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Oct 22nd, 2018
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  1. Name a scene from an anime that you really enjoyed and explain why. This can include the production, writing, or anything else that contributed to your enjoyment.
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  3. My all-time favorite scene in anime is Yui’s monologue and the ensuing concert scene in episode 12 of K-On! Season 1. For the sake of being on the same page, I’ll be talking about the scene from 15:18 to 21:55 (from where Fudepen starts playing until the ED starts). If you haven’t seen the scene, it can be summed up pretty quickly. Yui has forgotten her guitar at home on the day of the light music club’s concert. She sprints home to retrieve it while the band plays the first song and has a character monologue on her way back to the school about how she wasn’t sure how her highschool life would be, to where she is now, doing something she’s passionate about with people she loves. She then goes on to perform at the concert with her friends. It sounds like an incredibly simple scene but there’s a lot to unpack here in my opinion. I’ll try to keep it relatively organized by talking about Yui herself, the band as a whole and the themes being applied here, and the production value that makes me love this scene so much.
  4. To start, I’d like to focus on the main point this scene seeks to convey, or rather the main character it sets out to develop. Going through the scene chronologically, Yui sprints into her room and grabs her guitar. On her way back out she nearly slips and falls but manages to keep her footing and keep going. Right away, this sets up a really cute parallel between this scene and episode 1 where Yui DID fall on her butt when she tried to run out of her room. This attention to detail is not only praiseworthy as far as directing goes, but helps further characterize Yui as a believable person. Its likely the viewer imagines her running out of her room all the time and slipping. She probably does it often. But not on an important day like this, she keeps running. As she makes her way back to school via the same route she did in episode 1 she comes to a realization about her highschool life thus far (the first 2 years). When she entered highschool she didn’t really have any hobbies or anything she was particularly interested in, she was just sort of a cute lovable idiot with no drive or important relationships (other than Nodoka and Ui). But she comes to realize that over the past two years she’s found something she loves doing. She’s found people she loves doing it with. Of course, this is already naturally apparent to the viewer as we’ve been watching her over the past 12 episodes. So, it was a bit misleading of me to say that this scene develops a character, rather, this scene allows a character to become self-aware of her development. This brief moment of self-awareness allows her to reflect on just how much her friends mean to her and really drives home K-On’s theme of personal fulfillment.
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  6. ““The me of that day, you don’t have to worry. You’ll find them soon enough. You’ll find something that you can do. Something you can lose yourself in. And a place that means more than anything to you.”
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  8. There’s something beautifully simplistic but also extremely passionate about this. Yui is the most fulfilled she’s ever been in her life by being able to do things she cares about with people she loves. It’s such a simple concept but its honestly one of the most cathartic monologues in anime to me. Moving forward from this, Yui reaches her school finally and goes to climb up on stage when she starts to cry over the fact that she was so late to this concert because of her own stupidity. This could be viewed as ‘unecessary drama’ and I’ve heard it explained as such before, but this scene just follows the natural emotional progression in my opinion. Yui has just realized how incredibly important her friends are to her right as she has inconvenienced them in a pretty significant way. Its only natural that she would feel very guilty about this and show remorse towards her friends, which leads me into the rest of the band.
  9. The rest of the band members (Mio, Ritsu, Mugi and Azusa) have their own arcs at different points of the show, but their purpose in this scene is in reference to Yui for the most part. Its incredibly unsurprising to the viewer, but they obviously forgive her immediately for being late to the concert. They all love Yui just as much as she loves them. Yui comes to the realization just how much she truly loves her friends, and that love is reciprocated through this short dialogue exchange and the way it does it is so in-character, something I think a lot of shows struggle with in their emotional moments. Mio nonchalantly tells Yui she could’ve at least bothered to tie her tie and Ritsu pipes up and tells Yui that they all love her. From there, Yui goes on to give a little speech before she and her friends perform Fuwa Fuwa Time recounting her time in the light music club. It’s silly and unnecessary and EXACTLY what Yui would do in this situation like the airhead she is. But within this she drops another line of what I think K-On is really about. “We started this club saying Budokan or bust. But right now, for us, this auditorium is our Budokan”. Not only is this a very blunt way of saying that this is their peak, their most important moment, but its also a way of saying that K-On was never about the music. It isn’t about how far the band could go or if they could perform on some massive stage to thousands of fans. K-On is about the people in the band and what THEY enjoy doing. Which is why when Yui says “this auditorium is our Budokan” she sincerely means it. She’s on a stage with the people most precious to her, doing what she loves. This moment is what is most important to these five characters. And as is expected they play Fuwa Fuwa Time as their outro number with a small encore at the end. Another beautiful example of attention to detail to further sell what this scene is really about is in the small space between the band finishing playing Fuwa Fuwa Time and just before they play their encore. Naturally, you would expect to hear the crowd cheering at a time like this when they just finished their final song but there is no cheering. In fact, its completely silent as Yui turns to look at her bandmates after finishing their song. They’re in their own little world separate from the rest of the auditorium as they look at each other at the height of their performance. They can’t let go of this feeling just yet and decide to play the encore: one more chorus of Fuwa Fuwa Time. The camera pans out on pictures of their bags stacked together in the clubroom as they play (a recurring motif in K-On).
  10. On another layer, what gets me about this scene is some of the insane animation put forth by KyoAni veteran Yoshiji Kigami. Both Mio’s and Yui’s lip syncing in this scene as they sing is honestly the best I’ve seen in animation. The lips match up perfectly with the lyrics being sung and the mannerisms of the girl’s faces are so delicately put together I find it amazing in every way (sakugabooru link in sources). This is in no way unique to this scene, in fact, all of K-On’s ending themes feature this type of animation for a few seconds, but this scene takes it to another level with Yamada Naoko’s directing and storyboarding. Multiple different angles of the girls singing, the smears on Ritsu’s drumsticks as she plays, the almost rustic or worn shots of the well-used clubroom as the girls play the encore. This scene is put together in such a way that I deeply feel the emotions that Yamada Naoko was trying to convey. Even further than this, the song being played during Yui’s monologue (Fudepen) is the perfect choice for this scene. Admittedly the lyrics are vague and cliched but the fact that THESE characters are the ones who wrote them is what speaks to me. Its almost as if the rest of the band is cheering Yui on as she runs back to school after getting her guitar. “Now, let’s begin writing smoothly with all my love. Hoping you can feel my happiness.”
  11. And in that way, I think K-On crafts a masterpiece of a scene. From the beautifully realized character development and passionate reflection on what happiness means to these characters, to the nuanced justification of the show’s underlying thematic depth and meaning, to the superbly executed production values of the girls playing. K-On’s concert scene is my favorite scene in anime.
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  13. Sources Used:
  14. https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/20400
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