TG aims to overwhelm with symbolic metaphors, complexly dense in so little time, it is akin to a puzzle that runs like clockwork. This very ending is a representation of how the mind can categorize, how
one tatami mat goes into the next to form the shell of a larger structure, a macrocosm of the final story, each square correlated with the narrative of
interconnected characters prior in time.
Even though they are relatively simple geometry it questions concepts;
lyrically, why does it seem to reference the symbol of a (kami) god? Is it just internal monologue, done in a softer tone than the haste of its counterpart in the series? Note the inversion between the normal ending and the one at the opening of the last episode, from a multitude of colours to a solitary blue, reality ends up upside-down (just as Ozu switches roles at the end) and the potentialities of history are conjured up like the flourishing infinities that lay before empty time. Higuchi at one point urges seeking out a circle among all the angled shapes, but none is found until the episodic prophetic opportunity is taken. And so it becomes one.
A robot, symbolic not of heroism as in Masaaki's Ping Pong anime, but a shell that protects an introvert, that defends against the possibility of failure. The yellow carpet is present but so is the armour, the red sky indicative of an anguished subjectivity, but do automatons cry? Out of frustration time rewinds as the internal psyche of the protagonist clasps at a mental solution. At the beginning, tatami mats were the logical equivalent of disorderly rocks scattered among prehistoric imagination. How do societies evolve despite strife? Light contrasts darkness. How does a limited individual fit in?
Real objects and a shadowed environment, stand in for their drawn counterparts to possibly convey the physicality of sensation, as the representation of geometry's sharper shapes. A subjectively interminable number of days are intertwined with past exploratory fictions. Mundane universality. A farrago of hallucinatory experiences reveal to oneself... the ideal other, which is sunnily yellow and as chimerical as his own individual attempts at impression. Purple is a state in between.
Hanuki's pink may be her weird humour, his hypothetical allies relive illusory lives, green may represent youth just as Akashi is showered in the colour later on, but Higuchi is stereotypically wiser than that; fishing for words, randomly instinctive, calm as trees, his gut not withstanding.
Jougasaki, Masaki may be representative of the director of a similar name, in reality an overgrown Ozu, fanning strife if possible. And so they go. These relationships tumble and rumble, but what is a social construct? How does a self interact with the other? How can a distance be closed and can they hear each other?
What fortuity lay in cupboards? What a fluky ceiling. Metabolism, is it involved in rumination? An unveiling of a physical transformation, protein manifest, a palate of animated imagination. Hallowed ramen, feline oddities. A grey background.
Ozu, is he indeed a multicoloured disruptor of dichromatic tennis courts, a drunk (?), an astronomical film splicer, a verdant dyer of shirts, or a nebulous component of some surreptitious institution. Chronicler of society, fountainhead of pyrotechnics, the Grinch? Enabler of perversity, an overcoated yokai hybrid (perhaps like Inuyasha?) who merely kindles the fiery passions of dalliances (or not).
What is that which is forlorn? How could portals be pulverized? A flaxen contraption in a monochrome universe, this is an art of contrasts. An ashen, vacant firmament looms, but could Ozu be figurative of anthropoid romance? His phantasmic whistling may hint towards it, just doesn't help that it's with his friend's conjured up ideal.
Where could a yellow (same make as the phone?) airship take us, the completion of an 'ultimate' fantasy? The green valleys of some ritualistic gates reveal Ozu's quixotic tour de force. But what shade of colour do both result in? The airship emoji could certainly be useful. Who is this onion-shaped Ozu, and what have they done to his grin? Well, he could try serenading his own literary creation. But who are these foolhardy mercenaries who meddle in affairs of the heart? And so, as batteries always do, right at that exact moment.
Despair takes hold of the beard in this sphere of vacuity, but pasta it could relish along with quite an artistic alluvion, striding into a backwards movie, and finally the squid hybrid! Forty winks, of course, and a rave theoretically! An equine fictive binding, readying for a flick, and symbolic social engineering.
This and more he invoked from a hypothetical time loop. Could one truly have such infinite space (despite the holes)? But how could this shell devoid of colour be remedied, how could hue be interposed between the self and the exterior?
The canopy of an abode, moths someone fears, the hand flowed, nimble conceits, a spider's thread, material books' frontier, a Maromi symbol? A leafy, lush reality, this dreamy rhythm, the drawn and not so intermingling; a clear sight of what one forgot, an opportunity missed, carpe diem wrought, an airy figment, an alluring utopia.
Might this be that orb of chance, this omnipresent express out of solipsism? Might this trance have been but a prance through fecund flights of fancy? This carriage ever-heading, an existential swaying; this marriage of planes, an engine of Lepidoptera. And I am out.
TG excels not just at the little details, nor merely the amalgamation of reality and fantasy, not just with animation, but narratively too, that it is hard to fathom how both were created separately. How is it that mundane life, a monologue usually reserved for dreams, is given such a climactic adaptation? A breath of fresh air, a transition between realms, a kaleidoscopic vision. This series does so much in so few hours. It is a walking painting, an animated chameleon, it begs us to wonder at the spectacle, what could be if the arrow of time shifts, how does perception interact with the world? Is art ethereal? What cadence is surprise? Is language formless, and is life but a dream?
