The high school archery anime Tsurune is one of the most beautiful anime currently airing, and leans heavily on nostalgia for an older idea of Japan.
In a nameless town on the border of urban and rural life, at a nondescript high school like any other, arrows pierce through the idyllic landscape, hitting their targets and echoing out across a grassy field. The martial art of kyudo, Japanese archery, is at the center of Kyoto Animation’s Tsurune. The anime is currently at the end of its second season, Tsurune: The Linking Shot (which you can watch on HIDIVE), and while it may sound like any other sports anime with a bit of coming-of-age drama for spice — a tried-and-true genre of the medium — Tsurune pulls the viewer into a nostalgic dream world that feels vaguely like a memory of a life you may or may not have lived. The beautiful visual language of the show creates a longing to connect, a desire to reach back and relive the warmth of a memory that may or may not be yours. Nostalgia par excellence.
Tsurune is a beautiful show. The team at Kyoto Animation has poured its hearts and souls into making this show look amazing. Whether it’s the high-action shots of arrows in flight or the attention to detail in the background art that brings a local sports center or a high school classroom to life, there is an energy that pulses through Tsurune in both the intense narrative moments and in everyday scenes. Minato Narumiya’s journey back to kyudo after a tragic accident is made all the more powerful because of the care put in by series director Takuya Yamamura and his talented staff.
Telling a sports story in anime can be a relatively straightforward exercise. Your youthful group has a goal, usually to compete in a national competition, and they grow and experience life on their way to that goal. There is often a rival who is better at the sport than the story’s lead characters. Tsurune has all of these elements. Minato and his fellow Kazemai High kyudo club members are aiming for the national title, but in their way stands Shu Fujiwara and the private school kids of Kirisaki High. Yamamura storyboards these cliched elements perfectly, but they’re done in service of a greater philosophy, tying kyudo to something more, heightened by the incredible quality of the animation. Most anime won’t blow the budget on making a train station look photorealistic, but Tsurune does. Art director Shoko Ochiai has been creating gorgeous background art for years with Kyoto Animation, but Tsurune is the first project where she has been at the helm for art direction. Her time spent perfecting her craft on other Kyoto Animation shows like Violet Evergarden and Sound! Euphonium shines through here in Tsurune’s superbly composed scenery.
In the process of becoming a beautiful sports anime, Tsurune also taps into the particular emotional resonance of restorative nostalgia. When we think of nostalgia in a modern (mostly Western) framework, we envision remakes of popular ’80s or ’90s TV shows, or taking the aesthetics from previous eras and remixing them in the present to create something with a retro vibe. This is known as reflexive nostalgia, as it relies on the individual consumer’s feelings toward the nostalgic cultural objects being paraded in front of them.
