The Heike Story

I love Yamada Naoko, and the last thing I expected this to be was a disappointment. Think about whether or not you'd be excited to watch a light novel adaptation because its fans swore by it. Now replace “light novel” with "14th century epic chronicle,” and instead of getting an adaptation which enlivens the story, you get the screenwriters reading the SparkNotes summary of the original text out loud while periodically inserting their own headcanon at the most inopportune times and reinterpreting the setting in a similarly jarring fashion. A historical text of this nature had simply too much ground to cover, and an elevenepisode TV anime didn’t give them nearly enough time to do so. They had to juggle the half-baked emotional lives of the Taira Clan, the manufactured backstory and narrative relevance of their anime original protagonist, Biwa, and the extensive formal narration sequences stringing the story together. Needless to say, the resulting anime is a bit of a mess. What’s worse is I know this is all most likely Yamada’s own fault. A director has a team of episode directors and storyboarders on projects not because they don't want to do all the directing themselves, but because most of their time is spent being showrunners who oversee creative decision making, and it seems KyoAni's tightly knit team and the constant presence of Ishihara and Takemoto really supported her more than anyone originally thought. Deciding to add so much anime original content only to cram the rest in with it was stupid, and it quickly became clear Reiko Yoshida had no idea how to pace such an unruly source material, the likes of which she's never handled before. Anyone who hasn’t read the original text will find this rushed adaptation to be completely impenetrable. However, considering this show’s lukewarm reception even in Japan, any source material unfamiliarity which international viewers may have isn’t really the problem. The show is just plain boring, and everyone other than Biwa has the presence of a completely forgettable potato. Speaking of Biwa, this show feels like feudal Japan sanitized for the social justice generation. Yes, underage arranged marriages are bad. War is bad. Classism is bad. But these are all fundamental aspects of feudal Japanese society, and to have our obnoxious little Greta Thunberg protagonist scream in the faces of warlords about their moral bankruptcy and have them respond with goofy anime smiles and laughter instead of doling out punishment is just plain stupid. AstralBread wrote a preliminary review where he described Biwa as a protagonist who “simultaneously has zero presence [and] is a giant eyesore,” and I couldn’t have said it better myself. The story tries to prioritize a vague sense of climax towards the end, but in the early episodes, it absolutely refuses to make any necessary cuts. They’ll sideline important characters to focus on those who quickly lose relevance without even including their whole story because limited screen time didn’t allow, so what you’re inevitably left with is a bloated cast of increasingly inaccessible names and frustratingly identical faces, an anime original and out-of-place protagonist who gets inserted into plotlines she obviously has no place in, and partially developed characters with butchered backstories to whom you say goodbye shortly after meeting. The animation is usually fantastic, which is surprising considering Science Saru has always been an absolute clown show. Yuasa burned out as soon as he realized producers couldn’t be artists, and he put Eun-Young Choi in charge of the studio despite being deeply out of her depth. They hire way too many foreigners, many of whom are total amateurs and not used to Japanese work ethic, and worst of all, they take on more projects than they can realistically handle as a studio. They were doomed from the start, and up until now, they’ve been incapable of making even a ten episode anime worth a shit for Netflix, one of the richest entertainment companies on the planet. I figured there was no way they would be able to keep up with Yamada's unrealistic KyoAni standards, and the production would fall apart as soon as she failed to deal with the industry’s incompetence plaguing a project of hers for the first time in her sheltered career. However, I can’t even grant them this, because their chosen color palette is so dry and dull, the animation can look bland even when it moves well. This is yet another case where I’m forced to blame Yamada herself, because the Director of Photography, Kazuto Izumita, worked on absolutely gorgeous anime like Great Pretender, Ousama Ranking, and Rolling☆Girls, so it can’t possibly be one of those cases where the DOP wasn’t supervised closely enough by the director. She obviously had a vision, and it obviously didn’t work. It’s a respectable passion project, and it has lots of beautiful shots and impressive sequences of animation, but it’s the most style-over-substance rendition of classic literature you could possibly imagine. Thank you for reading.

Heike Monogatari is a beautiful series rich of meaningful emotions that the viewers will come to experience. It feels like a dream that slowly turns into a nightmare. It's a series that feels it has the same spirit Odd Taxi and Sonny Boy had. That being that it's a passion project trying to sincerely write a good series that doesn't use the cheap types of tactics mainstream anime uses to pull in viewers. I love anime that take risks, though they become the highlights of the season, the dedicated viewers have to accept that hardly anyone will watch them or appreciate what they tried todo. This series has flaws, but what frustrates me more is the mob of people who have lost touch of what writes even a decent series. Thus, trash like Mushoku Tensei and 86 become the most popular ones; the ones that will be hailed as masterpieces in the years to come, while a series like this, that is significantly better, will fall into obscurity and though appreciated, that group will be small. That is the fate of anime like this and that's an even greater tragedy. Biwa goes on with the ability to see people's futures. For her it's suffering to see what she has to see, and her frustration goes on as she feels powerless to be able to do anything about what the visions show. The Heike are filled with loveable and well written characters. They struggle to carry their clan as they travel, look for support, and battle against those that want them to disappear. As for the flaws, the story was obviously told very fast since the staff only had 11 episodes. Some of the characters I liked the most felt rushed. The music, though I enjoyed it, felt strange in the way it was executed. The opening and the ending are my favorite of the season, however. The fights are sometimes grandiose, and sometimes slideshows. Despite it's flaws, it's a solid 9/10, and I hope more passion projects with the skill and ambition of this appear soon to relieve me of mainstream anime.

