My latest review for the Fandom Post is live, and it’s on Glasslip, the show I recently wrote 3000 other words on. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Bless, we already read your thoughts on Glasslip, why do we care to read more of them?” The answer: between writing my essay and writing this review, I somehow stumbled onto the Japanese aesthetic concept of “mono no aware.” I won’t bore you with definitions here, but suffice it to say that it’s an exceptionally good way of thinking about both Glasslip‘s content and its execution. So, if you want to read me wax even more philosophical on Glasslip, head on over to the Fandom Post!
That…probably wasn’t a very good sales pitch, huh.
Mage in a Barrel 
No matter how much you polish a ball of mud, it’s still a ball of mud. 🙂
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Booooooo 😛
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Interesting. I’m familiar with mono no aware mainly from Japanese live films and literature, but somehow I never thought much about its application in anime. I tend to think that it works best when the principals are of significantly advanced age and intertwined closely with the rumination on impending mortality, but yeah, you could also portray that kind of feel through the lens of teenagers experiencing it for the first time. As for my favorite depiction of the concept, I strongly recommend Kore-eda’s After Life, which is about a sort of after life bureaucratic office telling deceased people that they have to select exactly one memory in their life they want to keep before they could move on. I also recommend about a dozen other masterpieces and basically the whole ouvre of Ozu; the concept is a defining characteristic of Japan’s cinematic history, really.
(btw, I totally thought that “The Portrayal of Idols in Anime …” article in the site is yours. That’s an interesting & informative piece).
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Glasslip‘s definitely not the only mono no aware anime out there (Non Non Biyori comes to mind for me), but I don’t think I’ve seen a ton of them. Thanks for the recommendations, though! It’s a concept that fascinates me, so I’d love to experience more of it.
And no haha, not mine! I do have a big idol anime piece in the works for the blog, although who knows when I’ll finally get around to finishing it.
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Mono no Aware, I think, underlies most of the slice of life genre. In highschool settings, there’s usually an underlying awareness of graduation, where mono no aware is mostly expressed as “spending time with friends”.
Shows that involve youkai often contrast life spans to express mono no aware. (It’s especially thick in Natsume Yuuchinjou, via the youkai-mediated relationship between Natsume Satoshi and his grandmother Reiko – a character almost entirely characterised by the youkai who miss her.)
Romance has the making-memories-together trope – sitting side by side and watching the sunset comes to mind.
And so on. Ever since I heard of the concept, I see it everywhere in anime.
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