Yama no Susume Second Season

Honestly, I happened to come by this anime purely by chance. An anime about girls climbing mountains? As soon as I read the summary, I gave it a try. What the summary anticipated was a journey, and a long one at that. The four main characters go through many hardships and turns, and it made me want to cheer them on. Aspects of their experiences are often relatable in some way, too, like being unsure if you're able to do something, or simply an argument with your closest friend. With art comparable to the easygoing nature scenes of Non Non Biyori's, Yama no Susume manages tofascinate me greatly. The detail and effort put into every scene is incredible and inspiring, and the accuracy with each feature of mountain climbing as a whole is amazing. It definitely feels like the studio behind it actually went and climbed a mountain themselves, giving the animation a very genuine 'mountain aura'. Overall, I enjoyed both seasons of Yama no Susume, although it's unfortunate that the episodes in both seasons weren't full length, but the second season made a big difference to the three-minute (?) shorts of the first season. It's an enjoyable ride, for sure.

This review is just going to be how Yama no Susume Second Season is to me. I started out watching Yama no Susume out of curiosity (well that actually applies to most of us huh) only knowing that it's about mountain climbing. In little time Yama no Susume captured my eyes and heart to the show showing the beauty of mountain climbing but not without the challenges and suffering (and moe). As where I'm from has no mountains so before I watched the show I had no real idea and interest in mountains not to say climbing it but this show just does it so wellin portraying to the audiences about the beauty that lies ahead upon climbing mountains. It sure did for me, after watching the Mt. Fuji arc I was inspired I was hyped to climb Mt. Fuji someday and sure as hell did I climb it on July 7th to 8th 2015 when I was in Japan (for goraiko like what the girls did in the anime). It was like what the anime showed me it is tiring, you question yourself why are you here but in the end when you get to the top your rewards are wonders, you meet people upon climbing everyone's nice. If it wasn't for this show I wouldn't have climbed Mt. Fuji, I wouldn't have saw the beauty at the summit and during the climb, I wouldn't have experienced the feeling of being above and among the clouds. I wouldn't have experienced this once in a life time event. I am just really in love with this show they don't just show you the beauty they show you what it takes to get there as well that's why I was prepared for the suffering it had to take to get to the summit. All and all, this show is wonderful in my opinion it's moe, realistic and inspirational an 8/10 for me.

