(26 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Fantastic slice-of-life show (or maybe romantic comedy) where most of the cast happens to be living at the bottom of the sea.
Characters
Hikari, one of the sea-dwellers. Very proud of his culture, to the point of enjoining his mates to keep their old uniforms when they transfer from their now closed-down undersea high school to the closest one near the shore. It’s obvious he cares a lot about…
Manaka, his childhood friend, clumsy and quite shy. It doesn’t help that the shaman has just stricken her with a very embarrassing curse : a fish-head coming out of her knee. Easily flustered, she runs aways and gets lost in the forest ; this is problematic, as her kind can only stay out of seawater for so long. She’s rescued by…
Tsumugu, a normal, land-born boy in their class. Son of fishermen, which is bound to lead to conflict later on, as the landpeople and the seapeople are feuding about fishing zones and the like. Unlike most of his classmates, he’s fascinated by the seapeople, and especially finds Manaka beautiful. Embarrassing fish-knee and all.
Chisaki, the other girl in the seakids’ group, obviously has a thing for Hikari, but certainly wouldn’t wish anything bad to happen to Manaka. She’s her friend, after all. She’s clearly putting up a brave face.
There’s a fourth member in their group, but he doesn’t leave me much of an impression yet.
Production Values
It’s from PA Works, so of course it’s beautifully-rendered scenery porn, and fluid animation.
The big struggle here is to make the undersea environment work. It looks a bit too normal to be entirely believable (clothes don’t work that way underwater !), but that’s part of the point.
Overall Impression
Oh, look, a fable about how ridiculous racism is ! How novel !
Well, at least it’s not too heavy-handed. This is perfectly pleasant to watch, and some care has been applied to figuring out the details of how exactly the undersea culture is supposed to work. It’s not realistic at all, but the idea is that both groups are very similar beyond the land/sea differences.
I’m not sure there’s really 26 episodes of story in this, but I’m intrigued.
