MIRAI NOTE

DESCRIPTION

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  100/100
  Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses. It merely marches forward.

  Time is the most powerful force on Earth. It neither stands still nor reverses... It merely marches forward, and it cannot be denied. The child of today, granted the opportunity to do so, will become the adult of tomorrow. New technology will become old news... New trends will become dated... Everything and everyone that has ever lived will, at some point, die. Try as we may to defy its passage, we were only given one consolation against its wrath... Our memories. Be they precious or tragic, mundane or meaningful, we carry the past in our hearts as we move into the future, and a past that is remembered is never truly lost. Such is the case with one nameless office woman, who once had dreams of becoming so much more.

  In my last review, I said I was going to start paying more attention to short animations from Japan, not only because they’re a cheap and easy way to buff my watched list... Although I am guilty of that... But because I found the concept fascinating, and I wanted to try something new and a little less formal. What I was not expecting was to wind up reviewing an actual gorram commercial, which I swear I’m just now finding out is the case. I’ve been watching Mirai Note over and over again ever since I found it in my research for Prosthetic Moses(apparently the creator of that short was also an animator on this one), but only a few steps into my research, I found out that it is, strangely, the case.

  Mirai Note was commissioned by Nakabayashi Co. LTD. for its seventieth anniversary, and if you don’t know what they do, they’re a Japanese office supplies manufacturer. I am not kidding. I guess it should have been obvious, as papers, notebooks and other office supplies do feature heavily in the animation, but I still didn’t see it coming. They hired composer Masayoshi to write and compose the song, and if that doesn’t scream ‘spared no expense’ already, they also managed to get Mei Nakabayashi... I honestly don’t know if the two are related or not, but it would explain a lot... Otherwise known as May’n, who is an incredibly popular Japanese pop star, to perform the vocals. If you don’t know her, well, you probably do. She’s performed a ton of anime opening themes in the last fifteen years, and she was in Macross Fronteir. Kind of. Anyway, the song is upbeat and energetic, and it’s beautifully produced.

  There are quite a few entities I’ve found that are credited as taking part in the animation... There’s Gagame, who I mentioned before, but there’s also Gainax Kyoto, which I’m assuming is some small offshoot of Gainax, as well as Studio Elle, who worked on this as well as one anime series called Gibiate nobody gave a shit about from last year. However, the visuals are mainly in line with their director, Rabbit Machine. I'm not sure if that's a group name or someone's pen name, but they have made several anime shorts before, some of which were also commercials. They have the kind of style you’d see when a studio is using an experimental aesthetic to disguise a low budget... But I don’t know how true that is, because it doesn’t look cheap. There are a lot of still frames, mostly shot in oblique and eye-catching ways, but the backgrounds are intricately detailed, the editing is fast, and it matches the pace of the song so well that it feels like it’s moving more than it actually is.

  Whatever budget they had, the bulk of it went to scenes of the nameless main character dancing, using some very graceful idol-esque moves that I’ve personally never seen before, as she practices her routine both on the school rooftop and in an empty classroom as she imagines herself performing for real on stage... With the quick, subtle shot of a completely empty front row to show you she is, in fact, imagining the whole thing. These dancing scenes are the most emotionally powerful moments of the story, so the fact that they look so immaculately breathtaking does a world of heavy-lifting for the rest of the short.

  As for the story, it’s kind of nuanced as it’s very simple on the surface, but a lot more complex in its messaging if you look deeper. I don’t know if the protagonist has a name, but we open with her as an adult, finding some stationary from her youth that leads to her reliving parts of her life... As a high-schooler, lost with no idea what she wants to do after graduation, who then finds inspiration to become a professional dancer. We then see her buckle down, train, and practice... Only to enter college, transition to more tedious academic pursuits, until another moment of inspiration pushes her through to graduation... Only to become a lowly office worker with dreams that never panned out. Reality then breaks as she’s confronted with a vision of her younger self, who takes her by the hand and leads her in an enthusiastic dance around the office... Until a couple of her colleagues catch her, leading to a moment of cringe that, it turns out, was the memory her adult self was reflecting on in the first place. This all takes place in less than five minutes.

  According to the admittedly rough translation of the youtube description that I was able to get from Bing, the message Nakabayashi Co. was sending to people who work hard toward their dreams is “Stop worrying- That’s your advance.” I’m assuming this was supposed to translate to some variety of “Never stop moving forward,” or that you should just relax and take each day as it comes, which is a pretty damn sincere message for a fucking commercial, so am I reading that right? I was expecting something more cynical, but the most corporate message I can extract from it would be something like “Just like your hopes and dreams, our products will stay with you for life.” But I can’t apply that kind of commercialist subtext to it without feeling like I’m being unfair.

  Instead, I’d like to make a quick comparison to the anime this short most reminds me of, my personal favorite Ghibli film, Only Yesterday, which is another anime project that juxtaposes a character’s adult and child lives next to each other, and even crossing over towards the end, to deliver a heartfelt message about growing up. True, these two entities do not share the same message, but the messages they do portray actually complement each other surprisingly well. According to Only Yesterday, growing up means taking control of your life, and using your newfound sense of agency to define who you are for yourself. According to Mirai Note... Well, at least what I was able to take from it... The fear of failure shouldn’t stop you from pursuing your dreams, because even if you fail, the memories you make along the way can be just as important in the long run as success would have been.

  Now, in order to explain why this message touches me so profoundly, I’m going to have to give you a little backstory about myself. This is not my job. Writing reviews is my hobby. It never could have been my job, because I’ve never been able to successfully find a way to make any money off of it. I’ve made more money after nine months on Deviantart than I was able to make after nine years of writing reviews... Hell, I had to pay money to get my blog its own domain name, so I didn’t even break even. In real life, I’ve been working a full time retail job for nearly twenty years. It hasn’t all been bad... Overnights was rough, but it’s been mostly smooth sailing since I moved to the day shift as a personal shopper. Either way, my job is brainless as fuck, and I spend the majority of it daydreaming... Reliving old memories, playing movies I always dreamed of making over in my head, fantasizing about creative opportunities that never came to pass... So when I see the main character of this short using the unfulfilled dreams of her youth to get her through a tedious day at work, it hits harder than Will Smith at the Oscars.

  Deep down, I think we can all relate to this. The vast majority of people never get to live out the vast majority of their dreams, we all have to accept reality and adjust to life, or as Nakabayoshi Co. would put it, stop worrying in order to advance. Our memories, whether real or imagined, belong exclusively to us, and they’re the best medicine we have to let the endless passage of time go down a little smoother. I love this short. I don’t care if it’s an elaborate commercial for a stationary manufacturer. Beauty in media can come from anywhere, and if I can find it in fucking School Days, I can find it here. I highly suggest you check out this particular short, you can find it very easily on it’s own listing page on this site, and it’s only a five minute commitment.

  I give Mirai Note a 10/10.

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