Nico Tanigawa
WataMote!

Attention, contains spoilers! This review should be read after watching the work, but if you’re among those who aren’t afraid of spoilers (or have no intention of watching it), read it at your own risk.

"WataMote!" is nothing but the abbreviation of the much longer title "Watashi ga motenai no wa do kangaetemo omaera ga warui!", which literally translates from Japanese to: "Say what you want, but it's your fault I'm not popular (or, if I'm a loser)". Derived from Nico Tanigawa's manga and unfolded in the classic 12-episode format, WataMote (still unreleased in Italy and viewable only online with subtitles) is an anime that deceives. It initially appears as the most classic of Slice of Life, full of self-contained episodes whose only purpose, besides showing us some snippets of “real” life, seems to be to make us laugh and to let us spend a few carefree hours. And it must be said that it succeeds quite well at the beginning. It probably even deceived those who self-spoiled the plot right from the start. Grotesque situations, bordering on Fantozzian, set the stage for a delightfully naive protagonist, delightful in her attempts to achieve her set goal: becoming popular in her school. And so the aim seems to be to make the viewer laugh. And indeed, the laughs do flow. Sidesplitting laughter, which amuses from the very first episode. But here's the hitch. “From the first episode”. So also in the second. In the third. In the fourth. But how long can an anime keep standing on laughter? Perhaps until we realize its purpose was actually not to make us laugh, but something else? To make us cry? To move us? Or maybe… To make us reflect? Can a work concentrate all its allure for the audience in wild laughter while actually holding its true content, its most authentic message, in a depth that surfaces more and more as, episode by episode, we reach its conclusion? It would seem so, and it is precisely this that elevates WataMote to an anime of a much higher caliber than average, akin to the difference between a literary masterpiece of the random 20th century in the mix and a typical fake-romantic novel from a supermarket so fashionable these days.
WataMote is a Slice of Life, as mentioned; as such, its task is precisely to represent reality. But reality isn't all roses and flowers, and all the stereotypes we find in anime fall like leaves from a tree beaten by the autumn wind. And this wind doesn't just settle for knocking them down, no, it wants to mock them. Mocking not only the anime (and manga, visual novels, online life simulators, etc.), but also those who watch them, who find their embodiment in the same protagonist, a Tomoko completely alienated from the world around her precisely because she resides not in Japan (the real one) but in the much more comforting world of dreams and adolescent fantasies. It's no coincidence that an anime like this represents, by parodying, all the absurdities found in other anime, represented for what they are, absurdities indeed. All the more absurd when they are represented by a character like Tomoko, who has nothing absurd about her, quite the opposite, she is extremely real in her delirious humanity, making her compare her sweat to that of “a character from a basketball manga”. And sometimes it happens explicitly, like in the apt comparison between Light from Death Note, who epically moves the pen on the black diary, and Tomoko, who (also epically) moves her mouse on her pathetic and loser computer as if she were wielding a sword in battle. How many times have you felt like a character in a movie, a novel, a comic? This happens to the protagonist constantly, and she truly believes she is “really” like that, and it is precisely this that makes WataMote a “real” anime, as it represents exactly the “unreality” of human thoughts and their contrast with what is right in front of their noses.
Every pretense of optimism, happy ending included, is swept away by a subtle harshness, which mocks our inner defenses and wounds us deeply precisely because we, welcoming it together with the “comedy” of the view, fail to recognize it. Something inside us makes us distinctly differentiate between comedic and dramatic works, which is why we are utterly defenseless when this difference is more blurred, unable to understand where one ends and the other begins. The tragedy seems to give way to comedy, but exactly, it “seems”: it's nothing but an illusion, and the tragedy, clearly unwilling to be gagged, hidden in a chest, continues to kick until it breaks free, but not with violence, little by little, eating piece by piece the heart of the viewer who thought they could relax with a few hours of carefree viewing and finds themselves thrown into an abyss of suffering and solitude.
