originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/723053...
The fashion on Tumblr lately has been to divide everything in the world into yaoi and yuri, hasn’t it? Well, tonight we don’t need to make any abstract stretches of the imagination: it’s time for anime where boys kiss boys and girls kiss girls.
So. Five minutes ago, before Tumblr deleted it, this post was off to a pretty good start! I was happily explaining about the differences of nuance between 少年愛 , 耽美 , ジュネ , やおい and ボーイズラブ on the one hand, and on the other, why 薔薇 (rose) isn’t a genre title but nevertheless the editor of 薔薇族 (‘rose tribe’) magazine coined 百合 as a distaff counterpart, the 'lily tribe’, and that really caught on.
I was starting in on a brief sketch of some history, how Tokugawa Japan was super gay and had a defined set of social rules for gay relationships in the form of 男色 , but this was squashed by the Meiji restoration, and thus gay manga became a subgenre cultivating its own specific otaku audience.
So then I was gonna tell you about how the early shōjo manga focusing on gay relationships, taking the old term shōnen-ai [which originally referred to pederasty], were quite nerdy and literary, but the subgenre rapidly grew in the 70s and 80s, cultivating an otaku audience of its own - primarily women termed, somewhat disparagingly, 婦女子 but this demographic breakdown is certainly not absolute and there is a term for male fans, which is 普段し . We coulda gone into the whole world of doujinshi, of the massive convention comiket; I coulda cracked open Kimi Rito’s History of Hentai Manga for some interesting tidbits about how certain images become encoded as symbols and then reused routinely in manga.
And you know, I might have talked about how this is distinct from manga aimed at gay readers in gay magazines (like the above mentioned 薔薇族 ) which might be termed ゲイ漫画 . Perhaps we might mention here the upcoming adaptation of gay manga meme sensation kuso miso technique:
I was maybe gonna talk a little about some of the older genre conventions of BL; the masc top or 攻め and the effeminate bottom or 浮け ; maybe a little about how yaoi fandom got exported into anime fan culture in the West and the strange phenomenon of the 'yaoi paddle’.
…well, it looks like I managed to skim over all that anyway. Spite works wonders for typing speed, it turns out. But believe me, that’s really just surface level stuff. We’re working on a followup to the legend of Animation Night 69, so we’ll be able to get in a lot deeper in a few weeks~
Anyway, even today, BL and yuri works rarely get adapted into anime in a particularly high profile way. But 'rarely’ is not never! In Animation Nights past, well: on Animation Night 69 we watched the delightful 風と木の詩 (The Song of Wind and Trees), an OVA adapting the seminal (ha ha) shōjo manga about a French twink at boarding school. That was the direction of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, known also for Venus Wars and definitely the subject of a future Animation Night, it was as moving and melodramatic as you could hope from 70s shōjo. Sayo Yamamoto (AN36) brought us the incredibly charming figure gay skating series Yuri on Ice; and then of course Kunihiko Ikuhara (AN155), bless his heart, made his always bold statements on yuri with Yurikuma Arashi ('Lesbian Bear Storm’) and BL with Sarazanmai, which I will surely cover if we ever reach the point where we’re like 'let’s marathon a TV anime’ again ;p
Tonight though? We’ll be looking at a couple of relatively recent films on both sides of the fence.
For the BL wing, we have the film 海辺のエトランゼ Umibe no Étranger, aka L'étranger de la Plage or Stranger by the Shore. Kanna Kii, the mangaka, had previously worked as an animator at Studio Hibari, a small anime studio that dates back to the late 70s and broadly seems to specialise in shōjo. Kii returned there to design characters and supervise the film, and evidently Hibari were very excited to adapt the work of their alumnus, because they absolutely spared no effort.
The story centres on orphaned highschooler Mio and his neighbour Shun, an aspiring gay novelist on a remote island in Okinawa. The pair grew close three years before the start of the story, but Mio had to leave Okinawa; we join him now as he returns to that same shore, still holding feelings for Shun.
I’ll admit, I don’t know a ton about this movie - but it comes highly recommended by kvin who described it as one of an 'oasis’ of strong BL works released around 2020. And the clips I’ve seen - well, they’re the gifs used in this post, really nicely drawn scenes of affection. So I’m pretty excited!
