Omohide.com

(The review of the Touch television series, an anime I highly reccomend, can be found here. This review assumes you’ve seen the TV series – or, at least, up to the halfway point.)

Years after the Touch anime ended, two followup sequel movies were released, Miss Lonely Yesterday, and then Crossroads.  I approached these movies with hesitation, wondering what they could possibly add to that wonderful series.  Here are my reviews:

Touch: Miss Lonely Yesterday Review

In my opinion, this film is a good lesson in why sequels to long and satisfying stories like Touch can give very poor results.  I would advise Touch fans to avoid it because I don’t believe it adds anything to the Touch story and harms much of the character development that took place in the original series.

The premise?  The movie takes place in Tatsuya and Minami’s college years (they go to different colleges).  Everyone has gone their own way in life, and the only good part of this film was seeing what became of the characters from Touch.  As for the bad:  Essentially, this film rehashes emotional situations that were already covered in a far better manner in the original anime, and then proceeds to inflate them with artificial and emotionally empty melodrama.  For example, we see Nishimura having trouble with his elbow and facing a humiliating loss upon which he breaks down crying.  He also acts rude and distant to his childhood friend until his defeat.  The problem with this storyline was that it was already done in the anime in a poignant and satisfying way.

The other part of the plot revolves around a new college friend of Tatsuya’s who has a one-sided infatuation with him.  She (successfully) tries to cause a rift between him and Minami, and this results in a great deal of the film having Tatsuya and Minami almost estranged from each other (Minami goes off with Nitta).  This was the most unconvincing part of the entire anime.  The catalyst for their separation is so minimal, so quick, and with such little reflection, communication or contemplation by our characters (instead we get a long musical montage showing them separated) that it simply feels like a generic soap opera plot affixed onto the characters from Touch with little rhyme or reason.

Indeed, the writers of this film expect me to accept that a girl we’ve known for a few minutes can cause this rift between Tatsuya and Minami – by attempting this they are trivializing the bonds which were reinforced with a hundred episodes of gradual development in the original anime series.  Where was the Minami that was thoughtful and could playfully shake off a similar scenario when it occured with Nitta’s sister Yuka, knowing Tatsuya so well that she could figure out what he was really thinking with ease?  And we’re also supposed to buy that the soft-spoken and considerate Nitta (brother, not Yuka) would suddenly become opportunistic and jump to take advantage of a problem between her and Tatsuya?  What has happened to these characters?

Well, the comparison to Yuka in the anime is not entirely accurate – the additional element with this new girl is that the she brings up Kazuya and attempts to use his memory to achieve her goal, saying that his memory is a constant weight on Tatsuya’s mind and particularly between him and Minami.  But we have already walked that road in the second half of the anime – our two characters had already faced that conflict and overcome it.

Perhaps if this movie’s general plot had been an episode somewhere in the middle of the series, it would have been more acceptable, but presenting it as a sequel is somewhat insulting.  The attempt to bring a new character into the Touch world also falls flat, and unfortunately, the familiar main characters who were once believable are compromised by being shoehorned into this plot.

Now, I will admit that I am inherently skeptical of sequels and their ability to truly add something new to an already satisfying story.  The trouble with following up a long series which had such developed characters and a good resolution is that if you simply retread the same kind of conflicts, you compromise how meaningful all those moments in the original really were.  Here are two possible sequels to Touch that would have been far more convincing and interesting to me: One, a film which more strongly revolved around Tatsuya and Minami graduating from high school, entering a new stage in life and dealing with the effects of this change both to them as individuals, such as their ambitions and goals, as well as the changes between them as they exit the familiar high school environment.  Two, a standalone story dealing with baseball – perhaps Tatsuya, like in this film, has been avoiding baseball for a few years and is finally convinced to return for a game – or something along those lines, with the film building up to that climax and victory.  Either of these would have been better than what we got.