The point is precisely this: a continuity of comedic situations revolving around a “tragic” protagonist cannot lead to a smile forever. Fantozzi can make us burst out laughing, in part due to the stylistic choice of his films, but eventually, someone moved by compassion will start saying, “He makes you laugh, but... Poor fellow…” WataMote radicalizes this pattern. The comedic situations hold up for the first four episodes, five at the most. At a certain point boredom sets in. Boredom which then turns into nausea. Nausea into depression. And depression, into existential anguish. Those rare glimmers of hope, of light at the end of the tunnel peeking here and there every now and then, only serve to make the tension growing episode after episode in the anime’s atmosphere even more dramatic. Pure internal suffering veiled as a divertissement. Tomoko is alone, she is an outcast, a girl living a different existence from girls her age: a flat, miserable life, carried on by inertia, without a purpose or anything to give it meaning. She is nobody, and the people around her do nothing but remind her of that, continuously ignoring her. But in the end, whose fault is it, the one who ignores or the one who does nothing to avoid being ignored? Or rather, the one who seems to do everything to be ignored, only to complain about the contrary? I try to evoke compassion in the viewer while I eat my lunch all alone in the deserted classroom after fainting, but wasn't it I myself who just hours earlier was deliberately seeking isolation and went to eat in the darkest and most hidden place I could find? This is the question the anime poses to us. But is it a question that also finds its answer? To understand it, just analyze the title. “If I’m a loser (and therefore an outcast), it’s your fault, not mine.” But are we so sure? Or perhaps this title itself embodies the same parody we find towards other anime? Maybe the point is different and more complex; that title isn’t a parody explicitly stated by the authors, but rather the point of view that Tomoko has of herself and her life.
This point should not be underestimated, in fact, it is here that we find the meaning of the entire anime. If we risk drawing an unlikely (but not so much) parallelism between European literary history and Japanese animation, WataMote isn’t realist in an 1800s sense, as could be the influence of the surrounding environment in the works of Balzac and Zola (the type of realism, since we’re talking French literature, that we might find more fitting in a work like “The Flowers of Evil” by Shuzo Oshimi), but rather in a psychological sense, with that introspection typical of the 20th-century interior monologue of Joyce or Svevo. In practice, reality isn't what it is but rather what the protagonist believes it to be. The very stylistic choices, sometimes depicting the characters with only mouths and otherwise identical appearances, represent an extremization of the (unconscious) concept that Tomoko has of society and the world. “It doesn’t matter what you think, it’s your fault I’m unpopular.” Exactly. Not because it’s the truth, but because it’s what Tomoko “believes to be the truth”. And the problem is that the entire anime is built on the subjective perception of reality, showing the viewer not what really happens, but what happens in the protagonist's eyes and mind.
Tomoko is a social misfit, a recluse, an outcast, not because others want to reduce her to that but rather because she seeks that marginalization, that reassurance that can only be obtained in solitude. Exactly, “reassurance”. Because poor Mokocchi (“kawaii” nickname for Tomoko) suffers like a beaten dog, like a poor defenseless chick at the mercy of the storm. But a beaten dog and a defenseless chick could escape their suffering condition if only they wanted because they have the ability: it’s enough to bring out the claws and beak, to attack, to react, to not passively endure events. To bite the hand that beats them, to find shelter from the rain. But they don’t. Maybe because they don’t have the courage, perhaps. Or maybe, precisely because it’s more “reassuring” to do nothing and accept one’s fate, hoping that someday things will change, rather than doing something to change them. And those who watch do nothing to prevent this view of things: moved by pity and compassion towards them, they’ll try to do something to help them out of their situation. Tomoko seeks exactly this, she seeks someone who, “just like it happens in anime”, can save her from the solitude she herself has imposed on herself precisely so she can be saved. The problem is that not only will Tomoko fail to find anyone who can save her (or rather, who is interested in saving her), but when the opportunity arises, instead of embracing it, she will flee. Because even being saved requires a bit of courage, the kind of courage needed to leave an existential condition in which we have been mired for a long time and venture into a reality. Because feeling sorry for oneself and waiting for life to change on its own is much more comfortable than reacting to one’s situation with self-awareness, or at least accepting to change our state of affairs when someone extends a hand to us. And this is exactly what happens with the President, who comes dressed as a bear to overcome the barriers imposed by Tomoko and hugs her in a liberating embrace. Tomoko desired that hug, she craved it with all her being, at least on an unconscious level. But her surface barriers would have prevented her from accepting it from a visible flesh-and-blood person. A concealment from consciousness was needed, perhaps a good disguise. Like a bear, exactly. And so Tomoko lets herself be hugged, and maybe this is the first step towards an awareness of her deepest feelings. But then, conveniently at the end of the anime, when Tomoko has the chance to react to her solitude and decides to take the initiative to talk with the President (and no longer with the bear), all her determination collapses. Hence derives the tragic nature of the entire anime. From the protagonist’s failure in front of the contrast between her goals and the obstacles she has to overcome to achieve them. Therefore, in front of life.