While many people were kindly disheartened by Naoko Yamada’s departure from KyoAni, I see it as a logical step forward in her already auspicious career. Yes, KyoAni is unquestionably an industry leader, pushing the envelope on how visually marvelous anime can be, but at the end of the day, KyoAni still caters to a broad audience—they wouldn’t be as successful as they are if they didn’t. With her latest films being “A Silent Voice” and “Liz to Aoi Tori,” Yamada has been dipping her toes into more experimental media for some time now, and with that requires creative freedom not as easily available at thatbeloved studio. So her transition to Science SARU—one of the most experimental anime studio to come out in recent years—serves as an exciting foray into the world of arthouse; and adapting a poem as ancient and dense as “The Tale of the Heike” makes this project all the more ambitious. But regrettably, that ambition might’ve been too great. For those who don’t know, Heike Monogatari is basically the Japanese equivalent of the Iliad and Odyssey; it’s a tale as old as time passed down through many generations. To adapt such a story would be a task so gargantuan, even the most talented of screenwriters would cower at its premise. And yet, Reiko Yoshida—who’s pretty much written all of Yamada’s works—stepped up to the challenge. I respect it, but the narrative was...messy, to say the least. The show kind of expects you to fill in the gaps yourself, but as a Westerner who isn’t too familiar with Japanese literature, the plot lost me more often than I’d like to admit. But that isn’t my fault. The job of a show is to tell a story, not to tell a story I’m supposed to already know: it’s just poor adaptation. There are way too many characters sitting around and talking about the plot, things just happen and I have no idea why, and it has the same problem as The Godfather where there’s a bajillion characters I can’t keep track of (it doesn’t help when so many of their names end with “mori”. Yamada just wasn’t set up for success with such a convoluted script adding so much confusion to the whole experience. On top of that, it was bizarre to see a script play so far away from her strengths as a director. As evident from interviews in the past, Yamada describes herself as a “method” director, taking pride in her ability to get close to her characters’ thoughts and frame of mind. And looking at her filmography, this is her first time directing a story that isn’t set in modern-day Japan, and she seems out of her depth here. Biwa, as an observer-type main character, has next to no presence in the story for most of the runtime, and for a historical-political drama, none of the other characters were all that relatable either; it felt like she was grasping at straws when trying to portray them. Why? There’s too much dialogue. Her characters aren’t allowed enough space to express themselves. Yamada’s style focuses on empathy and all the little emotions we hide in our body language and facial expressions. A common theme among all of Yamada’s works is the deep anxieties the future can hold, and that fear has always been communicated through subtext. I don’t even want to call it subtext, because that implies there are lines of text to read in-between, and her best moments are when there IS no dialogue, conveying emotions purely through audiovisual mastery. Oftentimes, Yamada’s characters aren’t able to process the emotions they’re dealt with. The beauty of K-on is in the senior's naive ignorance of their transient lifestyle. Tamako Love Story captures the unease of facing others’ feelings, including your own. And if “A Silent Voice” didn’t make this clear, emotions are more than just words; it’s not something that can be described, only felt, and she’s consistently delivered on that delicate intimacy until now. Heike Monogatari falls into that anime trap where everything’s overexplained. Characters that somehow have the self-awareness to psychoanalyze everyone including themselves is a trope I despise in drama. So to have Biwa, a literal child, flat-out say that she’s “frightened of the future” in such a pronounced manner was jarring, to say the least. To make matters worse, the show feels tonally all over the place because Yamada was trying to get TOO artsy with it. I never thought Yamada would be one to use vapid metaphorical imagery, but alas, I was wrong. The most egregious example is in episode 6 where Kiyomori sees smoke in the shape of skulls to symbolize his guilt and fear of the recently deceased. Wow, how deep. I swear it looked like a parody scene straight out of Adventure Time; it was horrendous. If it was any other director, I would’ve burst out laughing. And the final nail in the coffin to this bizarre mess of a show is the music. Ushio Kensuke—a composer that previously worked with Yamada on “A Silent Voice” and “Liz to Aoi Tori”—has started to become monotonous. It feels like he’s recycling old ideas in an almost self-plagiarizing way. His music is wonderfully hypnotic and captivating, seducing his audience into a more contemplative headspace to explore the character’s emotions. It was gorgeous, really, but this time felt lackluster and out of place. There were moments with goofy percussion, then 2 seconds later comes the more metronomic pulse of a sentimental piano. Instead of easing the audience into a lull, he’s just telling us how we’re supposed to feel, and that’s annoying. Also, for a period piece, I’m not a fan of him using modern instruments in the soundtrack. Sure, he made sick music in “Devilman:Crybaby” and “Ping Pong the Animation,” but why the hell am I listening to a brisk techno beat in a show set in the Heian Era? And it’s not like it’s a fusion of culture like Samurai