This second season of Yama no Susume continues the story of Aoi and Hinata from the first one as they, along with their two friends, keep developing their interest on mountain climbing while reaffirming their friendship. This is overall a cute and positive show with endearing personalities and an inviting mood. And yet, it has to be one of the most perplexing experiences I've had watching anime, and for many reasons. I admit it, I didn't like the first season. With a premise that should have hit all the right notes in my personal tastes, I found the delivery dull and lazy, filled with the mostblatantly regurgitated trope iterations and overall giving me the impression that I wasn't watching something genuine and sincere. This season is far longer, the episodes have more time to develop its ideas and not feel too schematic and/or contrived, so in theory it should be able to fix these issues. And it, indeed, went way better this time. Yet if I had to describe this season in a single word, that would be "erratic". Extremely, bewilderingly erratic. First, let me say that the art and animation in this show deserve all the praise that I can't fully give in other departments. It is a show about outdoors and scenery and it delivers with great shots and embellished natural landscapes. It has a lot of active and energetic character interaction and it's delightfully executed in movement and framing to transmit that feeling of liveliness throughout. The visual delivery is absolutely on point and that is something I can't deny no matter how I feel about the series. That said, I am very conflicted about the writing and characters, and perhaps the most blatant example of this inner conflict came in the very first episode. The vibes I was getting from it couldn't be worse; the same essential problems the first season had in execution, with a kind of moe and cutesy imagery that felt so lazy, tropey and lowest common denominator that I couldn't get invested in its mood at all. And yet, there was a scene right there, when the girls finally set up the tent and enjoy their time together. That scene. That conversation in the tent. It somehow felt properly restrained, natural, authentic. It was exactly what I want and expect a slice of life to be. To a point, I wish the entire anime was a consistent stream of serviceable mediocrity, somehow like that first season was, because this is more difficult to handle. "Irregular" would be an understatement for this show. It is actually brilliant, genuinely great and inspired, in bits. Some of its little sequences can rightfully be placed among my favorite slice of life moments of all time, and the series gets some themes and tones surprisingly well. For instance, one of the things I was most surprised about is that, for a series this positive and idealistic... it handles the negatives and adversities incredibly well. It knows how to deal with tension and inner conflict. The negative effects of Aoi's acrophobia are perhaps my favorite plot point of the series and whenever it plays a role it doesn't feel sweetened or overdramatized, but heavy and uncomfortable, and creates some of the best and most heartfelt scenes in the show. I could mention some other moments that deal with an amount of tension and conflict, like the semi-frequent quarrels between Aoi and Hinata, or that scene with Aoi trying to convince her mother to let her climb Mt. Fuji... and they all, somehow, excel at executing their particularly heavier moods. But for every great there's a downside in this show and in this case it's the amount of monologuing and characters wording their feelings and concerns. Aoi is particularly guilty of that and it can get truly grating. It is cheap, it is redundant and it disrupts the natural flow of events. I can't fully express how much I dislike the choice to use them as tools for character exposition, and how often they managed to break my immersion in otherwise very competent scenes and conflicts. In fact, in general, I don't feel much for the characters of this series. For the two main ones, I like them more as concepts than as characters themselves. While sometimes, clearly more often than the rest of the cast, they move me and hit home in a particularly brilliant way, I can't bring myself to getting this kind of strong attachment to them that other series manage to create. And it's not due to lack of merits: the premise of their friendship is really beautiful and inspiring, and their relationship doesn't have anything essentially wrong, actually managing to capture the little instances of conflict that also conform a friendship. I think it's worth noting, and to a point daring for the show and the overall mood it intends to create, that it tries to put emphasis on their bickering instead of reducing their relationship to the beautiful and wholesome moments. But with that said, I can't get over character quirks of Aoi that I find irritating, like the above mentioned, and while Hinata is more solid, she isn't in any way memorable to me as a standalone. The rest of the cast is rather forgettable. Kaede is... just there. I don't hate her, I wouldn't say I like her, to a point I appreciate her viewpoint and I see nothing wrong with her presence but nothing else. Kokona is a weird and ambivalent case. She is sweet to the point of type 1 diabetes, which I somehow can handle due to my high sugar tolerance but even then I can't help but point her as a character that is pushed far beyond the limits. And yet, there is some naïve childhood charm in her that prevents this excess from backfiring or resulting in annoyance. I truly don't know what to say or how to sum up my views of this show. It is genuinely brilliant but at the same time it's grating and mediocre. It has forgettable characters but intense and breathtaking character moments. It feels fake and pandering in its amount of regurgitated moe gimmicks that are uninspired and overdone in execution, yet it somehow is able to transmit down-to-earth feelings that few slice of life capture with such efficiency. The highs of this show seem to come from nowhere, but they exist, and they make the experience absolutely worthy. That is what I can conclude, I guess. It was worthy. Irregular, erratic and a huge mess of an experience, but one of a kind. And somehow, I find myself looking forward to the third season.

