Tsuritama – 07

The pace slowed down a bit this week, but there were some interesting moments scattered throughout the episode particularly regarding Haru & Akira.  The animation quality was a bit dodgy this week though, particularly with the faces in a few shots, but the backgrounds were as pretty as ever thankfully.

Haru was acting very oddly this week.  It’s clear that his loss of control in the previous episode has badly shaken him, to the extent that he’s frightened of fishing and going out to sea.  Watching him try to cover up that fear by feigning a fickle, flighty personality was kind of uncomfortable – Akira is right, Haru is a terrible actor.  Of course since Yuki and Natsuki don’t have any memory of Haru’s traumatic experience, he can’t really open up to them and is left sitting apart from the others trying to deal with his issues alone (Coco doesn’t seem to be much help, she’s very much a background observer at present).

Haru does appear the be suffering from emotional trauma – he’s acting heartbroken (I laughed when he tried to heal himself with a band-aid over his heart though) and his reluctance to talk to anyone about it directly, speaks of Haru still holding a lot of information about himself back.

Interestingly it’s Akira that steps up to coax Haru back to sea (even if it is for his own motives) since Akira is the only one that witnessed, and resisted Haru’s possession during the ill-fated tuna fishing expedition.  Akira seems quite conflicted about what he’s meant to be doing at the moment.  On one hand Akira is very dedicated to his mission of observing the aliens and investigating the Bermuda Syndrome, and on the other he can’t seem to stop himself from enjoying the social side of fishing (something Natsuki teases him about this week) and even starts competing with Yuki & Natsuki.

Had to laugh at Akira’s anti-water gun measures this week – he was clearly baking in that raincoat!  I am interested in knowing what Akira & Haru were talking about at the end of the episode though, both looked quite serious before Yuki interrupted with news that Sakura was missing.  Akira wasn’t even wearing his raincoat, indicating that he trusted Haru enough not to do anything to him.

The rest of the episode was taken up with Natsuki chucking a teen temper tantrum and getting caught up in his family issues.  The way Natsuki’s personality see-saws is kind of disorienting, but I know for a fact that I was the same way when I was a teenager – cheerful around my friends / siblings, stroppy & mopey with my parents.  Natsuki clearly doesn’t know what way to act when all of his friends & family are gathered in the same place and ends up being withdrawn & quiet until his father steps on a landmine and he lashes out at everyone around him.

Natsuki clearly cares a lot about his family and he really doesn’t like to see his family unit change.  Natsuki has clearly taken the death of his mother extremely hard, and while the other members of his family are trying to move on with life, Natsuki seems to be stuck in the grieving stage, which throws him into conflict with his dad and sister.

I found it interesting that Yuki backs down when Natsuki snaps that he doesn’t understand the situation – Yuki has lost his parents, his only family is Keito and she’s not in the best health.  Yuki is in a better situation to understand loss than most, but he accepts that he doesn’t understand what it means to have parents & siblings and so can’t entirely understand Natsuki’s mindset.

Next week should be interesting as everyone bands together to search for Sakura and I’m also looking forward to seeing how people react to the huge amount of boats taken over by the Enoshima dance.  Tsuritama continues to fascinate, even when not a whole lot happens in an episode!