(devoir d'anglais)

I chose to talk about The Tatami Galaxy, an anime television series, because I think it's a near perfect work, that inspires me a lot and I hope I see more animations like this one.
It's also fairly short for a television series (11 episodes of 20 minutes), so not that time-consuming.
The story is set in Japan, it's about a young man entering college, looking for a campus life promising love and romance. So in the first episode he enters the Tennis club, hoping to meet some long black haired charming women. Unfortunally he's only met with frustration. He spent his first two years envying other couples, ruining their daily lives with his newfound fiend looking friend called Ozu.
At the end of the episode, he regrets his choices and his wasted two years, wished he could go back, it's on that note that the episode end. Then every next episode, we see him, again entering college, but each time he chooses another club. We then watch all the changes that happen (or not).
Because indeed, each time he's looking for love, each time, Ozu joins the same club and approches him, each time a mysterious female character Akashi plays a role in the background (and seems to act as the love interest), each time the main character only ends with disappointment after two years, wishing he could go back and change everything.
That is, until the last two episodes. When instead of choosing a club he chooses to live as a shut-in (maybe aware of his failures in every other realities?), he then lives two years inside his flat by the size of 4.5 tatamis (hence the title). He seems happy from his choice as nothing could disappoint him now. But by some wizardry he manages to enter the bedrooms of his alternate-self from all the alternate realities. He look into their lives, indeed they may all have ended disappointed, but they all experienced a lot, a lot that the shut-in didn't and look with envy. That's when he understand his mistake, he goes out and live the rest of his college to the fullest.

I liked that anime a lot, for a lot of reasons. The message it conveys may seem classic (you should go beyond Hedgehog's dilemma, it's alright to be hurt) but I like optimistic and moral shows. One thing I was amazed at was so easy it was to relate, and project one's self onto the Narrator. Indeed, he doesn't even have a name, that's how basic he is. Even when he thinks like a pervert, or is bragging, we can feel a tiny bit of us in him. That's how universal the Narrator is. The show also create a real coherent closed universe, that follow its own rules, within the 11 episodes. Indeed in an episode, a gang steal his bike and because of that he meets his doom, but in another episode, he becomes the leader of that bike stealing gang. In one of the episode, he discovers that his upperclassman has a fetish doll and aim to ruin his reputation while in another, he helps him and hide the fetish doll (and fall in love with it). That's also how the show create his humor and plays with it. The animation is also peticular (it was made under the direction of Masaaki Yuasa after all), with lot of bright colors that matches the thoughts of the Narrator. All in all, I felt like it was a very personal show that can also cater to the mainstream.