"Bungaku Shoujo" Movie

When the teaser preview special for Bungaku Shoujo was released earlier this year I was a bit tepid in my enthusiasm for this project. It looked quite lovely and it featured several of my favorite seiyuu talents, so I made a point to give this a try when it finally became available. As someone without any knowledge of the original light novels, I found this film to be mostly directionless and confusing and in the end only a very average experience.

Bungaku Shoujo or Literature Girl is about a young girl, Touka Amano who eats books. Yes she literally eats books. She ... can’t eat normal food apparently. Of course it would have been really nice of the story to actually tell us WHY she eats books but unfortunately we have to divine that answer for ourselves. Perhaps I could have slit open a goat’s stomach or read the source materials in order to get the answer to that but honestly why should I have to? That’s the movie's job to provide me with those necessary answers. The only answer we are given is she’s a literature girl, as if that explains everything. And thus that is the main problem with the entire movie in general, it’s called Literature Girl but it’s really not even about her. Touka is basically a side character in her own movie.

Well the real story eventually reveals itself to be about a young writer, Konoha Inoue who after winning an important literary contest a couple years before and subsequently his novel became a national sensation. But do to a personal tragedy that followed this, he has vowed to never write again. Konoha lives as an ordinary high school student since his book was published under a pseudonym and he has remained anonymous. Rather far-fetched idea really as he has seemingly managed to keep this a secret from his family as well. Of course this completely ignores the fact that it is also incredibly unlikely that a middle school student is going to have the ability to write such a novel to begin with. But I digress.

The drama that unfolds does manage to be pretty compelling however. I did find myself engaged and interested in the story. While the major story arc is adequately resolved to many additional questions linger at the end. As mentioned before we learn really next to nothing about Touka herself. The only reason I think I understood it as much as I did was by additionally watching the preview OVA and the Memorie OVA. I would suggest anyone interested in this title to do the same to get the maximum amount of enjoyment from it. I am unclear as to whether this movie will get a follow up movie or perhaps even a TV/OVA series to further explain all of this but taking this film by itself as it currently stands, I would have to say as an adaptation it fails.

As mentioned the titular character, Touka is really left to be mostly a mystery. Personality wise I found her to be a likable character which a lot of potential if they had explored it. She felt like an odd mix-mash of Haruhi Suzumiya and Yuki Nagato. But other than being likable she really doesn’t make that much of an impression. The male lead Inoue is typical for the genre. A soft spoken, effeminate nice guy. Though I did feel he was presented very well and made for an interesting character. The struggles he has in dealing with his own personal demons I think were mostly realistic and understandable. With one exception, the rest of the supporting cast is mostly just background. The only ones who really even stood out to me at all were the ones voiced by actors I happen to like.

Above all the characters would be Miu Asakura, who is at the center of all of the stories drama. She is both the films chief antagonist and protagonist, particularly over the last half of the movie. Miu by far has the biggest impact on the film and really steals the show for herself. When you consider she’s voiced by Aya Hirano, I suppose it’s not surprising she would have the most impactful role. While Miu makes for an extremely convincing psychopath, some of the reasons behind her mental break didn’t exactly add up to what she eventually became. This being said, she is the brightest spot in the show character wise.

The acting is clearly the best part of Bungaku Shoujo. I thought Aya Hirano was exceptional as the psychotic Miu and I think it might be the best pure acting performance of her career. Many other well known seiyuu stars such as Nana Mizuki and Aki Toyasaki appear but unfortunately their characters are mostly unimportant to the film. Musically this film is just average. Neither the films background music nor ED song was really that moving, despite the latter being performed by eufonius.

Artistically the film is good. The backgrounds are quite stunning and color palette is soft and pleasant. The one thing that did strike me was just how similar so many of the characters looked however. It’s almost like most of them had exactly the same face, just with different hair and eye colors. While it’s not hard to distinguish them from each other at all I just found it a bit unsettling to look at.

Overall this movie only rates as average with me. Sure I did actually enjoy the movie quite a bit despite all its warts. However the large number of important questions about the overall story and title character really detracts from it as a whole. Until such time more of this information is presented to us in future works, then I suspect only fans of the original works would really get much out of this film.

A good piece of literature can be food for the soul. Or so they say.

For one particular schoolgirl, this has a whole new meaning to it. Amano Touko, a self-proclaimed “Literature Girl”, loves her stories. Not just reading them, she also eats them. This is not done on a whim as Touko practically depends on literary pieces as her main source of sustenance.

What a novel idea! Or so I thought.

Well, this newly discovered diet has little to do with the real story here. There’s also no explanation given as to why eating books are sufficient nourishment for the body. But that doesn’t matter anyway. ... Enough procrastination and let’s get on with the real story.

Inoue Konoha is just another normal schoolboy. However, little do people know, he actually used to be a popular romance author. Konoha even won a competition when he was 14, but that was also when the tragedy began. His childhood sweetheart, Asakura Miu, was also an aspiring writer. After discovering that Konoha had dashed her hopes of becoming a professional writer in the same competition, she attempted suicide. Bungaku Shoujo is about how this pair of lovers overcome the rift between them and get back on the same track in their lives.

