Anime Review: Akane-banashi Season 1

When it comes to Shonen anime, we tend to think of big flashy battle anime or sports series. Shows that are about explosions – of energy, of action, of movement. Strings of special attacks or flurries of blows with blasts of energy and impact. Even in comedy and romance, there is a tendency towards the explosive, in reaction and in displays of emotion. Akane-banashi, being a series about Rakugo, instead manages to succeed by eschewing explosive force for more subtle displays.

The show follows Akane Ousaki, a high school girl in her senior year. Her father was in training to be a Rakugoka, but during his Shun’ichi exam while she was a child, Issho Arakawa, the master of the person he was apprenticed under disqualified and expelled all of them, and he hadn’t done Rakugo since (he could have sought out another master, but didn’t). Since then, Akane has unofficially apprenticed herself to her father’s old master in the hopes of redeeming her father. Over the course of this season, she becomes more formally apprenticed to her father’s old master, Shiguma Arakawa, learns more about performing Rakugo to an audience, and eventually takes part in an amateur Rakugo competition judged by, among others, Issho.

Rakugo, being an art about comedic storytelling that’s basically done from a kneeling position, doesn’t lend itself to big explosive moments. Instead, it’s about small gestures and moments. This means in animation it becomes about the fine details of the physical performance, and the subtleties of the vocal performance by the actors. This series, in both respects, captures those subtleties beautifully. The animation captures the shifts in body language and expression as the various performers shift between characters, while the voice actor shifts accordingly.

That said, we aren’t generally seeing full performances, just highlights of them – the good parts, if you will. The series focuses instead on the gists of those stories and the highlights of each Rakugoka’s performance. This makes more subtle moments of the story the weight of those explosive movements in other Shonen anime, while retaining that subtlety.

This makes for a series that has some of the trappings we associate with the Shonen sports story – training, tournaments – but through the nature of the art form being depicted being more subtle, so are those elements included in a more subtle and grounded manner. This also serves to help highlight the appeal of Rakugo as an art, both in the traditional storytelling form, but also as we see in the tournament arc, reinterpretations of the stories, whether through putting them in a modern context so modern audiences can appreciate the story, or centering different characters in the narrative who might have been put off to the side due to the biases of the time.

In short, while Showa Rakugo Shinjuu certainly introduced a lot of people in the US to Rakugo as a historical art form, Akane-banashi feels like it does a great job of presenting it as a modem art form as well.