Toradora 11 -rewatch-
Back to school, culture festival, zzz.
Ami's true self showing through again
In an earlier episode Ami mentions that Taiga can be cute when she's jealous; here Ami is slipping through instead. Ryuuji tries to bring up Minori's UFO metaphor to her, just to start a conversation, but she totally blows him off again before it can even get anywhere. Then we move into the meat of the episode...
Ryuuji and Taiga are linked by their father issues, but with Taiga's dad actually trying to get in contact with her, her problems takes center stage for this arc. Ryuuji talks a bunch of live-and-let-live he's-your-only-father stuff which stems partially from him not knowing, as usual, what will tick Taiga off more than usual and I think partially from the fact that he never knew his own father. Taiga maintains the rage.
Again, Ami takes a role in kickstarting the emotional heart of this arc's plot by nominating Taiga as the class's pageant entry. At this point it's actually hard to tell if it's out of malice, it's Ami's twisted way of instilling self-confidence in Taiga, or (more likely) both at once.
Back to the father plot...
The first unambigulously and direct adult problem in the series rears its head
Whereas everything that comes before is pretty much teen drama to the max, Taiga's dad cutting off her living allowance (
actively stealing from her account) is an incredibly dark move (illegal in my local jurisdiction actually; not sure about Japan). Ryuuji can't see what the big deal is yet, so Taiga foists the task of negotiation onto him. Good smash-cut which skips a bunch of expository dialogue into a line.
What a seedy piece of work
Although Ryuuji remembers it differently.
Ryuuji returns to find Taiga washing up, but in a combative mood nonetheless. Importantly you never see her eyes in this scene; just the back of her head or she's totally off-camera, even as she argues with Ryuuji, right up until:
She leaves the water running and leaves silently. The LN and manga have some stuff in there about Ryuuji thinking about how selfish she's being, but I think it's more powerful in the anime not to dwell on it just yet. Nonetheless, this scene is really striking, I think - it's her unbridled frustration that Ryuuji is being reasonable, trying to see both sides of the story and indeed giving her dad even the time of day. Why? He should be 100% on her side, right? Logically unreasonable, but it's exactly what I'd argue Taiga
should be feeling at this stage of their relationship.
We jump back to the culture festival which has two really good gags:
Minorin's appearance for the rest of the arc, and
Taiga 'practicing' wrestling moves with Ami
Back to the serious stuff...
Shade, light, his smallness... lots of stuff here.
Not that Taiga gives a shit, of course. Notice Ryuuji's empathetic hand position.
Taiga's dad gets about a 3 second profile shot walking towards Taiga and Ryuuji before getting kicked in the gonads.
The next scene is insanely powerful. A couple of things straight up:
- Taiga explicitly says she expected Ryuuji to be 'the one person on her side', but on seeing what Ryuuji's trying to argue, asks "What do you know about me?"
- Taiga attempts to reclaim her decision to move out, something she earlier said she regrets, and reframe it as her rejecting her father
- Ryuuji realises that he's pushing his own father issues onto Taiga and immediately tries to apologise
This moment I've not experienced myself, I hope
The scene also gets a lot more 'drama physical' than Taiga/Ryuuji scenes usually get, with Ryuuji basically slamming her against the door to lecture her. Some really amazing voicework here.
Again, as soon as Taiga accepts Ryuuji's realisation, her face is cut out of all the shots henceforth until later. We see her hands playing with Ryuuji's face and the back of her head as she steps, zombie-like, towards her dad.
Come to think of it, you don't see a lot of shots of his face and when you do he's exceedingly bland in appearance
Ryuuji's narration attempts to convince himself that this is a good result, but can't quite manage it.
That's enough for today, methinks; I'm all analysed out.
