Aug 22, 2011
Imagine having to write a story, possibly a love story.
There are two ways to make it interesting. The first is to create a lot of unexpected events, twist and backstabs that create interest. The other is to simply write interesting characters that create interest even in everyday events.
You almost always see the former. The reason is simple, adding more flat/cringeworthy characters or writing an absurd plot twist take little effort and still keep the user interested. On the other hand, creating an everyday story with no twist and making it interesting by having great characters and great character development is something that is
...
seen extremely, extremely rarely. Especially so in anime, where the classic love comedy is full of absurd misunderstandings, copious amount of tears and a sometimes a load of female character only to make you wonder "who will end with who".
As you may have guessed by now, Toradora! is a case of the latter. There are no plot twist, no unexpected new characters, no unexplicable sudden change of minds, no supernatural revelations. You aren't here to wait for exceptional events, and in fact the story begin by telling you how it will end, even before you start looking. The anime name "Toradora!" is the combination of the names of the two main protagonists. Four of the main five characters are already all here from episode one, while the last appear in episode 5. From there it's only well-written and believable character development.
The fact that the anime manage to be interesting even when you already know the ending and nothing exceptional happen (to be honest, you could consider two episode to be something of exceptional, i personally don't) tell a lot about the strenght of its writing and especially of its characters. No one of them fall in a clear stereotype, no one of them do dumb things only to make the plot progress, they but do only what they should do. And everyone of them is a beautiful character with many layers, like a real person (ironically, the least detailed ones are the two mains, for accessibility reasons).
All the story progression happen at the right pace, and there are a lot of hints and hidden details you'll hardly catch at a first view but that will clarify a lot of more "obscure" behaviours you may notice.
Not only the writing and the characters are good, the double level of reading of the plot is also one of its strong point. While Toradora! may appear at first as a love story, and a lovable and well written one (remembering far more the classic american love story than an anime), Toradora! is not just that. Toradora! is a story of growth and show, even drastically, that the desire we have can not always be fulfilled, that if they can, there are sacrifice to be done, and it does so even at the cost of going against the viewer's expectations (so beautifully meta). But it's not a simple coming of age story where the character reach "maturity". Toradora! show that growing isn't a trip with a destination, but rather an endless discovery in all directions where you must sometimes stop and look again at what you have thrown away during your wanderings. While this is not a really new or amazing concept for other kind of media (books and movies have been there countless times), in anime such a deep message it almost come as a shock, especially with a good execution to boot.
To put it simply, Toradora! is the the best love comedy in anime form since the times of Maison Ikkoku, and it share with MI its ability to not be narrow and focused only on one aspect of life, but it space on everything (from work to family to fears), even if narrowly due to the short duration of it compared to MI. And even if Toradora! doesn't best Maison Ikkoku (it has still many, many flaw that i won't list here, almost all due to the nature of modern anime), it has given me the hope that Japan can still write a good love story, even if once each twenty years.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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