Clannad: After Story

Clannad: After Story - the masterpiece that perfects emotionally enriching storytelling.

Clannad: After Story is acclaimed for its depth of emotion and realistic theme, thus fixing it into the reality of life. This sequel from the school setting of *Clannad* talks about love, loss, family, and struggles of life from a grown-up point of view. It gives insight into Tomoya Okazaki and Nagisa Furukawa-from the tender love of their youth in married life to the births in their household.

What sets it apart is the fact that it's not fantasy; Tomoya and Nagisa's struggles are real-life events that hit with full force, as evidenced in the bittersweet ... way life would have it.

Character Development: The character development of Tomoya from a jaded young man into a responsible adult pays off-a true show of the joys and pains of growing up. Nagisa, the emotional linchpin of the series, really shines bright with her resilience, while the parents and other characters add texture to this world and make it tangible, lived-in.

Visuals & Animation: Most recent series don't need to be flashier, but Kyoto Animation's work herein is powerful with warm colors and an expressively animated character showing every mood in the story. Merging this with symbolic scenes, especially in the Illusionary World, gave even more depth to the narrative.

Direction & Pacing: Tatsuya Ishihara directs every emotional beat in Technicolor sans melodrama. He handled the jump in time very smoothly and made the viewer witness character growth organically. Indeed, the subtle shift of the series from comedy to seriousness reflects that from youth to adulthood.
The on-point soundtrack and atmosphere of this series can also be credited for its beauty, thanks to Jun Maeda's beautiful score, with signature tracks such as "Dango Daikazoku" bringing so much poignancy into the scenes. Light yet powerful music and good voice acting lift every particular scene, especially in the development of Tomoya from a carefree youth to a man batted by life's storms.

Objective Reasons for Scoring High:
1. *Emotional Deepness & Relatability*: It approaches basic themes of serials such as grief, family, and persistence so easily and universally.

2. *Character Development*: I would best describe that realistic development of Tomoya into a nuanced amount.

3. *Direction & Storytelling*: The events that unfold show well-deserved emotional payoffs that feel truthful. 4. *Music & Atmosphere*: This is sound and vision combined, appealing to all the senses.

5. *Realism & Themes*: Presenting the bitterness and sweetness of life, *After Story* represents a hopeful or resolute message toward survival.

Conclusion: *Clannad: After Story* is an incredibly emotional anime that runs the gamut regarding themes and character development: real-life struggles, grown-up themes-one of the most memorable ways ever. This anime would be a classic with its fleshed-out characters, strong storytelling, and wonderful soundtrack-one that would be remembered for many years to come.

Clannad Afterstory is the portrait of a life with a sense of scale and scope not often found in the anime medium. In its latter stages you feel a sense of history with its characters that accentuate and heighten their ordinary conversations, giving them a dimension beyond their original meaning. More than a story about family, it’s a story about the passage of time, executed with about as much intelligence and skill as you’d expect from a very talented toddler.

Right yeah, so Maeda watches the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, yeah? And so he watches this film, yeah, and it’s about this guy, you know, ... and he marries this girl, yeah? But they’re kinda broke, but they have to run this bank, and there’s this big evil rich guy who’s trying to develop the town, he’s trying to get a monopoly on things, and our main guy’s trying to stop him. And he sacrifices all these things to stop the evil guy, yeah? But he gets sad doing it and gets to feeling that he wishes he was never born. So some fat fucker who’s an angel in disguise says “Alright, bet” and he creates a world and invites the guy to view this world, a world where he doesn’t exist. And this world is on some 1984 shit, you know? Major dystopia. His brother’s dead, his cat’s dead, sister’s dead, mother’s dead, father’s dead, Biff has married his mother and owns Trump Tower and is also the president of the United Nations of the World. Main guy goes “nah fuck this go back” and the fat guy goes “Alright, bet,” and he brings him back to the real world and they all go celebrate Christmas.

