It’s being overshadowed a bit by Ousama Ranking flashing across the fall season like a late-arriving comet, but Blue Period continues to deliver the goods week after week.  And while it’s easy to pass off its success as the anime riding on the coattails of the source material’s epic quality, I’ve come to respect what the anime is doing quite a bit.  It doesn’t have the panache of Ousama Ranking and the source material is great, but the anime is doing a very fine job letting us inside the feelings of these characters through their facial expressions.  And the cast is putting in some excellent work as well.

If there was a theme here, I would say it comes down to “the grass is always greener”.  I guess it’s no different in the art student world than anywhere else – when struggling, people always think everybody else has it better than them.  Yatora keeps throwing around the “genius” label like he’s paying people compliments, but in fact it’s just the opposite.  I get that he works his butt off, and kudos to him.  I even think it’s great that he’s proud of that – he should be.  But the implication with the genius label is that those people aren’t working as hard as he has to.  And as he’s coming to see, that’s clearly not the case.

Of course Ya-kun isn’t the only one guilty of this – pretty much all the kids are doing it to some extent.  That certainly applies to Yotasuke, who’s must have been told self-pity was an Olympic sport.  I like Yotasuke a lot actually (I see something of my teenage self in him, truth be told – minus the talent in art) but he can be a lot to deal with.  The phone call cliffhanger was basically an attempt to placate his mother by proffering an invitation he assumed would be rejected – but he couldn’t even get that far on the first call.  It was only on the second that he managed to invite Yaguchi to meet – on New Year’s Eve.

If the “genius” thing is an irritating unintended insult, Yo-kun’s insistence that Yatora has everything is a quite deliberate one.  He may have had a world outside art and a few friends, but Yatora has more than his share of baggage, not least his family situation.  Not only that, he’s working as hard or harder than anybody – he’s proved his commitment.  I get that this is displacement – Yotasuke is projecting his frustration with himself outward, as all the major players this week are doing.  But I also think he genuinely does want to get closer to Yatora, mainly because it’s very clear he’s lonely (being a loner doesn’t mean you don’t get lonely – something people who aren’t loners often don’t understand).

Kuwana-san, of course, is another great example of this.  The cross she bears is the success of her artistic savant family – especially her older sister, she of the perfect marks on the Geidai entrance exam the first time.  Yatora loves applying the genius tag to no one more than Kuwana, and it’s undeniable that she’s gifted.  But she’s also operating under tremendous pressure (not least from herself), and driven by an intense fear of failure.  And as we saw this week, the pressure on kids at times like this can have serious physical effects.  It’s another phenomenon not at all limited to the art world.

That pressure means that 4-hour days at the cram school have turned into 12(!) hour days – though that doesn’t stop Yatora from requesting additional assignments over the winter break.  That puts Ooba-sensei clearly in her element, trying to keep these frazzled and exhausted children operational until the entrance exams.  For Yatora, she recommends he not fixate on color and instead experiment with tools and shapes, reminding him that any great work of art should look good either in color or black and white.  In fact Ooba-sensei declares that the students aren’t even going to work on oil painting until the 10-day interval between the two parts of the entrance exam.

The frustration these kids are feeling is really palpable.  As Yatora notes, there are no “right answers” in this field – you can’t just cram until you have it all memorized.  When the moment comes it’s either going to be there for you or it isn’t, and no amount of preparation and practice can remove that uncertainty from the equation.  It’s that tension, for better or for worse, that drives a lot of artistic expression, especially in the young.   As presented in Blue Period, I see artistic growth as a sequence of removing restraints – the obstacles we place in our own path which limit our ability to express ourselves creatively.  And if you’ve ever been there, you know that’s not a quick and easy task.