Now, I shall begin my review that probably has nothing metaphorical to do with cars. No car brands and car models whatsoever. Yama no Susume (Encouragement of Climb) began its season 1 as a 3-minute-per-episode moeblob, the “anime shorts” as some calls it. After watching the whole season 1 in an hour less, I thought that that was the end. And no farther stretching of stories will be made, unless the producers and staff will be making fillers. Perhaps another slice-of-life on high school grounds rather than mountains? Instead, the writer(s) of season 2 went around (or researched) their Land of the Rising Sun to find mountainsto showcase: the episodes progress to more trekking and mountain-climbing as high as Mt. Fuji even. That itself is proper, impressive, and cultural-friendly. Animators were able to impressively showcase some of Japan’s highpoints where kawaii-moes ought to climb without parenteral guidance. I mean, just imagine: three high-schoolers and one middle-schooler are climbing Mt. Fuji on their own. How parent-wracking is that? But this is CGDCT goodness. On the surface, that’s as plain as you get: kawaii-moes climbing mountains. Anime fans and otakus moved on with their lives to pursue bishies, panty-shot fanservices and the particular mainstream anime; they all did but I didn’t. Instead, I imagined myself on top a mountain, and went ‘hmmm…this is one remarkable, inspiring story’. STORY = 10 To put it simply in CGDCT terms, Aoi and Hinata, who were the MCs of the short season 1, wanted to reach on top of mountains they were planning to climb all for the sake of watching the sunrise. Now, you may have heard of phrases like “move the mountain or die trying”, “the going gets tough, the tough gets going”, “it gets harder by each step”, among other variations of mountain-related cliché quotes of whatnot, and even the great Stratovarius does have their solemn metal ballad “Move the Mountain”. All in all, the message means the same: ‘encouragement’. Yes, the title itself says it. On the surface, it’s a CGDCT moerrific anime and all things cute, but the story metaphorically tells you of encouragement in life. Life itself is putting mountains on proverbs to symbolize the arduous trek. There are failures, disappointments, and hurdles big and small. They pretty much are metaphors from the mountain’s trails, flat grounds, steep angles, rocks, grasses, and all of us have climbed throughout our lives of our own symbolic mountain until we breathe our last. Then, as you reach the peak of the mountain, which metaphorically-means your closing path to success, you only grasp a moment of it, all for the take of watching the sunrise. You then realized that every path you took was all hard work for a glimpse of that morning sun. Sounds familiarly comprehensible? Good. This anime showed just that, like telling you all those encouragement things the moe-way. It’s tricky but if you’re able to get past the moe-surface barrier, you’d realize what I’m talking about. Aoi and Hinata’s experiences are sugarcoated with cutesy, but you do relate to this when you find yourself in a situation where you “give up” and are sulking, or when a “friend helped you”, or when you want to overcome your fears. And yes, I’m not spoiling you on anything. It’s all just there, and again in a moe-way no doubt. ART = 10 It’s all fluid-ish and pleasing to the eyes. What’s more, it’s not the character design that the art has nailed, but the accuracy of the Japan’s showcase of mountainous sceneries themselves. Like I said, the animators made a culture-friendly take of showcasing some of Japan’s magnificent mountains. The details were made for inviting mountain-climbing. There’s just one thing though: it seems that most audiences generally are anime-fans and otakus who pursue bishies and panties, not tourism. And that’s a bad thing because all efforts are pretty much undermined here, next to being wasted. Yes, there are CGDCT-lovers, but that’s just a percent, a fraction of the most anime fans. Still, art-wise, the level of details is just staggering. CHARACTER = 9 Needless to pry on this as this is CGDCT, and that’s entirely good to put characters that are easy on the heart and mind. All moe, all cutesy, all Hinata, Aoi, Kokona and Kaede. SOUND = 10 Aoi, Hinata, Kokona and Kaede are voiced by Yuka Iguchi, Kana Asumi, Yui Ogura and Yoko Hikasa respectively. The chemistry is already there, maybe not as bonding as K-On! but these seiyuus know CGDCT and slice-of-life as if they lived it themselves. I’m impressed just by the simple and natural flow of voices and that’s very good. ENJOYMENT = 8 There are a few niggles, particularly that climbing mountains one after the other is going to make things predictable. Though, this is CGDCT at best, and the criteria fits as much as it is seen. One thing that comes to mind was maybe because the “CGDCT formula” needs to be in the special places of houses and classrooms for it to truly work. Going around Japan with this formula may not be its strongpoint, but like I said, these are just some few niggles, and enjoying Yama no Susume was still impressive as the number 8 itself. OVERALL = 8 You may be surprised why I rated it as eight (8), but here’s the thing: it’s absolutely moe, absolutely CGDCT, absolutely all elements come into play, and that’s why it’s an 8. Somehow, there's still something amiss...I could not put it into words but if we take a look at Non Non Biyori, the characterization seems top-notch compared to Yama no Susume. However, as these are just few niggles presented, the remark went to a fine 8. Don’t get me wrong, I like the sound of the number itself, that’s CGDCT-territory for me in fluffy clouds and beautiful mountains.

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