Bakemonogatari 1-13
Surprise!!! I’m a snob. Being that I am not a great fan of the supernatural or gratuitous groping/pantsu or girl-of-the-week shows or “stuff that everybody else really likes” in general I made the completely uninformed decision early into its broadcast run that Bakemonogatari wouldn’t be my thing. But my interest was piqued when I heard whispers about romance in episode 12, and clinched when Senjougahara and Bakemonogatari started showing up on the best-of-2009 lists of all of my most respected blogger crushes.
So I decided to get into Bakemonogatari via my preferred manner of viewing, ie. marathoning all available episodes after the broadcast run. What I found wasn’t what I expected. It was a pleasantly unique surprise.
Lots has already been written about how fascinating Senjougahara is as a character, and I’d add Hanekawa to that list as well since I really enjoyed trying to puzzle out her motivations. But unique as they are, I don’t think it was the characters that ultimately sold me on Bakemonogatari.
Bakemonogatari is a very textual show. This likely derives from its novelistic origins, and the show benefits from excellent dialogue and plot/character development complexities that are common to a lot of light novel adaptations. But Bakemonogatari’s textuality goes beyond this. From the various cut still-frames, kanji overlays and visual representations of the actual novel text to the sheer referentiality of the language which is filled with wordplay, puns and various linguistic tricks, Bakemonogatari’s written and spoken sensory barrage of TEXT serves as a constant reminder that we are operating in a literary modality. What makes this extra interesting, however, is the way text is problematized along with everything else in the strange world of Bakemonogatari.
On-screen text and long literary monologues are often used to establish credibility or reveal truth - think omniscent narrators, Greek choruses, hell, even date/place text overlays in CSI or whatever. In Bakemonogatari, much of what we see is unreliable. This is partly a commentary on the nature of oddities, which are not often what they seem, and part of the avant-garde and absurd humour of the show, where characters and scenes get redrawn in different tragicomic styles (one of my absolute favourite scenes was the one when Kanbaru and Koyomi clean a room by frolicking through a pile of books). In this sort of random visual environment it might seem natural to depend on the text to reveal the the true nature of what’s going on. But the text in Bakemonogatari is problematized in various ways too, by repetition, cliche and puns, the “missing cuts” and intentionally illegible lightning speed frames of text. It becomes a second unreliable narrator of sorts, sometimes outright contradicting what we see onscreen, and heightening the absurdity which I think is key to the show.
This overwhelming and confusion of the senses against a stark, geometric aesthetic backdrop is really compelling. It’s also very surreal and absurdist. I definitely think the show verges on brilliant, though I’m surprised it found such a broad fanbase and was so universally hyped given that some of the scenes (I’m thinking of many set in the park especially) were pulled right out of the Theatre of the Absurd. Repetitive, nonsensical brilliance combined with cute girls - I guess that’s what those French playwrights were missing!
Looking forward to the conclusion of the Tsubasa Cat arc, whenever that shit drops. I’m glad I took the plunge into this one after all.