It’s a good movie, sentimental for sure, but its sentimentality is offset by the fact that the miserable things that the guy James Stewart is playing goes through still happen, and that their outcomes still exist in the fictional world they inhabit. It also displays the power of fiction, of how an alternate reality with no tangibility can have a tangible impact in the reality we inhabit. By viewing a world where he doesn’t exist, James Stewart is made to realize that his life is very valuable to the people around him. You could argue Hollywood peaked with this one. It is a perfect sort of story, for film especially, having the necessary simplicity required for mass appeal while still retaining the depth necessary to remain relevant past the fashions of its era.

Yeah, so this is relevant because Maeda saw this and tried to emulate it. Source: telepathy. Source two: there’s a Tomoyo Afterstory visual novel with the subtitle ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. And the plot bears many similarities to the film. Guy meets girl, marries girl, is happy for a time, encounters hardship, is met with tragedy, wishes that he never met girl, encounters further tragedy, renounces his wish, which reverses the tragedy, and they all live happily ever after. Not a one-for-one copy, but the same beats are hit. The way Maeda does it is out of wack obviously, because the tragedy that occurs happens in the story’s real world, and so when it is reversed, it reverses what caused the wish in the first place. This is why many people feel that the ending in Clannad Afterstory feels so cheap and hollow – it doesn’t build upon what has happened before. Instead, it overwrites it with a new reality, that’s happier, but also less meaningful than the reality that existed before.

The characters have regressed. Tomoya is arguably the most interesting person in Clannad’s story, giving the moeblob atmosphere a harder edge with his delinquent status and his troubles with his father, and so to see him here as this kind of goofy kid in the middle stages of the story and a punching bag in the latter half is a bit too one-note to be interesting. Same with Nagisa, she’s sweet and kind and kind and sweet and that’s all she really is. A puppy to be run over. Same with Ushio, but here it’s a non-issue. Ushio is a really good part of the story. Maeda here is able to achieve a perfect union between the way Tomoya feels towards her and the way the viewer feels, which results in many emotionally fulfilling moments. Her introduction is the starting point of a good stretch of episodes where the show is plainly, really good.

Outside of that stretch, the rest is dubious. The girl and the robot has got to rank as the single most superfluous narrative of all time. Each time the story transitions to its world, it kills off any and all momentum the main narrative has generated up until that point. They walk and talk and – whatever! None of it matters. To the very end, nothing that happens in that world matters in the slightest. It is the source of the fantasy elements in the story, but the viewer never sees its influence. It exists to give off a pretentious magical, ethereal air, an aesthetic of something profound, for something as hollow as bird-bones.

And as usual for Maeda, things take too long to get going anywhere. There is an exorbitant amount of time spent with Tomoya at his new job for instance, ad the first episode takes its entire runtime to reintroduce characters who aren’t even important to the main plot, and the two story arcs preceding the main story are entirely irrelevant to the main story. All this superfluous detail dilutes the quality and impact of the important story moments.

I’m not going to say some shit like ‘I wanted to like Clannad Afterstory’ as if it was Maeda’s job for me to like what he’s written, but it’s true that I liked the idea of liking Clannad Afterstory. I’m not going to say ‘admirable’ either, because that’s just patronizing, but I like the idea of a story like Clannad Afterstory. For people don’t like the ending of Afterstory for another reason: there are no consequences for any of its characters. Tomoya gets to live happily, with his beautifully kind wife, and his adorably loving daughter. Somehow, there’s a feeling that this isn’t fair, a feeling that Tomoya is a criminal who has hoodwinked the detective called Realism. There’s almost a sense of jealousy. ‘I don’t want this to exist, because I don’t want to acknowledge that such a thing could be real.’ Because if miracles were to exist, if magic really was real, then what value does your suffering hold? If all your pain could be reversed in the flick of a wrist, then what was the point of the pain to begin with? I think such thoughts are besides the point. Pain and suffering has meaning because a choice is made to imbue these moments with relevance. The meaning itself is not real, yet there is a choice made to believe that the meaning is real. The belief leads to a change in the real world. Through the belief in something un-real, something real occurs. That, in a way, is a kind of miracle, which is what the ending tries to capture, though obviously, the miracles that occur in real life are not as miraculous as Jun Maeda’s success.

