If you would have told me even two years ago that Studio DEEN would be producing two of the most high quality and well loved shows of the year, two years in a row, I would have told you that you were completely insane and should probably be committed to a psychiatric ward. Despite that previous aversion to the studio, I can firmly say that Rakugo's second season is my AOTS by multitudes of miles, and that the series as a whole is probably one of the best anime to air in the past decade. Just like in the first season, this series just oozes quality from every seam. The art and character designs are muted, but detailed and expressive. The music is a mixture of lovingly performed traditional Japanese music and re-imagined period pieces with a focus on both upbeat and atmospheric jazz. The VA is notably superb, as it should be in a series that focuses a Japanese art of spoken performance. Even as someone who does not understand the language, the emotion and feeling just flows off every word during both the in-show performances and normal dialogue. DEEN stepped up to the plate with the fruits of its recent successes and delivered an extremely polished finished product. And this is just me praising the series' aesthetic qualities, which albeit great cannot hold a candle to the stories that Rakugo has to tell.
Rakugo is first and foremost a character-driven drama with quite a story to tell, and an anime second. This is incredibly refreshing in a medium so overfilled with "moe-blobness" and bereft of mature plots and characters, and reminds us just how effective animation can be when it decides to take itself seriously. With that in mind, this series is just as much about the art of rakugo performance as it is a story about our characters and their relationships both with and around it. It is hard to discuss anything about the specifics of the series without spoiling the experience, but believe me when I say that these characters are some of the most believable and engaging in recent memory, and getting to watch them grow up, accomplish their goals, and deal with all of life's challenges is a treat to watch unfold. In fact, if there was only one thing that I could praise Rakugo for, it would be its narrative breadth: across two seasons and eight decades we get to watch the evolution of the art of rakugo over three whole generations of familial performers. Despite this amount of pure content, nothing in Rakugo seems out of place, with character actions and specific plot events being as relevant from S1.E01 to S2.E12 as it is from episode to episode.
I don't think I'd hesitate to recommend this series to even those who don't like or watch anime, which is something that I typically wouldn't do for a series that I don't rate a 10/10. As a complete 24 episode package, I think that Rakugo very closely approaches this score with only a few reservations, but when split cleanly in two some issues arise with pacing out of the first season and into the "Descending Stories". The series makes very liberal use of time jumps, and although they are lovingly crafted and well-executed, I know that they will undoubtedly anger some just from their nature. With such an incredible length of time covered, Rakugo opts to cover the most important and influential moments in our characters' (and rakugo's) lives, and the jumps in characterization, or sometimes the deliberate lack thereof, can be a bit of a mental leap at points. Rakugo above all else never opts to insult your intelligence with needless exposition, so careful examination of what happens on screen is going to be required. This is a mature series, and it expects its viewers to approach it with the same maturity that it provides.
In the end, I think the biggest shame with Rakugo is that it's effectively un-localize-able. It deals directly with specifically Japanese cultural content that would lose nearly all of its meaning in translation. One of the series' greatest strengths is bringing the viewer to both appreciate and understand the art of rakugo performance and its traditions, but nearly all of this would be lost if all of the many rakugo stories were performed in English. This is not so much an issue with actual lingual translation but rather the voice actors' specific performances and the emotional weight and subtext that they carry. I want nothing more than to be able to recommend this series to non-anime watchers as an example of a modern, compelling example of the medium that isn't about giant robots or cute girls, but the sheer necessity of watching the subtitled version will immediately cause people to ignore the recommendation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt even the most talented team of American localize-rs and voice actors will be able to do this series justice.
If you haven't seen this series yet, go watch both whole seasons now. You won't be in the least bit disappointed.
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