So what’s the bottom line?  A sequel to a series like Touch should have either been a look into the further emotional and mental growth of our characters as they move on in life, or, less ambitiously, an enjoyable revisit with the characters we had grown fond of in the original series reprising some of the more enjoyable and entertaining moments from the original story (playing baseball).  The first would have been great and the second would have been satisfying in its own way.  What a sequel should not do is regress the characters and ignore previous character development in order to present an unconvincing attempt at creating “new” conflicts between them.  Unfortunately, I feel that Touch: Miss Lonely Yesterday falls into the final category and I suggest that any Touch fan should skip it.  On its own, it is a poorly written story, but bearing the name of one of my favourite series merely adds insult to injury.

*
*
*

Touch: Cross Roads Review

My approach to this film was clearly biased after the mess of the previous film, but I came out of it pleasantly surprised.  Cross Roads doesn’t add anything remarkable to the Touch story, but it does give us an endearing story with our main characters and allows us to see how they’re progressing later on in life.  In other words, this is what MLY should have been.

Most of the problems with MLY do not exist in this film.  For one thing, the story behind it feels like it belongs to the Touch universe, allowing for both light-hearted and dramatic moments, rather than the generic soap opera atmosphere of MLY.  In this film, Tatsuya has gone off to America in search of his own kind of baseball, one where he can, without any doubts, leave the shadow of Kazuya and “find himself”.  Again, a very sensible follow up to the tone of the anime which avoids treading on familiar ground.  He keeps in touch by phone with Minami, who is pursuing a career in photography.  The film follows his season with the Emeralds, a minor league team which is his stepping stone to the majors.  It also introduces a character named Alice, a young tomboy who loves baseball and finds herself with a bit of an infatuation with Tatsuya.  But this subplot isn’t used as a method of creating tension between the two lead characters – instead, it’s the closeness of our two lead characters that instead acts as a conflict that Alice must learn to accept and move on from.  And that was far more believable than the artificial melodrama of MLY.  I also liked her character and sympathized with her later on, while I felt nothing towards the new character in MLY.

The characters reminded me wonderfully of their high school counter-parts.  The interaction between the two lead characters was very convincing.  Since they are separated by such distance, most of the screen time follows them separately apart from phone calls.  Regardless, you always get the impression that their bond is deep and unshakeable, not something to be easily broken by distance.  Since Tatsuya is in America, things are clearly a bit different from the original Touch, but it still managed to convey a similar tone to the original series.  The baseball scenes are perhaps not as dramatic as in the anime, but that’s because each match had to be rather short to portray the entire season.

I enjoyed the animation and music as well.  I thought that MLY‘s art seemed a bit stiff at times, but the art and animation flowed well here.  It was nice to see that Harada did not keep his gruffy traveller look after returning from his trip.  However, I still find the change in Nitta’s design odd – it just doesn’t seem to resemble how he looked in the anime.  The music was good in terms of quality, but exceptional in terms of how it was used throughout the film.  Having watched this film a few days after finishing the original series, I can’t say that I personally experienced this, but I can definitely picture fans of the original being overcome with a sense of nostalgia back when this was released from the way music was used.  Much of the background music are actually rearrangements of familiar melodies from the original Touch soundtrack.  And I don’t want to spoil anything, but the title theme of the Touch anime makes a sudden reappearance in a way that made me smile – and it wasn’t even one of my favourite songs from the original.  I also don’t want to ignore the new title theme which opens and closes the film (the Japanese title is 風のゆくえ which I’m translating liberally as “Where the wind is”, but take my Japanese ability with a grain of salt), which is a very pleasant piece of music with a lovely wistful quality to it.

Now, while I did enjoy watching the film, my lowered expectations due to MLY may be affecting my review.  To be objective, Cross Roads is not exceptional, the ebb and flow of the story is a bit unbalanced, a few parts of the story stretch credibility, and I would have liked to see some of the other characters from the Touch world make an appearance (I’m not sure how I feel about Tatsuya’s new catcher being a Koutaro-lookalike named Nick Candy).  But as far as anime sequels go, this is one of the better ones, giving us another taste of the formula that made Touch as great as it was and providing some added, though minimal, development to our main characters.  I certainly reccomend it, and doubly so if MLY has left a sour impression on you.  If evaluated as a standalone work of fiction, I may not have been so generous with the score, but as a Touch fan, I cannot pretend I didn’t enjoy it quite a bit.   1/2