What is this? Is this anything?

Clannad: After Story is the anime equivalent to watching a YouTube video titled something like “Sad animal videos to make you cry - Part 6”. Is what I’m watching “sad”? In the most basic sense, yes. Does it in any way rely upon a particular connection to the characters/animals involved? No. It relies upon a sense of sympathy/empathy that most people just instinctually have. Clannad: After Story is, to borrow a phrase, all fart and no shit.

To accuse a piece of fiction of being “emotionally manipulative” feels strange; most, if not all, art falls under this umbrella. Of course any ... given movie/show/book/song/whatever is attempting to instill within you a certain emotion. Whether or not it succeeds in that, however, has to do with subtlety, pacing, tactfulness, and a ton of other factors that a writer (and their team) should carefully consider and balance. At no point in my viewing experience did the writing in Clannad (either season) feel carefully considered or balanced in the slightest.

I found Clannad (S1) to be thoroughly uninteresting. It was essentially impossible for me to care about its boring world, one-dimensional characters, and contrived drama. Adding to that, the humor was about as funny as being told that I have terminal cancer and the supernatural elements were so awkwardly implemented that it led to more confusion about the rules of the world than suspended whimsy. Still, I persisted because the light at the end of the tunnel (After Story) was promised by hordes of anime fans to be complete and ethereal salvation. And I swear to God if I keep falling for this shit...

Clannad: After Story is better than Clannad (S1) in the sense that being kicked in the balls is less painful than having all your teeth pulled; both are still thoroughly unpleasant experiences, but at least one doesn’t leave you permanently disfigured. The worst fucking metaphor I’ve ever come up with aside, I will give After Story (AS from here on out) some credit for at least trying to be ABOUT something.

Sure, S1 was about Tomoya and Nagisa starting up the drama club and their relationship, but most of what actually transpired was just a bunch of dumbass kids awkwardly bumbling around. S1 was, essentially, a harem that was too scared to call itself such. AS tries to strengthen its focus and be more mature. Does it succeed? Relative to S1, yes it does. AS is more “mature” than its predecessor. It focuses on more serious subjects and has slightly more of an edge. In the wider world of fiction, however, it’s more like the difference in maturity between a 10 year-old and a 15 year-old. Nobody in their right mind would describe it as “mature” except for in relation to S1.

To illustrate my point, newlyweds Tomoya and Nagisa are shown to be borderline nervous to hold each other’s hands. In their own apartment. In front of nobody. The subject of them having sex is broached more as though they just figured out how to roll a condom onto a banana than that they’re both high school graduates living together alone.

When AS cuts that nonsense out and focuses unabashedly on Tomoya’s struggles with acclimating to his job and adult life in general, it really shines (at least in comparison to what S1 and the first half of AS were doing). As compelling as THAT is though, I’d still never really think to call Tomoya (or any of the other characters) anything close to compelling, interesting, or likable on their own. Or even together, actually.

Tomoya in S1 was almost unbearable for me. His only real character flaw was that he was a “delinquent”. As much as he slacked off academically, though, he still found the time to help a gaggle of girls out with all of their personal issues, offer his services and time selflessly to an insane degree, and act heroically in the face of any and all threats. Outside of Optimus Prime, Captain America, and maybe Goku, the whole “my only flaw is my devotion to others and unfettered heroism” is a super boring and often times annoying archetype to me. Being “too good” is not compelling or relatable 9/10 times. Fortunately, AS does go out of its way to shit all over Tomoya and knock him down a few pegs and, as a result, the situations he finds himself in become more interesting.

The same can not be said for the rest of the characters, who remain thoroughly whelming in every facet. Am I honestly supposed to care about Nagisa? Why? Her personality is just so aggressively nothing. She’s earnest, shy, naïve, and just so moe, but whatever. Outside of S1 stuff related to the drama club, she doesn’t want anything or have any ambition. That’s actually one of my biggest issues with AS as a whole; nobody wants anything aside from stuff they’re given or already have.

