H20: Footprints in the Sand
(12 episode series)
I honestly can't remember how this one ended up on my watch list, and now that I've seen it, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's essentially a fairly typical harem anime, with the typical silliness and, for me, eye-rolling shenanigans that one would expect from such an anime. There's even plenty of soft-core fan service thrown in for fun, which can be quickly spoiled if you remember that these are middle school or junior-high-aged children. This series is actually adapted from an adult visual novel, which had erotic content and an "emergency button" to click on in case someone comes into the room and you don't want anyone to know you're looking at pr0n. The thing that keeps it from being just another clone of every harem anime ever is that it actually does have a serious dramatic plot mixed in there amongst all the attempts at cute. So basically it has the same issues with mood swings that made
Higurashi something of a mixed bag for me.
H2O further complicates this by adding something of a psychological aspect to it that made me wonder what actually happened versus what was just in the main character's head.
Of course, this isn't the only confusing aspect of this series. Hell, just the title has taken up more of my thought about the show than it probably should have, as "Footprints in the Sand" is actually a Christian poem about walking on the beach with Jesus. I actually got a copy of the poem on a bookmark for my confirmation that I still have, uh, somewhere, which is why my mind immediately goes to that. The fact that the small Japanese village the story is set in actually has a Christian church (at least in appearance) further adds to this, though religion isn't ever discussed in the story itself, and while town meetings take place in the church, there are never any services seen or talked about. Plus, a Christian church in Japan? According to Wikipedia, less than 1% of Japanese claim Christian belief, so why is there a church and why does it seem to be a major focal point of the town even though the story barely has anything to do with it? About the best I can figure out is that this might be a reference to the nature of the story as seen from the viewpoint of the protagonist, as there is a spirit involved that only he seems to be aware of. And I suppose it might be an excuse for the series to be bookended with a reading of the poem itself, though the reference seems to be more connected to a boy's mother, or perhaps the spirit in her relationship to the protagonist.
Okay, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. The story follows Takuma Hirose, a young blind boy, just after he has been moved in with his uncle in a small village following the death of his mother. His blindness is itself left something of a mystery initially, though it's made fairly obvious that it's probably connected in some way to his mother's death since it's stated that he became blind after this happened.
And just a brief aside, but am I the only one amused by the way blindness is often represented in anime by having the character have their eyes closed all the time? Of course this does lend itself to riffing in the form of "just open your eyes!" and the like whenever the character in question complains about their blindness.
Anywho, we're introduced to a character Takuma refers to as Otoha, a young blonde girl, at the same time we're introduced to him, which involves being chased out of the woods by a wild pig in an attempt to take a shortcut to school. Initially it seems like she's just some friend of his, except that as he collides with Hayami Kohinata, another student from his class, it's made obvious that he's the only one who is aware of her presence (almost said "see" there). Otoha actually comes out and says as much not long afterwards, as a setup to explain Takuma suddenly being able to see not long afterwards, and for the majority of the series. This miraculous restoration of his sight is essentially the set-up to the series, as Otoha explains that he's been given his sight back to accomplish something.
What that something is becomes readily apparent as it's soon shown that Hayami is essentially the school's and the village's whipping boy (so to speak). She's shown to be generally a good person as she helps Takuma find his way to school following their rather rough introduction to each other, even as she becomes really anti-social afterwards. Takuma naturally has no idea what the hell is going on, yet for some reason everyone seems to think he should. And really what it comes down to is that other students will use pretty much any excuse to bully and beat the crap out of Hayami, with others, including the teacher, basically just pretending that it isn't happening. Takuma reacts the way most people would to this and intervenes, but at least initially he seems to have new guy immunity.
The story of the show then becomes Takuma trying to figure out why the hell everyone treats Hayami like a pariah. And I do mean everyone. Hayami lives in the woods by herself in an isolation enforced by village taboo, and at best, people pretend she doesn't exist or just talk shit about her based on how horrible her family was supposed to be (for that matter, it's still kind of a mystery as to what exactly happened to Hayami's family). Meanwhile, Takuma is trying to just get everyone to get along, all while dealing with basically every girl in school displaying an odd amount of romantic interest in him, especially considering he just showed up. Oh, and this naturally includes a token loli, because it just wouldn't be a harem anime without one.
It's not easy being a pimp.
This mystery aspect to the series, along with Takuma fighting the bigoted nature of the village are what really appealed to me. The downside is that, much like
Higurashi, what could be a really interesting story is constantly interrupted with the stereotypical harem aspects of the anime. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the harem stuff was at best something for me to poke fun at.
Another area of amusement was the portrayal of the village itself, though partly due to how universal some of the stereotypes are, not to mention how disturbingly accurate those stereotypes can be sometimes. The way people tend to gossip about one another, the way going into a bigger town can be a special occasion that you make a day trip out of, and I hate to say it, but the way certain families can be treated deferentially as kind of community leaders, while others are looked down upon, and it can all be based on something that their grandparents or some other extended member of the family might have done back in the 1950s.
