Aug 16, 2015
What was so special about NANA for me was that it didn't feel as if I needed to personalize the story, as if I was approaching something foreign and making it familiar to me. Nana spoke to something that already existed in myself. NANA was a story about Nana(s), but it was also my story, not in any particular way... it just was.
There was something so honest about it--it wasn't about art, or fame, or sex, or money, it wasn't even about music itself. It was about people, and how we cannot go on without love. We need love almost more than we need to
...
breathe.
And yet, it seems so hard to hold onto. We look for love where we won't find it. We walk away from love that we didn't believe was there. We make so many excuses for why we do the things we do because sometimes we're not even sure if love is real, maybe all you have in this world is yourself. As people go their seperate ways and life just happens to them, the struggle to hold onto love becomes that much harder to bear, we have no choice but to approach our lives one day at a time, searching for a balance between all the things we want, all the things we lost, and all the disappointments we live with. Nothing can change that for anyone, we all have to find our own peace.
I saw that in every character, but I saw it most in Nana herself. On the outside, she's tough, and strong, and she stands her ground. But on the inside, she's more lost than anyone, she's a child that is desperately hanging onto love. She wants Hachi, she wants Yasu, she wants Ren, she's so afraid of losing what they mean to her but she can't force time to stop. She doesn't give a shit about where she's going in life because she knows and feels that it doesn't mean a thing if she gets there at the expense of her love. She'll do anything for love, she'll even die for it if she has to. It's kind of tragic, but what is she going to do? What choice are we given in life? A lot of people can point to times where they regret having given up on love, but even someone like Nana, who keeps trying so hard not to give up--what can she do? Even if we abandoned everything for love it wouldn't permit us a permanent connection to any one person or point in time.
I guess this anime was so important to me because I felt connected to someone I didn't even know, I suppose to Yazawa Ai and her own portrayal of that experience, but in just a general sense, to *someone* who clearly had felt these emotions. Because I watched NANA around the time I was struggling to make peace with the same exact feelings in my own life. I mean, it's an ongoing struggle, for everyone, but it came at the perfect time for me. NANA didn't do anything special with those feelings, and it didn't want to, that wasn't the point. It just existed with them, and in doing so, it quietly reminded me that I am not alone, in a way that I could actually feel. Nobody is alone, and that's not only some trite fucking sentiment you write on a bathroom stall in a moment of self-intoxication or something. There's really something behind that, you just have to be in the right place to receive it. NANA could do that for me and for a lot of people. I think there's something so magical in that.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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