What does Tomoya want? To be with Nagisa, of course. Okay, well he already has her, so what else is there? He wants to keep her, obviously. But Nagisa seems almost incapable of independent thought, so I don’t think her leaving him of her own accord is a situation to be fearful of. What does he want outside of the relationship? To just work wherever and be wherever? How interesting. Certainly I wouldn’t fault anybody in real life for being this way, but characters in fiction kind of have an obligation to be interesting to watch. The ones featured in Clannad seldom are. They neither come from the dirt and aspire to normalcy or start at normalcy and aspire to greatness. They start at normalcy and just kind of stay there.

This all comes to a head when a certain *thing* happens. I won’t spoil it, but if you even halfway pay attention to the OP it should be obvious (genuinely, even as someone who went spoiler-free the whole way through, I called it immediately). This *thing* changes the trajectory of Tomoya’s life until it doesn’t but I’ll get to that. Point is, this *thing* could have been easily avoided if these empty-headed idiots heeded even the most basic of warnings they had been given. That’s the impression I got, anyway.

I understand the themes of “the importance of family” and “the value of overcoming adversity and finding something to live for” as trite as they are, but would they not be more impactful if the characters actually, y’know, fought for something? They mostly just roll with the punches in a terribly blasé way. It’s just a series of things happening to them and them reacting in either a supremely uninteresting or insanely saccharine manner.

The *thing* I mentioned eventually gets reversed and, with it, the themes collapse in on themselves spectacularly. It would be one thing if it felt like something we’d been working towards for the duration of the show, and ostensibly there are, like, barely hints that *something* will happen, but it’s not really enough. The *thing* doesn’t get reversed because the characters work towards it, though, it just... happens. It might as well have been a dream. Sure, it dictates how Tomoya approaches life, but it’s not all that different from how he would’ve without the *thing* happening in the first place. There’s no sacrifice and there’s not even any real compromise – things just suck to make you cry and then they don’t because the showrunners wanted to hit a certain tone.

This next metaphor probably only serves to showcase how terminally online I am, but here goes... Y’all know the “Chad” meme? Of course you do, but do you also know the one where it’s the male and female “Chads” and it’s really pushing “traditional living” and stereotypical gender roles? The dude says something like “My only purpose is to provide for my wife and child” and the wife says “And my only purpose is to take care of the house and children while you’re out providing” or whatever? That’s all Tomoya and Nagisa feel like at the end of the day. That’s all it feels like Clannad has to say and it does it with a hilarious amount of earnestness and an equally hilarious lack of self-awareness.

I don’t know, I just cannot fathom how this is the 16th highest rated anime on this site. That’s higher than anything Ghibli, Your Name., Cowboy Bebop, anything Evangelion, Wolf Children, anything Satoshi Kon ever made, etc. It’s astounding.

But it looks nice I guess, and the music’s nice. Whatever. Nagisa and most of the female characters look more like what I’d find under a rock in my yard than any human being, but whatever. Most anime characters look like cats, so why not have them look like praying mantises?

Certainly not the worst show I’ve ever seen, but it’s just utterly unsurprising and unchallenging. Not that something being “challenging” is synonymous with quality, but when the characters are this flat, the drama is this poorly plotted, the story is this obvious (aside from the ridonkulous ending), and the emotions I’m intended to feel are this plain and unsubstantiated... Eh? I’m not a particularly unemotional guy (I’ve cried like a bitch at stuff like Anohana and Wolf Children) so when you’re showing me an “emotional” moment and I’m either laughing my ass off or my face resembles Squidward’s house, you’ve done fucked up.

Scores:
Art (7/10)
Music (6/10)
Characters (3/10)
Story (2/10)
Objective (4/10)
Subjective (4/10)

If nothing else, Clannad is proof that you can accomplish your wildest dreams. If somebody’s still paying Jun Maeda to write garbage, then by golly, the sky’s the limit for us.