Shiki kind of captured aspects of this as well.
Another area of commonality between this series and
Shiki is the way in which people could otherwise act like good people, and yet have a dark side to them. In
Shiki it was the casual way the villagers would go about killing vampires who were people they had known in life, and in this series, it was the way everyone could go from being super nice and hospitable to Takuma, to turning around and acting like completely horrible people to Hayumi. Hell, early on, some of them get toilet water and dump it on her. Or there's the way one of the village elders forced his youngest granddaughter to replace and live as his oldest granddaughter, who died in an accident. More messed up is that she was the granddaughter he and the rest of the village looked down on as a disappointment to the family while the granddaughter who died had been the stereotypical prodigal daughter. And then there was the way everyone would talk about how fortunate it was that she'd been the one who died rather than her older sister after the switch has taken place. And if
that wasn't messed up enough, apparently her grandpa was planning on setting her up with Takuma so that the two of them would get married and presumably Takuma would inherit the unofficial leadership role the old man had within the village.
It might sound a bit weird for me to say this, but these were actually the aspects of the series that appealed the most to me due to the dramatic elements in them. So hopefully it's understandable why all the cutesy harem aspects of this show tended to bring it down for me. Because just as we're starting to learn more and more about what's going on in this village, or watching Takuma playing peacemaker and extending a helping hand out to Hayumi, the anime throws out a beach episode or something like that.
The story turns out about how you'd expect, given that it is a happy ending (I think), though there are a couple of odd twists toward the end of it which I'll get into in the more spoiler-heavy discussion later on, along with the confusion I have from it.
I hate to say it, but the characters didn't have a heck of a lot to them beyond the stereotypical roles one might find in any harem anime, beyond a few things here and there to make them somewhat unique. Takuma was an average student, and his blindness and seemingly miraculous recovery was about all that made him stand out, at least until you got into the story and the way he acted in the face of the village's treatment of Hayumi. Granted, those are good things about his character, it’s just that there isn’t much more to him, and he comes off as a generic good guy character. This makes a kind of sense given the source material, but I feel Takuma is an example of the duality of this series. It wanted to have some depth to it, but it wanted to be cute, too, and in Takuma’s case, this results in his character lacking any real depth to it. We know his mother died and that his blindness is most likely a result of the trauma this caused. We know that he’s generally a good person, open to people and ideas, but not sure what to make of all the attention showered on him. Which is another thing – almost everyone seems to like him for no real reason, even the bigoted, scheming village elder, and it takes a lot of him standing up to people’s bigotry toward Hayumi and refusing to abide by their messed up rules for some of them to dislike him. I kind of got the “insta-friend” vibe when it came to his interaction with the majority of his classmates. It isn’t until almost the end of the series that we get to really learn much about him, and even then it’s limited, and the drama involved with that comes off as rather contrived. And most of the other characters are the same way. Takuma’s uncle is, for the most part, the generic meddling relative who is very open with his affection, as well as his desire to see Takuma get a girlfriend and get laid. He’s easy to like, but the thing that made him stand out for me was that one point where he had a bit a brevity with Takuma in discussing what exactly happened with his mother’s death and what was involved in it. As a supporting character he didn’t really need much depth, but his moment of brevity is another example of what I’m talking about when I say I’m disappointed there wasn’t a bit more to this show as far as the drama went. The only characters we learn much about are Hayumi and Hinata/Hotaru as the series explores that whole mystery aspect as far as why everyone hates Hayumi and what happened to lead up to that. I already spoiled that a bit as far as Hinata/Hotoru, actually. But I feel that this exploration into their characters through exploring the story allowed them to at least somewhat step aside from the clichéd character types that they are introduced as. Actually, the story is a little clever in that it presents these clichéd character types as the role the characters play within the community, though this angle is never really explored very much.
And here’s where we get into real spoiler territory, so if you want to avoid that, skip ahead to the last paragraph for my final thoughts and score.
Man this show is messed up.
I already got into the whole thing with how Hinata is actually Hotoru, who took on the name and role of her sister basically to save face for her family. But the really disgusting thing is that it shows that Hotoru was every bit as smart and academically talented as her sister, and all she’d have needed was the love and support she’d gotten as Hinata. I really wish this point had been explored, well, at all, really, but no one ever confronted her grandpa about this point, and no one else in the village was confronted about it either (you know, all the people saying how lucky it was Hotoru died instead of Hinata, because Hotoru was the stupid one and a disappointment to the family). Of course, either the people in the village were stupid in that they couldn’t tell one girl from the other, because the sisters were not twins, or they were essentially brainwashing themselves into believing it. Even more messed up is the reason why Hotoru was looked down on by basically everyone, which amounts to being bad at math and good at art. So when we find out later that she had the ability to excel academically, we also have to keep in mind that she had potential as an artist, too. Then, of course, there’s the other thing she was looked down on for, which was that she was friends with Hayumi.
