Anime doesn’t often use trigger warnings but when it does, it means it.
It all starts when a cheerful but hungry little octopus like alien from the planet Happy befriends a girl who is kind enough to feed him her leftover bread from school lunch. He wants to return the favour by using one of his Happy Gadgets to allow her to fly, but she refuses, saying she has to go buy a writing board to put under her papers and besides, flying won’t change anything. While the alien, who she calls Takopi doesn’t notice, as a viewer you do immediately see something is wrong with Shizuka. Her red backpack is battered and looks like somebody has kicked it, while she herself seems flat and lifeless.
The next few days sees her visiting Takopi to feed him her leftovers, as he tries but fails to interest her in his Happy Gadgets as a way to pay her back. One of which is a Happy Camera, which he uses to take picture of the two of them, but doesn’t get to explain why it’s more special than just using your mobile to take picture before Shizuka leaves again. All Takopi is thinking about is how to use his gadgets to make her happy, while as a viewer you get more and more hints of what’s going on with her. A group of her fourth grade classmates walk past and talk about breaking her writing board and how she can just buy a new one from her ‘welfare money’ as her backpack looks rougher and rougher and it’s clear she’s being bullied. Takopi doesn’t notice, coming from a planet where this sort of thing just doesn’t exist; he’s just worried about making her smile.
And then he does see her smile, when she has to leave early to go home to feed her dog, Chappy and invites him to come along. The moment Chappy sees her he’s all over her, licking her face, with Shizuka laughing and smiling. Later on, she tells Takopi how much she loves that dog, having know him from when he was a small puppy. She tells him she can take anything else that happens to her, as long as she has Chappy. Taking the dog for a walk, Takopi tries to get her to try his gadgets again and promises to give her the biggest smile ever amnd she gives him a little kiss. It’s a very touching, happy scene but you can’t help but worry.
And indeed when Shizuka shows up the next day, she’s bruised, bleeding and battered and holding Chappy’s collar in her hand. When she explains she had a fight with a friend, Takopi brings out another gadget, the reconciliation ribbon, which can stretch to infinity. Shizuka asks if she can borrow it and Takopi reluctantly lets her, knowing it’s against his planet’s rules. As he watches her go he tries and convinces himself that it’s alright, but he can’t help but worry. As the evening falls he hurries to Shizuka’s house. And what you’ve been worrying about ever since shizuka mentioned how much she loves Chappy becomes true: Shizuka has committed suicide. The episode is not even halfway done.
The slow dread building up in that first half was bad enough, but seeing this cheerful, naive little alien discover the suicide scene, not understanding what had happened, was so much worse. I felt so sorry for him slowly starting to realise what had happened, what he had allowed to happen in his naivety. One of the most upsetting scenes I’ve ever watched in anime. But the show wasn’t done yet.
Fortunately it turned out that the picture he took with his Happy Camera allowed him to travel back in time back to the moment he took it, so he could prevent Shizuka from dying by figuring out why she was sad enough to do so. The second half of the episode has him going to school with Shizuka as he, still naive, tries to deduce what made her sad while you first hand how she is being bullied, all of which Takopi misses or misunderstands, but still manages to mitigate, increasingly frustrating her chief bully, a girl called Marina. Finally Marina calls out Shizuka to show up behind the school. With Shizuka clearly terrified to do so, Takopi transforms into her and goes in her place. He’s convinced if he can just talk to Marina he can sort everything out and the two will be friends again, still not understanding what exactly Marina is doing to Shizuka.
That quickly changes. Marina wastes little time in hitting and abusing Takopi as Shizuka. It’s even more harrowing a scene as that of him discovering Shizuka’s suicide. Seeing this little alien experiencing genuine fear for the first time is heartbreaking. Seeing him finally realise what Shizuka is going through is too. The final gut punch is that Marina too is heavily implied to be abused, by her mother and that this plays into her own bullying of Shizuka as well as her reason for doing so.
An incredibly bleak, hard to swallow episode and the series as a whole doesn’t promise to improve its mood quickly, if the reactions over on R/Anime are to be believed. And all this while it stars something that’s more at home as a mascot character in a Precure series. It’s Takopi and his relentless cheerfulness that makes this bearable, that we see things through his eyes. But which of course also makes it that much worse when he is forced to confront the ugliness at the heart of this story. The animation and acting has to be excellent to make this work and they are. None of the abuse or suicide scenes come across as gratuitous, sensationalist or heavy handed. A season that promises to be full of excellent anime is off to a great, if harrowing start.
