Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Yofukashi no Uta, AKA Call of the Night! That name is never not going to be a mouthful, I swear. Content wise this week was a tad middling for me despite an otherwise good idea. Why? Well lets dive in and talk about that.
First off, a visual nitpick. You know by now that I think Yofukashi looks pretty good. Not from animation, it’s pretty basic there, but because of it’s backgrounds and color palette. I absolutely love the neon. But I noticed something… off this week. The foliage? The greenery? Everything that isn’t a building? None of that is really getting touched by the same neon lighting as the buildings. As such it results in a bunch of seemingly dark splotches in an otherwise bright frame. This isn’t a huge deal I suppose, it took me 3 episodes to notice so it’s obviously not a glaring issue. But now that I’ve seen it I’m afraid I won’t be able to unsee it. Hopefully it’s not to much of a problem.
Moving on to the actual episode, like I said above this one just felt off to me. Awkward. The idea is good, this push and pull between day and night, of a normal life and traditional romance vs the wild, non-traditional Nazuna. In this way, I think that Akira is a great addition. Not much of a love triangle, she’s not competition there at all, but she presents the option of an exit strategy for Kou. However something about the way it was all presented felt incomplete to me. I can’t tell if it was because this conflict was rushed, because jealousy is weird on Nazuna or for some unknown third reason. All I can say is that the café scene, and subsequent making up, lacked an emotional core for me to latch onto and really connect with. Let me know down below if that wasn’t the case for you.
To try and unpack this and see if I can figure it out mid-post though, lets start with Akira. As I said, I think that Akira represents “normality”. She’s that moment when night becomes day, that invitation back towards a normal life. She only ever appears early in the morning as the sun rises, and all of her flash backs take place during the day where Kou no longer feels welcome. Akira is that that thread connecting him back towards humanity in his quest to fall in love with, and become, a vampire. That’s a pretty compelling hook for a character! And while her design is very dull compared to Nazuna, which makes sense seeing as she’s “normalcy”, her attitude is appealing. I will however say that sometimes she looks like she’s going cross eyed when trying to figure out what she’s looking at.
Meanwhile on Nazuna’s end, what she embodies is rather obvious. It has been since episode 1. What this episode does though is continue her journey into emotional intimacy. Just look at the kinds of jokes she makes! Or how she was clearly more comfortable with the thought that Kou was screwing around with Akira than she was with losing him to her and her daylight normality. Once again, to Nazuna physical relationships are nothing important. They come and go, having no meaning beyond personal pleasure. It was nice to see her be emotionally vulnerable and react negatively to something, to losing Kou, for a change. But like I said above, something about this realization felt… hollow? I’m normally all about these kinds of misunderstandings getting sorted out quickly but I want Yofukashi to really focus in on Nazuna figuring out her emotions. Hopefully we can get more of that soon.
Anyways that it for this week. A short one because I couldn’t quite figure out what to write. I think the episode was fine, it continues a lot of the same threads we’ve had in the first two and Akira’s character concept, if not her design, is one I can get behind. Hopefully this issue I had is just a personal one, like I had a bad day or something, and not a sign that Yofukashi is starting on a downward trend. I still think it has a lot of potential with this conflict between day and night, normalcy and being true to yourself. There’s more going on here than I originally thought from the 1st episode.
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