The plot is that a rather ordinary
university student – never given a name – lives in a 4 ½-tatami room in Kyoto as he joins the different clubs his
university offers, or takes up other extracurricular activities. Each time, usually
through the interference of his strange-looking friend Ozu, and more often than
not thanks to making bad decisions in his romantic affairs with various women –
one of whom doesn’t really exist and another of who is someone else’s love doll
– he ends up deeply regretting how he spent his university years, and wishes
for the clock to be turned back so that he may do it all again differently. And
again and again, he gets his wish, until eventually he begins to discover the
myriad parallel lives he has lived from a strange place outside them, and
begins trying to have an affect on them – often inadvertently setting into
motion different events we say in previous episodes.
Oddly, while perhaps the most bizarre and transcendental
of all the anime Yuasa has directed – save perhaps Mind Game – it is also the
most immediate and accessible. The protagonist is recognisably just like a very
large chunk of the target audience, being lonely, highly intelligent,
essentially good-hearted though prone to being easily influenced, and crucially
not unable to get feminine attention through some happy chance circumstances. Yet
he also ends up in some desperately pitiable situations and there is a certain
schadenfreude that comes from watching him be manipulated so easily and so
cruelly by the Machiavellian Ozu.
The series was highly lauded – it was the
first time a series rather than a feature won the Japan Media Arts Festival animation
grand prize, for example. Its simple premise and repetition kept it just on the
right side of utterly bizarre, and the now-familiar simplistic yet oddly
sophisticated visual style of Yuasa anime again reached a wider audience.
Certainly, I found it enjoyable – it was funny, it was clever, it was
innovative and it no doubt played a considerable part in getting Yuasa’s
10-minute ‘Kick-Heart’ crowdfunded project for Production I.G. started (though
I have no idea why Madhouse haven’t just got him working on another full
series). I liked the bold visuals, with their Shaft-like shifts in style, the
simplicity of the main characters, the stylisation of the secondary figures and
the bizarre use of a cowboy as personification of the narrator’s libido – and genitals.
But…the fact is that what I was holding this
up against was Kaiba, and I still have difficulty expressing
just how highly I regarded that series. It looked so simplistic and babyish but
there was so much under its surface and it was just so stunningly good – it was
moving, it was intellectually challenging and it was quite brilliant in the way
its visuals made the world so unique as it shifted and ebbed in a Protean mass
of primary colours. The Tatami
Galaxy, I am quite sure, shut out
less of its potential audience at the beginning, with few likely to be put off
by the visual style even if it’s relatively bold. But at the same time it just
didn’t have the scope, the sincerity or the sheer emotional power. It feels
much closer to Kemonozume than to Kaiba. Thus, I live in
hope that – wrestler/nun short film aside – the next thing Yuasa works on will
be more like Kaiba, and have that level of beauty.
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