The figure of the cherished people chasing their dreams embellishes their blue sky.
The source of the image comes from the network, intrusion and deletion
If you like our article, please give us a thumbs up and follow, also welcome to leave a message in the comment area, we will continue to update the relevant content in the acgn field, thank you for reading.