NANA

Nana is one of the greatest things I’ve ever experienced in my life and I don’t use that over dramatic statement lightly. Nana I think I can safely call my favorite anime now. Maison Ikkoku had a good 3 year run but Nana just gets everything right. I won’t bother giving a thorough plot synopsis as this anime can be boiled down to “young screwed up adults trying to make it through life whilsts dealing with their past traumas and trying to move on from them. Nana focuses on our two Nana’s who I’ll refer to as Komatsu and Oosaki who by pure coincidence happen to meet on a train on its way to Tokyo and how this one chance encounter changes their lives. Episodes 2-4 are flashbacks of Komatsu’s Journey up to this point and episode 5 is a flashback of Oosaki’s journey up to this point. I remember trying Nana in like either late 2018 or early 2019 and not liking it. I watched the first episode and thought it was super striking and I wanted to see more. It was late at night though so I stopped after the first episode and picked 2 and 3 back up the next day but really didn’t like them and I don’t remember why, I guess because I wanted to see what was to happen next after Komatsu and Oosaki met each other at the apartment again and the flashback stuff was originally uninteresting to me. Regardless though on this watch these were all great episodes that would later on as I watched more episodes serve as starting points for 2 of my favorite characters in anything ever. That’s why Nana is my favorite anime really, the characters. Every, single, character in this show barring like maybe a few who get little screentime are all multidimensional fully interesting characters with their own personalities, traits, trauma’s, and circumstances. What aids this are the absolutely slick character designs. On their own these designs look striking and would likely draw a viewer in on the basis of just looking cool but then when you look at Oosaki, Yasu, or Komatsu their fashion and appearance gives you an idea of their character. Oosaki the punk rocker, Yasu the caring father figure type who keeps the group in check & Komatsu the dreamer type. But these character designs can only get you so far if your characters aren’t up to snuff and indeed Nana’s characters are fully up to snuff. I already mentioned how they’re all multidimensional with lots of layers to their character. How they’ve all got different personalities that play off of each other so well, and all have different circumstances surrounding their personal trauma’s leading into why they’re here now. But they’re either extremely likable, interestingly written to where even if they aren’t likable you still can’t help but call them great characters even in the case of a bastard like Takumi. Lets take Komatsu for example, she starts the show as this ditzy, clumsy, day dreaming-esque character who’s almost entirely irresponsible, falls for every guy that looks hot, essentially she has bad qualities but she’s not an outright terrible person if you were to meet her out on the street or even watch the show in its roughly first half. As the story goes along though we start seeing more of a dark side to Komatsu, particularly how she plays men best example being how she straight up ditches Nobu when Takumi meets them walking along a path and she goes to have sex with him. Komatsu is a complete piece of shit in this scenario but I really like that Nana takes this character I once rooted for and turns her into someone I hate. Later on Komatsu becomes pregnant with what we assume is Takumi’s child, I say assume because we’er never given a clear answer rather it’s Takumi’s or Nobu’s. Despite all of Nobu’s claims that he used protection even just one unprotected sex night could’ve impregnated Nana. So it makes it unclear rather Nana decided to stay with Takumi and keep her child rather than aborting it is a good or bad thing ultimately. I still never really forgave Komatsu for her actions mind you, but I love how Nana writes & explores its characters. Like with Oosaki, Oosaki puts on a front of being tough and independent but in actuality she’s broken, misses Ren, relies on Yasu for a lot of things, and has too much pride too break her front in most cases. There’s a lot of examples with other characters throughout but at the expense of sounding lazy this isn’t really meant to be an analytical or even critical review of NANA so if I were to start naming every example we’d be here all day. One point where I could rag on Nana a little bit is that the production is kinda eh for a Madhouse work. I don’t wish to imply Nana looks substandard or even bad, far from it. It has plenty of great backgrounds, solid color choices, the setting is memorable, the aforementioned sick character designs. There’s a lot of good going for Nana’s production however the directing isn’t really exciting or super interesting largely. There are great and memorable shots but more so than other TV anime I find that Nana really tends to favor on model character art and static backgrounds in favor of looking great at a stand still over having super fluid animation. Even during scenes where Trapnest or Blast play it doesn’t animate as much as you would think or hope it would. Madhouse’s own Beck was certainly better in this regard but I also feel like Nana looks better on average than Beck does. However, the worst I can really call Nana’s directing is adequate, nothing less. It gets the point of scenes across, doesn’t distract, and whatever bad things I could say about Nana’s directing (not that there’s very much and they’re all debatably nitpicks) are ultimately fruitless when watching the show because I was completely engaged throughout the whole series and these episodes just flew by. The music kicks ass too, it largely goes for a Punk Rock sound and since I like Punk Rock the soundtrack is very much to my liking. The singing is great too, I’m not entirely sure if the VA’s themselves sing or if they hired professional singers but regardless it sounds great. I really wish they got Boris to be involved with this OST though, even if it was only for one insert song that you hear for all of 5 seconds Heavy Rocks Boris would be perfect for this OST and I could boast about Boris being so good they were on the Nana anime. I may also mention that the English Dub is actually really solid to good. I usually watch anime subbed but because I was lazy I just forgot to switch to subs on episode, but while I was listening to the dub I actually really grew to like it. There are some choices I’m kinda eh on because Layla sounds like she’s been smoking cigarettes for 50 years and doesn’t really sound like it matches her character but she’s the exception. Everyone else I thought their English VA matched their character perfectly especially Oosaki and Yasu. That’s not to say the Japanese voice acting was bad it was also quite good, the series even had some notable names like Romi Park playing Oosaki but since the dub was actually solid to good for me I just ended up sticking with the dub for this series. Another thing Beck would have over this series is that the English dub for that series actually dubbed the singing but that was because Funimation dubbed Beck and there’s not really anything the creators of this show could’ve done about it. Not that it really bothers me but I thought it was worth mentioning. I feel like I’m largely done here but before I go I wanna get a bit sappy/overdramatic again. Before watching Nana I hadn’t watched any anime in a year, the last time I saw any was giving the Kara no Kyoukai movies a 2nd chance, which did turn out to be a good idea since Kara no Kyoukai 7 turned out to be one of my favorite anime movies ever but otherwise it seemed like anime was just something I wasn’t interested in anymore outside of favorites I’d already seen numerous times before. Even trying to watch said favorites sometimes would result in failure because I’d just wish I was doing something else like playing a video game or reading manga (and even then I haven’t been reading manga much lately) and never end up finishing them. Nana though, none of that mattered, I was so completely invested in it and every day at work I’d always wonder what was gonna happen the next episode and once I got home I’d watch more. I haven’t felt that way about anime in a long time and something about Nana’s characters and their struggles just really resonated with and lit a spark inside of me. I don’t know how anime will go for me, if I’ll continue to keep watching it or Nana will just end up being a fluke. But I can say, for the first time since early 2020, I’m actually excited to watch anime again and feel like I want to watch anime again. Even though Nana isn’t a finished work and who’s to say if Ai Yazawa will ever come back to finish it. Rather she does or not, it doesn’t matter to me. Nana’s story is perfect the way it is and this is one thing where I can definitively say there is nothing I’d wish to change about it. This “review” ended up being shorter than I thought it would be, but I need to say something, literally anything about Nana. My favorite anime, and one of my favorite things, of all time.