But music in anime as an end, and not a means?
Such a presumption proved fallacious. After I tackled the first few episodes of Kids on the Slope, I realized that offered here was the musical elements of Cowboy Bepop and Samurai Champloo raised by a few degrees, finally nudged into the narrative; the music had graduated from its former position as a condiment to an ingredient. Shinichirō Watanabe had finally delved head-first into an anime about music.
But only nominally so.
Kids on the Slope is a cocktail, and jazz functions here in a similar manner to gunmanship and swordsmanship in Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. The nucleus of the show is similarly parallel: two males, both of whom excel in the designated surface theme, are bound in an unlikely alliance with one female, and the three of them get into all sorts of hi-jinks and hullabaloos until their joint adventure ultimately culminates in [spoiler alert].
The social commentary here is a lot more obvious, though, and the historical setting is utilized to its fullest as the pressing problems of the mid-to-late sixties bare their teeth at us intermittently. The exhibition of Japan’s post-war consciousness, scarred and humbled, is amplified by the location, Kyushu, where a noticeable presence of US military bases force the local population into contact with gaijin. Changing social attitudes are framed in this racially uncomfortable setting besides the transition from jazz to rock ‘n roll; John Coltrane is dead, and girls are throwing their knickers into the air for four unlikely lads from Liverpool. Kaoru and Sentaro, our two jazz-playing protagonists, are sitting at the end of a musical arch, plugging away at an increasingly unpopular art-form as their celebrity-status-seeking contemporaries don electric guitars and sing love, love me do.
Diverging from the templates of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, Kids on the Slope sprouts love triangles galore. Indeed, the series gives School Rumble a run for its money in terms of the immense pile-up of interdependent, ill-fated romances that form a cat’s cradle at the heart of the narrative. Thankfully, we feel a sufficient amount of pathos to at least somewhat care about the hearts of each of the characters presented to us in this angst-ridden drama - but in twelve episodes, the romantic endeavours of five people can feel a little unconvincing at times, squished as they are between social commentary, historical reflection, and musical appreciation.
Brother Jun, although an admittedly necessary character for the disenfranchised-60s-university-student perspective he supplies, was drawn a little hastily, and his escapades with his semi-forbidden young lover, Furika, felt slapped on. It was Sentaro, subtly and lovingly revealed to us through a series of heart-rending flashbacks, that charged at the frontiers of my tear-ducks; he is crafted in fully-fledged three-dimensional glory, and acts as a representation of a torn-in-two post-war Japan for reasons I shall, out of courtesy to prospective viewers, not disclose.
The aesthetic is satisfying; pristine, cerulean, and colourful, it nevertheless conservatively tip-toes around anything that could be described as creative. This lack of exploration is encapsulated in the bland opening which, though concerning an anime about jazz, bizarrely contains no jazz, and is instead a beige, happy-clappy, pseudo-J-pop ordeal that does, grudgingly, grow on you. This blip aside, there is a coherence to the show - it is a cohesive product, polished and complete, and I would have finished it in one sitting if the leaden feeling in my eye-lids didn’t dictate that I instead take two.
