There are few anime this emotionally powerful. Many anime overwhelm the emotions with brutal spectacle or try to furiously tickle your ribs. Few of them are touching, and the few that are earn and keep an audience which connects to this feeling.
Makoto Shinkai (a guest at Otakon 2011) has been responsible for a number of films like this: 5 Centimeters per Second comes most readily to mind. But Aniplex USA recently did a lavish re-release of a title from a franchise that might not seem to be a reservoir of the same class of emotion: Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku-hen, originally released in English as Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal.
The main mood of the original Rurouni Kenshin TV series is lighthearted adventure. It strays into deeper emotional waters from time to time, but always remembers to come back to shore, so to speak. Tsuioku-hen, which covers time from before the beginning of the series proper, is nothing like the TV show in terms of its tone: it wants to break your heart.
Does that make it depressing, though? I don't assume so. Film critic Roger Ebert--a champion of anime from Miyazaki to Satoshi Kon--once said "No good movie is ever depressing, only bad movies are." When pressed to explain the point, he put it this way: a good movie, no matter what the subject matter, is always uplifting because we are seeing people working at the top of their game. If you have someone bring you a sad story with artistry and intelligence, that gives it the chance to be transformative and transcendent instead of just a bum trip.
Many other anime are consummate heartbreakers, and all the better for it. Grave of the Fireflies, from Studio Ghibli (directed not by studio head Hayao Miyazaki but his cohort Isao Takahata), took a semi-autobiographical novel about the final days of World War II in Japan and turned it into a grim, visionary, wrenching experience. Empire slotted it into their "Top 10 Depressing Movies" list, but Ebert himself listed it in his "Great Movies" index and described it as "an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation." I can imagine him saying something similarly effusive about Tsuioku-hen. Sadly, Fireflies is out of print as of this writing (compare prices here), but may be picked back up at some point by another distributor.
Some tragic anime take a slightly more mainstream approach. Basilisk, a loose recasting of Romeo & Juliet between feuding ninja clans, surrounds its core tragedy with a fast-moving, violent spy-vs.-spy story. That doesn't make the loss any less keen, though, and the show's shot through with remarkable bits of writing and observation that make the losses we experience all the keener. The fact that it's sad is just proof that it's working as intended.
Check out our review of Tsuioku-hen, and chime in with your own views as well. Also note that the other two standalone films thus far derived from the Kenshin franchise are also being released by Aniplex in limited-edition Blu-ray Disc versions, which we'll be looking at before long.
Images: Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku-hen © N. Watsuki / Shueisha, Fuji-TV, Aniplex Inc. Image courtesy Aniplex of America. Grave of the Fireflies, Basilisk images courtesy Pricegrabber.
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