Champloo. I honestly think the biggest crime here is the rushed pre-production. I didn’t think Yamada would resort to the occasional still image. Naoko Yamada is a director that excels with time. Back in KyoAni, she had the liberty to completely redo K-on’s character design (a decision that paid off dearly) and she had the luxury to spend 2 trips to London in preparation for K-on the Movie. From what I can tell, Science SARU seems to be facing overproduction issues to the point that Masaaki Yuasa—a director synonymous with the studio—says he himself is burnt out and needs a break. That’s why Yamada’s here. They’re trying to look for freelance directors to diversify their catalog so Yuasa doesn’t have to do everything himself. A classic tale of too much anime, not enough workers. It’s depressing, really. I know I’ve been mostly negative on this review, but that’s only because of my exorbitant expectations for the show. I mean, it’s not all bad. I liked some of the flower imagery. Whenever older Biwa starts hacking away at the biwa (what a dumb idea for a character name) with an intense staccato, it gave me chills. I love the background and how it gives it off the feeling of an old scroll. And I especially love the shots where Biwa is framed with one eye and the other is hidden off-camera. Depending on what eye is shown, it conveys a lot of what she’s thinking. Everything that could’ve gone wrong went horribly wrong, but Yamada still managed to pull out a show that looks better than the vast majority of anime I’ve seen. It was too artsy, too ambitious, but I’d rather have it be too ambitious than not at all. This shows that Yamada is still a top-tier director, but also a painful reminder that no artist is infallible. Despite all of that, Yamada continues to be my most favorite director—not just in anime, but across all media. Having one disappointing project doesn’t change the fact that she created what I believe to be 4 consecutive masterpieces, nor does it diminish the deep catharsis they brought me at points in life I needed it the most. Sure, it could be that this new direction is actually pretty good and I’m too close-minded to see her vision, so I do look forward to revisiting Heike Monogatari after several months of reflection. Thanks for reading!

"Tomorrow. The next day. After this. In the future. Far in the future. Even farther. One day. Now I can look up for the future. Good things happen too." How do we overcome suffering and how stories that have been told over and over again through generations can help us accept the nature of life, it's ups and downs? The director Naoko Yamada was one of the survivors of the arson at Kyoani studios in 2019 and her first big work after this awful trauma is the retelling of what is arguably the most famous story of Japan, and the way I see it, this haseverything to do with the events of 2019. The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari) is a work of historical fiction describing the events of the Genpei War during the end of the 11th century, but these facts are know to anyone nowadays. Just like the main character, we can glance "into the future" and read the future of each one of the characters that is presented to us during the series, so what's the point? The point, I believe, is the deeper meaning behind the original tale and is expressed in the quote from the anime above, among other scenes. We suffer with the tides of life. Nature teaches us about the impermanence, the mighty fall, those who live happily today might suffer tomorrow. And yet, life goes on. Accepting impermanence as the real truth of life and remembering those we lost not with grief but with gratitude can help us overcome whatever might happen. Just like in the period described at the tale, we too live in a period of rapidly change in society, big historical events happening at our doorstep, and we might see ourselves as victims of chance and the fast changing of tides. But the acceptance of impermanence and the memory of the past can help us endure and acquire wisdow. Just like no power, happiness and good fortune lasts forever (the lesson the Taira clan learned the hard way), so is suffering and pain. After all, good things happen too, and no matter how hard things might be, there should still be a reason to look up for the future. On a technical level, this work is a masterpiece. The exposition being played by the biwa player singing the respective parts of the original tale reminds you that this is a story that has been told through oral tradition, at the same time, the mixture of modern music makes the quick description of battles and political events more dynamic. Overall, the story chooses to focus more on the characters of the Heike clan than on the battles, which for the most part is a great choice. Special mention to Saori Hayami as Tokuko, which was simply the perfect choice, specially in the last episode where you can really hear the director speaking through the character on the themes I talked above. One small issue is that the events and characters are hard to follow if you never heard of the story before, but nowadays with the internet, an overview of the events is at one click distance, and I don't think the goal of the anime was to give a historically complete description of the events anyway. Also props to Aoi Yuuki's biwa and her singing of the tale. I would totally buy a complete version of the tale singed by her if that ever becomes available. In short, don't let yourself be discouraged by not knowing about the actual history behind it before watching. If you really get interested, you would be falling into the Heike Monogatari rabbit-hole sooner than you think. Go ahead and enjoy the most beautiful animation of 2021.