Aria(2005-2008)
3 Seasons

Review of Aria

Aria

Anime(2005-2008) TV 3 Seasons

     D: Junichi Sato

     W: Junichi Sato

     M: Choro Club

      Takeshi Senoo

ANN      7.834-8.428

MAL      7.73-8.5

IMDB     7.2

Characters:

MC - ARIA COMPANY

President Aria Pokoteng (アリア·ポコテン Aria Pokoten)

Akino Ametsuchi (天地 秋乃 Ametsuchi Akino) , nicknamed "Grandma" (グランマ Guranma)

     Founder of Aria Company

Anna (アンナ Anna)

Alicia Florence (アリシア·フローレンス Arishia Furōrensu)

Akari Mizunashi (水無 灯里 Mizunashi Akari)

Ai (アイ Ai)

PAIRINGS

(Akino X Anna)

(Akino X Alicia)

(Alicia X Akari)

(Akari X Ai)

MC - HIMEYA COMPANY

President Hime M. Granzchesta (ヒメ·M·グランチェスタ Hime M. Guranchesuta)

Akira E. Ferrari (晃·E·フェラーリ Akira E. Ferāri)

Aika S. Granzchesta (藍華·S·グランチェスタ Aika S. Guranchesuta)

PAIRINGS

(Akira X Aika)

MC - ORANGE PLANET COMPANY

President Maa (まぁ)

Athena Glory (アテナ·グローリィ Atena Gurōryi)

Alice Carroll (アリス·キャロル Arisu Kyaroru)

PAIRINGS

(Athena X Alice)

ANTAGONISTS

-NONE-

BELIEF

The Anime  “Aria” itself personifies Belief in the character of Akari.

Many people become emotional during a movie. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is coming down the street

and there is the emotion of fear. When children are afraid during a monster movie, do mothers still say,

“It’s only a movie!”?  That may be so but tell that to your personal feels. Why does one laugh and cry at a movie. After all mother is right, IT IS only a movie, complete fiction, and totally imaginary!

Yet human beings feel a work of art, and express those feels in an emotional response all the while with full understanding that what they are experiencing is total fiction, a product of pure imagination.

Stories are entirely imaginary. There is nothing real about a story, yet our hearts believe in the characters and their motives, and we bleed with them when they are hurt. Curious how the imaginary can have real pragmatic effects.

Our hearts believe where our heads do not. That is why we have always found the critic who says that a story violates physical reality to be like, “Dude, why are you wasting your money on a piece of art which you will not enjoy?” You experience a piece of story art or any art for that matter with your heart so why do you allow your head to butt into a wonderful, emotional experience? Leave your head at the door when you enter the theater, and let the artists have they way with you totally. Then if you do not

have a wonderful emotional experience, you can call that work of art “bad” not because it violates physicality  but because it did not move your feels. It is no criticism of a space opera because the ships move faster than light speed, “Well, that’s impossible, so I will not enjoy this story.” type of head reaction. That’s just silly in our minds, and a waste of good money for the tickets.

The unreal, the imaginary, possesses a reality all their own.

As Death says in the Hogfather, “If you do not believe in imaginary things, how are they to become?”

The belief in the imaginary is the ability to transcend physicality, and this allows the unreal to effect change in the real. We do not build anything until we imagine what that thing will become.

The belief in the imaginary as Becoming allows the real as Being. The imaginary becomes the real.

This leads belief to time where we take Being, and put it into motion. Traditionally Being is a fixed, timeless, unchanging thing, like in most religions, a Faith which leads then to fixed dogmas and doctrines which themselves are unchanging. But as  ("No man ever steps in the same river twice") Heraclitus maintained, change is a fundamental fact of reality.

Without the fundamental belief in change, you are locked into the chain of causation, and everything about your life is fixed and immutable. There is “no free will”  type of thing. You have no real choice

But imaginary things have a way of moving the feels which can then move the will into a changed state of behavior, as Death says, if you cannot imagine something which does not exist, how will you then make that something become.

This is why you react to an imaginary story in the movies or novels. Your heart knows what your head does not, it is necessary to believe in imaginary things in order to break the chain of causation.

Art is certainly created in the real world so its causation is the result of a real individual effort. But where does the art reside? Where does it exist?

Consider Michelangelo’s sculpture in David.

The reality of David is that it is a block of marble with considerable chipping having been performed.

And, if so, where is the Art of David? Where does the statue exist?  Michelangelo's chipping has resulted in a physical object which suggests a human being. But that suggestion comes from the structure or form which has been imposed upon the physical marble.  But considered as such, the structure or form is not real. That same form could be and has been imposed on many different physical objects. The Art of David is imaginary in the very same way that all fictional stories are imaginary.

Beethoven’s 9th Sympathy exists in thousands, maybe millions, of different versions with every copy being a physical instantiation of an abstract, idealized imagination. Which one of the versions is the real work of art? Well, its all of them. Where do stories exist? Books? But that is just ink marks on paper bound together into something called a book.

One way of looking at this dichotomy, is to steal an idea from the mathemagicians.  When they encountered something so impossible such as the square root of -1, this hardly phased them, being the creative people that they are, they just invented a different number scale. Now the x axis is for the real numbers and the y axis is for the imaginary numbers such as I.