Then, let’s be honest, the world doesn’t always work this way and we don’t always find people willing to pity us and save us. Tomoko realizes this at her own expense. When an activity as mundane as a trip to the cinema seems to have transformed into the purpose of her entire life, her only friend must cancel for work reasons. That is, for reasons which, in the reality of the real world and not in the reality of Tomoko’s “fake world” mind, are far more important than an outing with a friend that can easily be postponed without consequences. But for Tomoko, things work differently, and these consequences definitely exist. If not in reality, at least in her psyche, torn by the conflict between illusion and reality. So, her brain will make her believe that “working is great” and that working with cakes will redeem her from herself. The illusion shatters tragically when, in a scene that is perhaps one of the emotional peaks of the entire anime, the beautiful dreams of working as a waitress are overwhelmed by the anguishing alienation of an assembly line worker in a cake factory. But how is it possible, wasn’t working with cakes supposed to be a beautiful dream? Why then this delirious nightmare? Well, this is precisely the “awakening to reality” children have when they are no longer children, when their “dream of becoming an astronaut” clashes with the real work world and an increasingly competitive society (especially the Japanese one in which the anime is set). Tomoko is still a high schooler, but she’s no longer a primary school child, so she’s old enough to finally notice this tragic gap. A gap that, let’s remember, is crucial for our life, as it makes us grow up. Just like when a simple “See you” from a boy is capable of triggering a long and complex web of romantic and erotic fantasies from which, once entangled, one can’t escape, ending up mistaking them for reality and wanting to make others believe that that is precisely the reality, like a 12-year-old cousin who looks up to us as examples. But if reality is one thing in our head, it can be a different thing in someone else’s head. And Tomoko will only understand it when she is forced to apologize, humiliated, with her head bowed, before the boy who inadvertently becomes embroiled in that web of lies. The soundtrack does its job magnificently in this sense, alternating styles and musical genres spanning a real abyss of situations possible to represent, precisely to mark this gap between the world of the mind and that of reality, between philosophical meditations cradled by Tibetan music and self-destructive thoughts in embarrassing situations, sliced by death metal guitars and nearly grindcore bursts (perhaps tying back to the style of the nice opening, a mix of pop and very commercial melodic death metal reminiscent of Sonic Syndicate and similar bands).
All these situations make Tomoko aware of a profound truth: others cannot spend their lives pitying us, and even less so family members. Her mother sees her as a girl like any other, not noticing her inner turmoil and not hesitating to scold her when she doesn’t cooperate with household chores. Her father, finding her asleep in full (self)erotic dream delirium, gently lifts her from the ground, and in that simple gesture, shows the affection he feels for his daughter, but it’s an affection devoid of any psychological introspection into her feelings: we will never see any dialogue between Tomoko and her father seeking explanations for what happened. In fact, her father is just an ordinary father, and indeed, we will never even see his face, covered in shadow.
Her brother Tomoki (by the way, a point for creativity…) is not exempt from this situation, he actually amplifies it. Not only does he not understand his sister, but he doesn’t even accept her. He pushes her away, despite her attempts to draw his attention (easy to understand: Tomoki is the only boy in the protagonist’s life). He distances her, as if annoyed. Yet, perhaps unintentionally, it is precisely the indifference of her brother that somehow keeps poor Tomoko in touch with reality. Because she, even if now a teenager, remains at a mental level of a child, with her mental journeys, her fantasies (which she believes real), her illusions to get lost in and reject the outside world, perceived by her as hostile, invasive, and dangerous for her identity. But in such a context, strong family affection would have only complicated things, further wrapping the eerie girl in a nice blanket like the one the mother tucks in at midnight, under a shiny bell jar. But none of this happens, so Tomoko is forced to seek this warm blanket elsewhere: in a middle school friend who has remained loyal to her, in a girl reading a book she knows, in a stranger who buys her an umbrella out of pity, in a kitten seeming to purr because we've strongly desired someone's company. Or perhaps in an instant ramen devoured in solitude under the stars.
Many desire a second season of WataMote because there was no proper ending, and I admit, I’m part of this group. But others criticize the work precisely because of this “lack of ending”. A criticism like this demonstrates that the viewing has been sterile and the viewer has failed to grasp the message and intent of the work.
The ending of WataMote does not exist, because you cannot give an ending to life. Tomoko will remain as she is because the anime’s intent is to make the viewer reflect by showing the reality of life and not that of anime (and films, novels, comics, etc.), in its depressing entirety (perhaps even exaggerated), which cannot be resolved in a friendship obtained exactly at the climax (i.e., the end). This would transform the anime into a real anime. But WataMote doesn’t want to be an anime. It wants to be horrific and wonderful, boring and intriguing, sad and funny, all at the same time, in a dialectic of opposites as disturbing as it is real. And above all, it wants to be a saber through our hearts, making us laugh, moving us, and making us suffer just like real life does.
A small masterpiece.