Our yuri wing… well, there’s a few good choices for yuri TV shows I could show you, but tonight it’s late and we need something short and sweet, and that really narrows the field! What I have is あさがおと加瀬さん。Asagao to Kase-san [Kase-san and the Morning Glories], a one hour OVA adapting the manga 加瀬さん Kase-san by Hiromi Takashima. The OVA starts partway into the manga, when plant nerd Yui Yamada has already started dating her crush, the athletic Tomoka Kase. It follows the trials of the girls’ relationship as they are coming towards the end of their time at school - relatively low-key, slice of life first relationship typea thing.
The animae was adapted by studio Zexcs under the direction of Takuya Satō, who you might remember as director of the first part of Armitage III [AN153]. Zexcs spun out of JC Staff at the end of the 90s, and they’ve been pretty busy since then - for me their most notable creation is Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil), a truly unique rotoscope anime with an incredibly engaging, tense story about teenagers and the imp of the perverse… which sadly never got the love it deserved! yes I’m still beating this drum!
Anyway, while I have not been able to find a ton of production information, I am told at least that Kase-san was a passion project for Satō - evidently a yuri fan given he also took on the adaptation of Otherside Picnic. It began first with five-minute web adaptation Kase-san and the Morning Glories in 2018 that’s more of a musical montage of moments from the series, which was then able to be expanded the next year into an hour-long OVA…
A lot of romance stories focus on the characters getting together, so it’s interesting that this one skips right over those chapters of the manga and gets going once the characters are already together, focusing more on the trials of an ongoing relationship between two goofy hormonal kids trying to figure out if this is just a class S thing or something that they want to last. A great deal of effort is put towards character animation, intimacy, the little flinches and reactions. You can read a little discussion about it here on ANN.
So! With apologies for the late start once more (T_T), it’s time to begin! Animation Night will shortly be live at twitch.tv/canmom, and I hope you’ll join me for a gay old time~
Both of these movies turned out to be wonderful. Umibe especially had some absolutely gorgeous colour direction, and character animation strong enough to really sell all the shoujo drama.
And as it happens I have come across a couple of bits of new information I somehow missed while composing the post above! kvin mentioned he’d actually written an article about Kase-san, so it turns out there’s a wealth of production info out there - I just wasn’t looking in the right place. Here’s a particularly cool anecdote:
Director Takuya Sato happened to binge-read all the volumes of the manga available in the spring of 2016, immediately falling in love with the series and deciding that he wanted to make it into an anime at some point. In his excitement he recommended one of his friends and common work partners, who would go on to become the character designer and chief animation director of this title. However, that suggestion turned out to be a massive underestimation of how much Kumiko Sakai, known as Kyuta Sakai in the anime industry, adores yuri works; though the most popular titles she’s provided designs for are the likes of Re:Zero and Steins;Gate, it’s no coincidence that she handled series like Sakura Trick and Strawberry Panic as well. Whether it’s cute fluff or raunchy material, she’s always delighted to have an opportunity to draw intimate scenes between girls – we’re talking about the person who designed, supervised, and solo key animated an erotic OVA for A Kiss for the Petals after all. So of course, her reply to Sato’s Kase-san recommendation was a simple “Duh, that’s my favorite manga.” An amusing way for the core team to be assembled.
The whole article’s worth a read, a really good description of what made this film work so well, but I had to share that. As for that OVA of A Kiss for the Petals, here’s its MAL page, I’ll see if I can find a copy.
And meanwhile with Umibe - well, I talked about how Kii went back to her old studio to animate, but what I didn’t know is that the Umibe team reunites the team who made this 2D Houseki no Kuni PV back in the day (Kii among them)…
And as much as I love Orange’s adaptation of Houseki (I wrote… a great deal about it on Animation Night 97), there’s something really lovely about this slightly more stylised 2D take. So it’s really cool that that team got to come back together and make such a beautiful movie.
Thanks for coming by to see the films everybody! That was a really good time and I have definitely gotta track down more BL and yuri material that can fit the format lol. Sadly both of these projects seem to have been quite exceptional, rather than the start of a trend - I’m told the pandemic arrived hot on the heels of Umibe and disrupted Fuji TV’s plans to make more BL adaptations. But, we’ll see…
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