Getting into Slice of Life for my genre review collection, we have Barakamon. An anime that I tried watching once before but never got past the first episode, mainly because I went to Barakamon after watching Handa-kun and realizing...
Getting into Slice of Life for my genre review collection, we have Barakamon.
An anime that I tried watching once before but never got past the first episode, mainly because I went to Barakamon after watching Handa-kun and realizing that the two are very different anime. I actually wrote about it back then in this post.
It’s fun to read it now after having actually watched the entirety of Barakamon, I think my opinion was a little wrong on Barakamon as it does incorporate comedy and it’s not as serious as I thought it was back then. But, I still agree with most of what I wrote there, and there is a serious change from Handa-kun to Barakamon that can leave a real sour taste, regardless of which you watched first.
Anyways, after five years it seems, let’s get to Barakamon itself!
Synopsis
A professional calligrapher loses his temper when he receives negative criticism and punches someone influential in the industry. As a result of this shameful and immature display, his family sends him to an island village to think over his actions and rebuild his approach to calligraphy. When he arrives, he quickly finds out that things won’t be as easy as he’d originally thought…
Journey
Barakamon is a bit of a journey of self discovery. We follow Handa Sei, who up until the beginning of this anime, had become pretty accustomed to praise and success. While he was always a hard worker when it came to calligraphy, his life was also pretty narrow and sheltered as a result. So moving from the city to a remote village full of nosy people and lacking the amenities he was used to leads to a lot of lessons learned, new experiences, et cetera.
All the kinds of things you’d need for this kind of journey. And you can really sort of feel the change as the anime progresses. This isn’t a very long anime, just the standard 12 episodes, but quite a bit changes from the first to the last episode when it comes to Handa Sei and how he views the world.
Slice of Life
Now when we aren’t building character, we are fully engaged in slice of life content with a nice topping of comedy. Slice of life very commonly relies on comedy in order to keep things from being too stale or boring. Like watching a high school slice of life where the students seriously just go to school and study wouldn’t be all that fun, it’s all about the fun little interactions between the characters and poking fun at a lot of things people do or say in these situations.
Barakamon is not much different there. Handa Sei and his story is serious, but that doesn’t mean that his life in this island village can’t be fun or even a bit wacky. He ends up getting close to a whole crew of characters each with their own quirks that can make for entertaining situations. So when we aren’t getting that character development, we’re just getting fun situations that this genre is all about.
Rating
I’ll give Barakamon an 8.5 / 10.
It’s a good anime from start to finish, and I really liked the balance of the serious overarching story and the day-to-day slice of life activities and hijinks on the island. The whole calligraphy side of things is also pretty interesting at times, seeing as we don’t really have anything like that… aside from graffiti maybe?
Just a well balanced and enjoyable slice of life. It’s anime like Barakamon that remind me why I loved this genre so much when I was still new to anime. I guess I still do love it, but I don’t seek it out nearly enough!
Have you seen Barakamon, and if so, what did you think?
Until next time,
Thanks for reading.