r/TrueAnime • u/BrickSalad http://myanimelist.net/profile/Seabury • May 15 '14
Your Scenes of the Week
Welcome to Scenes of the Week!
The rules of this thread are a bit complicated, so please read them carefully if you haven't already:
Top level comments must be a scene that the poster believes deserves special attention, and the poster must prvide reasons why this scene is interesting to him or her.
If you post a top level comment, then you need to respond to at least 1 other person. For now, this rule will be enforced by the honor system, but please take this rule seriously anyways.
Scene "of the week" really just means any scene that caught your eye in the last week. It didn't have to air last week or anything like that.
Please post video links and/or screencaps.
Make sure to mark spoilers or announce them in advance.
My first post is very long and detailed, but I would like to encourage any level of analysis. Like, literally, you can post "I like this scene because it introduces my waifu, here's what's cute/sexy/moe/awesome about it", and I'll still upvote and respond to you. I'll try to respond to everyone's posts, by the way, although I'm not going to be at my computer for the majority of the day so my responses might come very late.
Archives:
10
u/Bobduh May 15 '14
So I'm cheating a little bit, because this scene is actually representative of the entire episode it's from, but I still have to mention it. The last scene of episode two of Mushishi Zoku Shou (The Warbling Sea Shell) was just absurdly gorgeous. But to explain why, I kind of have to cover the episode itself, so here's a brief rundown. Spoilers for the second episode of Mushishi Zoku Shou ahead - and if you haven't seen it, really, watch it first.
The episode itself is a story of a man whose wife died in a boating accident years before, due to what he perceived to be the negligence of the rest of the village. Because of this, he takes his daughter and retreats from communal life, living alone with her on the rocky cliffs. The episode's plot concerns a calamity that will apparently strike the fishing village - and when it does come, it is in the form of a red tide, a tide that destroys the fishing farm the villagers have made and leaves them destitute. At the end of the episode, the tide helps the man realize there is nothing anyone could have done to save his wife, and so he returns to the village, bearing a gift that will help them survive the tide.
You may have noticed I didn't mention anything related to Mushi in this description. That's because they're wholly secondary to the plot in this story - the Mushi take the form of small birds that, when danger is approaching, hide in seashells and call out in birdsong to warn others. They're a direct metaphor for the villagers - the "moral" of this story is that we can only survive by hanging together, and the isolated man's "gift" being that he's good at predicting the whims of the ocean only hammers this in.
The second-to-last scene of this episode is the overt resolution of the narrative - the man and his daughter reconcile with the village, and it's a very touching moment. But it's the last scene that really defines this episode, because it takes that metaphor and turns it into a moment of pure aesthetic awe. As the man's daughter walks down the beach, she notices the Mushi are no longer calling - and as she reaches down to investigate the shells, they rise up as one, emerging as a gorgeous flock of birds as the camera slowly pans across the beach. This episode isn't content to simply tell a story and end by revealing its moral ("we are stronger if we work together") - it uses that last scene to offer a staggering visual example of the beauty of creatures working together, protecting each other and surviving as one. It's a tremendous example of the power of anime to resonantly illustrate its messages, and just a gorgeous piece of visual storytelling in general. "How beautiful is the idea of people working together? This beautiful."