Toradora, A Review

From Anime News Network:

Despite Ryuuji Takasu's gentle personality, his eyes make him look like an intimidating delinquent. Class rearrangements on his second high school year put him together with his best friend, Yusaku Kitamura, and his hidden crush, Minori Kushieda. Along with these two comes Kushieda's best friend, Taiga Aisaka. Her delicate appearance contrasts with her brutal personality. Secretly in love with Kitamura, Taiga agrees to help Ryuuji with his love interest as long as he helps her get closer to hers.

Toradora is the sort of anime that wasn't created, but designed, possibly by a robot. It flat-out refuses to bring anything new to the table, and accomplishes little since it doesn't try much anything. It has a number of tangible flaws, but is put together more or less competently. The show's real problems are conceptual.

You've Got to Be Fucking Kidding Me

It shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone that Toradora isn't about two people helping each other get together with their respective crushes – it's Ryuuji's and Taiga's love story .The show's romantic entanglements come in two flavors, humorous and serious. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the comedy is all unfunny and the drama all hilarious, but that does kind of get across the basic idea. The humor is effective at times, when it's not based on slapstick and Taiga acting like a raging douchebag, but it's never memorably funny either. As time goes on, it disappears all but completely, giving space to ever more ridiculous melodrama. Toradora manages to be quite an emotional roller coaster: at various points, I had the occasion to sigh in exasperation, roll my eyes in disbelief and chortle awkwardly. The over-the-top soap opera antics are the only thing in the series that leaves a lasting impression.

The show's other big failing is the fact that it's a character-driven romance with some pretty damn poor characters, so let's talk about them for a bit.

Of All the Main Characters in Anime, Ryuuji Is One of Them

Toradora's protagonist has the same indefinable nice guy/doormat persona that anyone who's watched more than a handful of anime will no doubt be very familiar with. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide how offensive or inoffensive they find terminal blandness. The writers genuinely seemed to think that having a mean-looking face was a personality trait, so that's Ryuuji's only distinguishing characteristic. Frustratingly enough, the gag of people thinking he's a gangster and being scared of him doesn't even reappear after the first episode, making this all pretty much completely irrelevant, aside from some vague juxtaposition with Taiga's tiny and harmless exterior.

“What Do You Mean, I Have to Come Up with a Personality for Her?!”

The series' main attraction is, of course, Taiga – a character so unbelievably generic that I don't even know how to finish this sentence. She is every annoyance of the tsundere archetype rolled into one, with absolutely no attempt at originality. She's violent jerk, but that's alright, because she occasionally acts cute and coy as well. It's the insipid formula behind Taiga that's ultimately responsible for Toradora's complete artistic degeneracy.¹ On the other hand, while it's amazing how little effort went into her personality, I'm sure that her faux-loli character design was carefully crafted to maximize her fetishistic appeal, and she's certainly a success in that regard, no doubt about it. There is nothing else to Taiga. Her unhappy home-life is played so close to the vest that it never even takes off the ground as proper backstory. Her relationship with Ryuuji is hard to root for because of how abusive and generally horrible she acts towards him. Apparently there are people who find this charming, so they might find the character slightly more palatable.

Would it be a spoiler to say that the very final scene of Toradora features Taiga hitting Ryuuji? I mean, talk about fucking progression, right? The show tried to pretend that it had developed Taiga's character over these twenty-five episodes, and yet that's all thrown out the window for another oh-so-adorable punchline. This kind of mass-produced emotional dishonesty isn't sweet, damn it. I feel bad for anyone who was still invested in them at this point.

Et al.

The series could perhaps survive its worthless leads if the supporting cast held up. Unfortunately, it doesn't have that luxury.

Kitamura – being neither an audience identification character nor a female lust object – is largely a non-entity. He's mostly just a complication in the plot, at times stupid and at times contrived. His own subplot is tedious at best, and there are times when he engages in some rather baffling behavior which does absolutely nothing to make anyone care about him one bit. Kushieda is at least somewhat interesting and has something of an inner life, but she's also so freakishly detached from normal behavior that she doesn't seem anything like a believable human being for an instant. She becomes something to put up with, not someone to care about. Her eccentricity falls flat when it comes to comedy more often than not as well. I am, however, thankful that her lesbian crush on Taiga isn't obvious to the point of gratuity.

The only really decent character is Ami, the proverbial fifth wheel in this love quadrangle who's introduced a couple of episodes into the series. There aren't really any glowing adjectives I could throw around here, and being more compelling and likable than the rest of the main cast is no achievement, but her “fake persona” gives her enough layers to be called a three-dimensional character. I found myself rooting for her ahead of Taiga in most respects – though not in the romantic sense, since I certainly didn't give a damn about the romance and who Ryuuji would end up with was never in doubt anyway. That said, it's clear that Ami is in the series largely for the easy pathos of her pining after a guy whose love interest she isn't.

The secondary characters are not worth discussing.

Minutiae

Toradora's production values are fairly high. The animation is polished enough that several moments of physical action come across as quite kinetic. The opening and ending songs are pretty decent, while the soundtrack is on the side of above average. I remember little of the voice-work, and therefore have no complaints.

Show, Don't Tell

Toradora's defining moment happens in episode 9. After an extremely awkward conversation with the girl he has a crush on, Minori, Ryuuji spends some time with his true love Taiga. Not only are they talking freely and comfortably, they're also physically intimate; she's practically on top of him. “Wow, that's a neat way of contrasting their respective relationships!” I thought, “It subtly gets across that there's something of a meaningful bond between them!” It was a scene that showed promise. I was genuinely impressed for the first time since starting the series. The very next instant, all my hopes were spectacularly dashed when Taiga pointed out the comparison herself, in case the viewer missed it. Toradora actually went ahead and explained itself, and there's simply no excuse for that. It's not just that the show broke the most basic rule of good writing or that it undermined itself so jarringly – it also showed blatant contempt for its target audience. It did not hold me to be able to figure something this simple out on my own. Toradora's writers thought I was an idiot. And that's what defines the series in my mind.

What Is This I Don't Even

At one point, Ami delivers a zinger to Taiga by telling her that talking to her is worse than having a period. I can't tell whether that's really clever or really stupid.

Tl;dr

It's not very good.

^1. For the record, the formula is: Tsundere + Pettanko + Zettai Ryouiki = ¥ ¥ ¥.