It is never explained what exactly the village had against Hayumi’s family, and it seems the only thing they seem to have against Hayumi herself is that she was a member of that family. Actually this is one of the more frustrating aspects to the show. It’s simply put out there and accepted that Hayumi’s family were just horrible people. And the only example we get is that her family apparently had arranged a marriage between one of their sons and Takuma’s mother, and apparently when she broke it to marry another man, they kept pressuring her about it, even after Takuma was born, to the point that she apparently committed suicide. And that’s basically used as a monkey wrench for the relationship that had been building between Takuma and Hayumi. But nothing is ever shown or explained as to why the village got so pissed off at Hayumi’s family to the point that they burned down their house and either kicked them out of the village or straight up murdered them. Which brings up two other questions: why is Hayumi still in the village and why did the state never get involved? I mean, maybe it’s different in Japan versus the US, but at least on this side of the pond, kids don’t get to just live by themselves out in the woods. Is Haymi being kept there against her will? Why is she there? If her family was banished, why didn’t she go with them? If her family was murdered, why was there no apparent police involvement? Why then is Hayumi not a ward of the state? Yes, I know the real reason for this is so that we have a show, but I couldn’t help but go back to these questions as I watched the series.
But then, there are plenty of questions like that which come up during the course of the series. Questions like, where is Takuma’s father in all of this? We literally never see him, and yet he’s the man Takuma’s mother broke an arranged marriage for. Where are Hinata/Horuto’s parents? Maybe I missed an explanation, but her life seems dominated by her grandfather with basically no room for her parents in the story. Is she orphaned?
And then there’s what exactly happened to Takuma’s mother, and to Takuma himself for that matter. It’s implied that Takuma knew all along that his mother didn’t actually commit suicide, but rather died attempting to save a small child who apparently was too stupid to live (dove in front of an oncoming train after his soccer ball). Why then does everyone claim his mother committed suicide? I mean there would have been the kid’s body along with Takuma’s mother, not to mention a family wondering where their kid went. And to complicate this, at least for me, is that Takuma’s realization of this happens as Hayumi apparently makes the same sacrifice. Or did she? Because the way it’s shot, it sure looks like the train takes her and another kids who’s too stupid to live out. But the ending epilogue shows us Takuma and his classmates as adults, and an infant that looks like what you would expect of a combination between Takuma and Hayumi by anime logic. Wikipedia says this is actually the product of a crossdresser and another character, but those characters were always on the periphery and I didn't even catch that the one character actually was a crossdresser, so it would be pretty easy to make the mistake I did about the infant.
Of course this is following Takuma regressing into childhood and thinking that Hayumi is his mother. So just a bit of Oedipus complex thrown in there for fun, I guess. But this is why he connects what happened to his mother to something that was happening as he and Hayumi are standing at a train crossing just as the gates are closing. I guess the upshot of this was that Otoha (who is apparently the spirit of Hinata) was sent to help Takuma to get over his blindness by accepting what happened to his mother, and that she never intended to leave him as she did (hence she didn't actually commit suicide and that aspect of it was all in his head, apparently).
Maybe I’m reading too much into it and the ending messed with me more than it should have, but then one of the other things put forward by the climax of the series is that Takuma had been blind all along through the series, and everything he thought he’d seen had been all in his head all along. The scenes that play behind the credits and as a stinger to them only added to my confusion, as Otoha makes an appearance just before Hayumi shows up again some time after the scene at the train crossing (everyone is grown up now), and both in the dialog leading up to this and in Takuma's reaction to seeing Hayumi left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was actually alive or simply a spirit as Otoha was. Which basically lead me as a viewer to wonder what exactly was real as far as the series went, and hence a bit more disappointment on my part because I feel kind of cheated by having to ask that question to myself.
Eh, maybe I’m overanalyzing things. My friends were pretty convinced that Hayumi was alive and the baby we saw another of their friends carrying at Horuto's house was definitely a product of Takuma and Hayumi (though it's actually the product of a couple characters named Hamaji and Maki).
I guess what it comes down to is that while this series has an interesting premise with some potential to it in terms of being a drama with some mystery elements to it, I feel that this was somewhat overshadowed by the harem aspect of the series, as well as the constant need to inject “cute” throughout. This made for quite a bit of mood whiplash watching it. However, if cute is your thing, especially with a slice of life feeling to it, you might like this show, though the mood whiplash might get to you from the darker elements. It made for an interesting watch once through, I doubt I’ll ever make a point of watching it again. 6/10.