Even though I’m not a romanticist, I find it a simple, yet beautifully crafted story. The conflict to the resolution was well panned out. It stirs your curiosity by leading you bit by bit to the truth behind the two lovers. The manner in which their fates are tied to a novel is simply poetic. However, the promise of a wonderful story was totally let down by poor characters. The side characters hold practically no importance to the story, and the relationship among the all the characters was underdeveloped. This made the struggles of the main characters, especially Konoha, seemed superficial. Miu is also a very annoying and unlikable character. You simply do not care about them.

The animation and soundtrack are very well done, as one would expect from Production I.G. The background music provides a very good ambience, which is necessary for a romance story. Overall, this has very good production values.

If you can look past the disappointment that the story-eating “Literature Girl” is nothing more than a convenient plot device, this is actually a nice story to be savored. With better execution and handling of the characters, it could have become a memorable piece of work.

Bungaku Shoujo (Book Girl) is a rather meandering tale about no particular character in general. Reading the synopsis on MAL here gives one the impression that this anime is about mystery, drama and intense emotions. Sadly, the story is anything but.

The Book Girl franchise consists of (for now) a movie, and a quartet of OVAs. The first OVA, Bungaku Shoujo: Kyou no Oyatsu - Hatsukoi was released in 2009 and was followed by the trio named Bungaku Shoujo: Memoire a year later. These OVAs pretty much serve as a run-up to the movie which came out right after the OVAs in 2010. The OVAs explore ... and set up the story for the main movie.

With a running time of one hour and forty minutes, team Bungaku Shoujo had ample opportunity to try and craft a story that is not only visually appealing but also meaningful. The problem with Bungaku Shoujo is that it is a story that has absolutely no particular reason as to why it should be told. The plot attempts to follow several strands parallely and tie them up together in the end. Each storyline involves Konoha Inoue (who is not the main character; serving to confuse things even further) and, ten points to Gryffindor, a girl. Skipping over the -dere nature of the girls, this just comes across as more of a pathetic attempt to make the story look complex and mysterious than an attempt at creating a deep and rich storytelling atmosphere.

The presence of most other characters makes no strategic sense. For example, there is this one character who's only purpose in life seems to be to blush and act awkward in the presence of Inoue. She does don the mantle of purpose for a brief moment some time later in the movie (she slaps another character in a hospital) but this could have easily been accomplished by a far more relevant and important character. Then there is Miu Asakura, who is seemingly in love with Inoue but also wants to hurt him. Why? It's all (apparently) because she had a bad childhood and because of a small misunderstanding. Asakura wanted to become an author and she sends in a story to a contest. To her chagrin, some other person wins the contest and this winner turns out to be none other than Inoue. Unable to bear this travesty (because Inoue never told her he was entering the contest), she commits suicide by jumping off a roof (but turns up alive later anyway). It is learned at the end of the movie that Inoue did this only to "impress" her. It is all rather headdesk worthy considering the fact that all the ensuing drama could have been avoided had Inoue not acted like an idiot and explained things to his friend. This was definitely the most grating and annoying part of the anime.

This brings up the titular character of the movie - the Book Girl. Tooko Amano is a girl who eats books. That's pretty much it. She consumes pages with prose on them (and also poems) instead of normal food. The nutritional implications of such an escapade are many but those shall not be discussed here. Thankful to say, there are no scenes exploring the nature of her bowel movements. If there is one thing this movie had going for it, it doesn't have any crass scenes. Plenty of useless scenes yes, but nothing crass. On the other hand, one must wonder where and how the Book Girl actually fits in into the plot. She doesn't. Her presence (like most other characters) is very weak and she ends up as a mere plot device in the end. A plot device that the writers then try and prop up as a central character in the last few moments of the movie. Her main connection to Inoue is that he is her main source of stories for consumption. Inoue and Amano are the only members of their school's book club. The two spend the evenings (respectively) writing and, in Amano's case, eating stories. Apparently, she is supposed to be this wise, oddball character but she comes off quite silly and pretentious with her totally unconvincing descriptions about the 'taste' of the stories she eats and her general demeanour.

All the different plotlines (there are only three really) are brought together in the middle of the movie when suddenly all the characters run into one another because of a mysterious note left in a 'Submit your love' box (or something like that) belonging to the book club. This quickly unravels into everybody meeting everybody else and Asakura staking claim on Inoue. By this point, if one isn't really enchanted by something in this debacle of an anime, most will be wondering why this story was ever written in the first place.

The ending is spectacularly unconvincing, and much like the anime itself, unnecessary. This is the ending in one single sentence - book girl invites all characters to a planetarium and causes psychological scenes and a resolution. In the end everybody simply walks away, with Inoue chasing after his Senpai (Amano). It is terribly underwhelming and unsatisfying. The lovers never get united, Amano just leaves for university and Inoue is left standing. If this were a harem anime (by all rights it should be one), it would be rated among the worst harem ever.

In the end, it all boils down to a general feeling of unease and boredom while watching Book Girl. It is also a sad fact that the prequel OVAs are much more fun to watch than the main movie itself. A terrible shame that such a well-produced piece of animation (indeed the artwork and the sound production are quite good) is let down by the absence of a meaningful and strong storyline.