Shamelessly stealing their idea, we then include the following diagram ignoring all negative values:

 

On the X axis, we place all real things which obey fundamental physical laws, and on the Y axis we place all imaginary things. A movie is created on the X axis, but the creation, the movie itself, is on the Y axis.

The block of marble is on the X axis, but the statue of David is on the Y axis.

As another example, lets consider a movie, and in particular, the movie Tootsie(1982) [Warning: Spoilers follow].

This movie was made by many human beings. Its production was mechanical. Business decisions were made as to how it would be released. The movie grossed a certain real figure in dollars. It was seen by many real people.

All of these factors in making the movie are on the X axis above. They are real and can be legitimately debated as to truth value. While we may debate what the number is, we all know that there was a single discrete dollar figure that was the total gross. Likewise you can make many statements as to its construction. “Dustin Hoffman was the real actor playing Michael Dorsey in the movie” is a true statement. “Leonardo DiCaprio was the real actor playing Michael Dorsey in the movie” is a false statement.

But many other elements of the movie are on the Y, Imaginary Axis. Tootsie(1982) is a work of fiction. The story and all the characters in the story are fictional, imaginary, they do not exist, and you will find the standard boiler plate, any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

Tootsie(1982)

 Dustin Hoffman   (a real male actor)  plays

  Michael Dorsey  (an imaginary male actor, a character in the story) who plays

   Dorothy Michaels (an imaginary female actor, a character in the story being     played by Michael Dorsey) who then plays

    Emily Kimberly (an imaginary female character being played by Dorothy     Michaels who works as a hospital administrator in the soap opera,      “Southwest General”)

If you can wrap your head around all that, you are doing better than this author. This is a tour de force of acting where Mr. Hoffman plays three different characters each playing the next with a gender change even and its hard to understand that while nominated, Mr. Hoffman did not win the best actor award that year.

But the point is that Dustin Hoffman is a real human being who is an actor. That individual exists in real space on the X axis. But Michael Dorsey, Dorothy Michaels, and Emily Kimberly are characters in a story which is in the Movie Tootsie(1982), and as a work of imagination, those characters exist on the Y axis. They are imaginary.

In the x,y chart above, please note the point indicated by (2,3). It is at this point that the x and y axises intersect with each other. Your feels during a movie are within your body which is on the x axis, but those feels are being generated by an imaginary event or character on the y axis. If 2 represents you and   3 represents the exact event or character in the imaginary story, then the point (2,3) is where they come together. Think about this a totally fictional, imaginary event moves your feels, and perhaps inspires you to change in some way. You then go out into your life, and actually effect some sort of change because you have been inspired by an imaginary thing. This is breaking the chain of cause and effect, and allows an imaginary ideal such as justice or mercy or truth or goodness, to become real as Death says. You first must believe in a wonderful world, how else will a wonderful world become?

You may wear your sackcloth and ashes in extreme cynicism about such Pollyanna views, but the truth remains. You have been inspired by a wonderful thing, to become a wonderful person.

In the anime Aria, S1-EP5, we have a wonderful conversation between Alicia (blond), Akari (pink), and AI who is off screen. Akari is telling this story to AI in an email from Mars (Aqua) to Earth (Manhome)  which lays out what this story is all about which is belief in wondrous things.  

In this conversation Alicia makes this comment about Akari

 

The full conversation goes somewhat like this:

 

In this scene, Akari has a profound emotional response when the Imaginary makes sudden contact with her Real person. This moment is the (2,3) point. And of course all of this is imaginary to us so what the artists seem to have intended is that this same feeling in Akari is reproduced in you the audience. If you are in sync with the story, you will indeed feel what Akari is feeling, and your heart will be moved.

No guarantees that any work of art will move you in proscribed ways, but the artists do want to have their way with you, and if you are open, and non-judgmental, hopefully you will feel Belief as it moves your feel.

The (2,3) point is the point of the Aria anime. Throughout the story during its three seasons, and two OVAs, Akari whose love for Aqua is unbounded and unqualified, experiences the Belief which is her love for Aqua.

This is symbolized in Akari’s encounters with Cait Sith, the giant cat-king who in some ways represents the protective deity of Aqua. The real of Akari touches the imaginary of Aria, and then that touch will touch you. Provided you have left your head to commiserate with someone somewhere else.

If you try to make this all work rationally, it will of course completely fall apart, because the process by which your feels are moved is not rational, or real in any way. You have to allow the Imaginary to make itself Real in your heart, and then you carry the ball from there.

This is the (2,3) point on the graph. Aria will hit that mark if you allow it to do so.

Aria is the most profound dissertation on the reality of Belief and how one goes about breaking the chains which bind us. Aria has the power as a work of art to set your mind and heart free.

Aria is a masterpiece and more than Highly Recommended. Aria is food for the soul.

Aria is outstanding
if our confused statement above
causes confusion, especially about
the (2,3) point in Aria
then consider the points in this link

But still One emotional powerhouse
that will not spare your feels one bit!
Highly Recommended

Folcwine P. Pywackett