DIZ PROBABLY HAZ SPOILERZ.


This is a very..odd anime, with several overtones of insanity describing, at the root, zetsuai - a desperate love. Oh, and it's yaoi - though there're no explicit scenes at all - the most is some kissing and nakedness covered by strategically-placed sheets. If yaoi (guy/guy relationships) isn't your cuppa, don't read further.

Zetsuai tells the story of a young singer, Nanjo Kohji (with beautiful silvery hair) who finds it hard to feel anything -- until he meets the intense, stagger-inducing gaze of a football player (Izumi) one night, when he was out of it lying in the rubbish dumps in the rain after an emo drinking session. [This happens to be the same gaze he was enamoured of when he had seen the other as a child. (They lived around the same area.)]

He pursues the other, with predictable confusion about having "such feelings for another guy", and Izumi obviously thinks he's weird. This culminates in what should have been the climax of the film, when (in the middle of a thunderstorm) he asks the other to kill him before he does something he regrets.

Then it ends there.

Because I watched Bronze first (hey, alphabetical order), I missed this initial section. In Bronze, they were already lovers, so Kohji must have done something in the end. -resists urge to snicker- But oh woe, Izumi has to go to Italy for a week, and Kohji absolutely cannot stand being away from him for so long, so he rushes to the airport and gets himself in an accident, going into a coma.

When Izumi gets back, he heartlessly says (after a few days) that he cannot pause his life for a living corpse, but Kohji miraculously wakes up, though he's lost his voice "because he thinks his voice is a negative influence to someone". And most of what he says is "I love you" to Izumi...mostly desperately. Eventually, he gets his voice back, makes a final album, and amidst pressure from his brother, it seems as if this love will not survive - that they'll go their separate ways, Kohji to act as master of his family's martial style (his father had died), Izumi to Italy to study.

This anime didn't touch me. It was just too sudden and unexpected, and quite crazy, the way the characters (well, mostly Kohji) acted. While the artwork was much better than I expected, I didn't like the way they (mostly Kohji) bandied "love" around, nor did I like the apparent unconcern Izumi feels for Kohji. There was, however, one part that I liked - while Kohji was speeding towards the airport in his motorcycle, he mentioned loving someone so much the two of them would telepathically hear the voice of each other's hearts. And when he first wakes up from his coma, this is exactly what happens. But when Izumi was told Kohji couldn't speak, and his mouth had only moved the first time, he seemed to refuse to accept the link.

To sum up, I love this review for the following lines, though I don't agree with what it says about bishounen drawing later on.



There's also another ep called Cathexis, that seems to be supposed to be a music video cum photo collage. Mostly pretty boring stuff, mainly because the quality wasn't good enough for me to be able to full-screen and appreciate the artwork.