It really annoys me that I didn’t peg the Ikuhara Kunihiko connection with Sayonara Lara immediately (or almost). Because boy, by the end here I just kept thinking “Man, this this is more Ikuni than Ikuni”. That has positives and negatives for me, as anyone who’s read my criticism of his shows could tell you. But there’s no denying the man is a genius in his extremely idiosyncratic way. And given how safe and creatively unambitious most anime is these days (including original anime) even his negatives kind of feel like positives at times.

The thing with Ikuhara is, the not making sense is sort of endemic to the proposition. It’s just part of the fabric of what he does, and I think that’s something Sayonara Lara embraces enthusiastically. What was with all the Christian imagery? Who knows. What’s the real story on the ancestral connection between merfolk and humans? Again, who knows. I often think Ikuhara himself is unsure of what all his weird thoughts add up to, and just throws them all in for the audience to decipher in their own way. His protege Furukawa Tokohiro embraced that at times, and his protege – and Lara director Koide Takushi – does so here.

Mawaru Penguin Drum was the show that kept cropping into my mind I was watching the third act, but Shoujo Kakumei Utena is certainly the more obvious parallel. I was convinced we were headed for a MPD-style tragic end here, but I’m quite glad to have been wrong (and totally surprised). Mind you this was no fairy tale happy ending here, more bittersweet and somewhat somber, but not explicitly tragic. From what I’ve seen the consensus reaction among viewers has been negative, but that doesn’t surprise me and I don’t think it means a whole lot.

As I’ve repeated ad nauseam, I would have been disappointed if the whole true love thing had wound up being nothing more than physical attraction. Mari, Luca, whatever – that would have cheapened the higher aspirations the series seemed to have. Of course, a sizable chunk of the audience took the reductive view that the series was yuri and nothing else matters, because yuri is justice and dammit, give us what we want. That’s a shame, but entirely unsurprising. But again surprisingly, not only was the end not expressly tragic but it did indeed transcend that simplistic interpretation. Though just how is a matter of interpretation.

I also noted last week that “The truth is the anime can’t give us an ending that’s materially consistent with both Andersen’s story and the foreshadowing in this episode, as they’re kind of mutually exclusive”. The irony here is that the anime did in fact reject Andersen’s ending materially and spiritually (though the extent of the latter can be debated), but still set itself up for the same criticism. Andersen’s ending has been almost universally derided over the years as being milquetoast, wishy-washy. It seems likely it wasn’t his original ending. And it’s not hard to see Koide’s ending as trying to have its cake and eat it too.

The other element of this is that the original ending is expressly rooted in Christian theology, and Andersen was a devout Christian. I debated whether going deeper would be a “spoiler”, but even if thad ending is 189 years old I’ll default to caution and leave that as it lies. I don’t see any overtly Christian elements in the ending here unless you count a magic fish-dagger biting a cross in half. But what does that even mean? What does any of the symbolism mean? I’m reminded of an interview I did with The Red Turtle director Michaël Dudok de Wit in which he said Suzuki Toshio and Takahata Isao (his film was co-produced with Ghibli) referred to any Western movie as “Christian” – the two terms were synonymous to them. Perhaps the iconography and such is just here as a bridge to Andersen and holds no deeper meaning for Koide.

This whole question of what true love and “the light” are is obviously central to Sayonara Lara. Interestingly, Lara says “I never found true love” during the denouement, and that suggests that – as I rather hoped – the position here is that love takes infinite forms, and resists reductivism. Including romance. For me, Lara’s love ultimately is life itself (which is rather anathema to Christian orthodoxy in a sense). She loves Mari more than anyone, but to reduce that to lust is to disrespect it. She loves Luca too, maybe romantically and maybe not – the way she puts him through the wringer suggests she’s not sure herself. But most relevantly, she loves humans and she loves the world and she loves the experience of being alive. That’s a message I can get behind.

In practical terms, it seems in choosing life – with humans – Lara was able to transform even after her father broke the potion’s spell. Perhaps not perfectly – there are suggestions her human form is slightly warped – but it seems clear that she can never go back. And despite her dagger seemingly killing Mari and then Mari coming back, she still has the power to keep her family alive if not to restore them. And Lisa and Kouta (if you pay close attention he’s definitely alive) too, and in human form as well. Six months pass, along with an unknown number of fits and starts with Luca, and Lara finally decides to move out and be on her own.

Why did she do that? It may be implying a link to the Andersen ending (IYKYK), and indeed there is something sort of ominous in her farewell scene with Mari at Seta Station (let me add for the record, that was the first time I’ve heard the JR West station jingle in anime and that was very cool). That requires a pretty big leap to get to, though. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of continuing the journey of learning how to be human – which is perfectly normal for a teenage girl, after all. Learning how to love and indeed what love means is a big part of that journey too. But ultimately I think this is an ending one can read as either hopeful or fatalistic, depending on what one brings to it.

In looking back on the history of Patron Pick shows at LiA, it may very well be that Sayonara Lara is the best one so far. It’s right up there for sure – for all that it was a bit scattered and needed to be longer to really flesh out its thoughts, this was a genuinely fascinating piece of work. It looked great, as you’d expect from Kinema Citrus. And that so much of it took place in my backyard, Shiga – where Koide-sensei grew up – added a strong personal connection for me. This was a throwback not just to Ikuhara, but to what original anime series were in the days when he was creating them. And if I may be so bold, what they really still should be.