Saturday, February 29, 2020

Carole and Tuesday - Mother



When I set goals, I tend to reach them. Several years ago, I decided to watch the IMDB top 250, and I did so. Recently I have started working through myanimelist.net top 50. I never really appreciated how much anime I had seen until creating a profile on myanimelist.net, it is a lot. As of this moment, I have three anime away from finishing the top 50 on MAL.

Now I am not shy about talking about great music from unorthodox sources, and three times on this blog I have talked about a song I loved that is directly linked to an anime. Also, I reviewed David Sylvian “For the Love of Life” which I discovered from the anime “Monster.” So that’s four really.

Well, let’s make it five.

I hold “Cowboy Bebop” up as possibly the best anime ever, and one of the reasons I loved that anime so much is now it married its soundtrack, art style and story telling together into a masterpiece. The entire production was a piece of art. A clash of styles specifically designed to showcase the delicious melting pot of all human cultures colliding in space once we leave earth. The creator of “Cowboy Bebop,” Shinichiro Watanabe also gave us “Macross Plus,” I love the original “Macross” and this sequel was a very intimate smaller scale story that adds to the mythology yet can be enjoyed as a standalone story.

“Cowboy Bebop” and “Macross Plus” both had excellent soundtracks created by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. Music is still the central theme here.

Watanabe has a lot of good will in my books. So, when my kid brother recommended, I watch Watanabe’s latest work “Carole and Tuesday” it made sense to watch it.

The characters are good, but not great. Carole and Tuesday are not very dynamitic, I might even go so far as to say they are one dimensional. Fortunately, both young girls are very likable, so not a big problem. It helps that the supporting cast is numerous and equally reasonably well written.

The story is good, but also not great. There are number of moving parts which gives the impression there is a bigger story then there actually is, but there is nothing wrong with the story, so it is generally good.

The art style was good, but the story did not entirely yield itself to anything too exciting. There are no big actions scenes or anything, however I was charmed by the rotoscoping for the musical performance.

I liked the fact “Carole and Tuesday” takes place in the same universe as “Cowboy Bebop.” This helped world build the shared universe. “Cowboy Bebop” always felt like a “lived in” science fiction, but seeing a very different side to this world from the bounty hunting side of things, made it feel very thoroughly lived in.

Normally there would not be much more to assess, however, the music is the driving force of the entire show, and they killed it with the music.

I liked the music in the first half of the show, particularly rival character Angela’s smash pop song “Move Mountains.” I was also fond of the closing credit song “Hold me Now” and of course “The Loneliest Girl” was very good, but the only other song that really stood out was Pyotr’s “Dance Tonight” but I think I enjoyed the rotoscoping dance sequence more then anything else for that song.

The second half of the show came out swinging with great songs. “Army of Two” is great. I loved Flora’s “Give you the World.” That Desmond character, he was just so weird, I loved him, and his two songs “Miserere mei” and “All I see” were a great trip. Then Carole and Tuesday have a triplet with Crystal “After the Fie” which is another winner. Good stuff all round, but everything about the show, the story, the characters, and the music were all building to a magnum opus.

It is very common for the most celebrated or promoted song from an album to subjectively not impress me the way it is meant to, so I typically hedge my expectations. In the final seven minutes of the final episode of “Carole and Tuesday” the song “Mother” is performed in full and concludes the show perfectly. “Mother” is not only the best song in “Carole and Tuesday” it is probably the best song I have ever heard from any anime ever. It is among my favorite songs to come out in 2019. It is a song so good that it makes the “Carole and Tuesday” soundtrack eclipse the “Cowboy Bebop” as the best soundtrack of any anime I have ever heard... maybe.

With no context, I believe “Mother” holds up as a great song. When I first heard it, I liked a lot, it immediately became my favorite song from “Carole and Tuesday.” However, I was not paying the best attention. I have become very busy at this point in my life, so I was working on something on one computer monitor while watching “Carole and Tuesday” on the other. About an hour after finishing Carole and Tuesday I had a strong urge to listen to “Mother” again. Then again within a few hours. The next day while at the warehouse working, I listened to “Carole and Tuesday” songs all day. The next two weeks of my life were dominated by “Mother.” I must have listened to that song nearly a hundred times. I must have re-watched that end scene twenty times.

Having now paid an incredibly high level of attention to “Carole and Tuesday’s” finale, I have discovered a great many reasons why this song is so excellent. The additional context of all those moving parts perfectly came together for this magnum opus. Even though the writing was flawed, that song so good, that it kind of made up for it, and now I feel like it is a perfect ending.

I mentioned earlier that I really liked the Desmond character. Well for him, we was about to lay down and die of his radiation poisoning, but he felt summoned to contribute his weird spaceman voice in this cosmic musical adventure.

The character Flora’s whole story was that she was so burned out being a singer that she could not bring herself to sing anymore, but after watching Carole and Tuesday cover her song “Give you the World” she starts showing signs of coming out of it. Well Flora explodes into “Mother” with her amazing voice and spreads her arms to the sky returning to form, and it pans to the manager character who worked with her when she was a big star and his face is melting with surprise and joy, and it is just great.

For reasons that may not entirely make sense, Tuesday’s mother may have been influenced by the beauty of the song and changes her wicked ways as a politician. This is one of the moments the writing is not so good, but the sentiment is there, and the “Mother” connection works.

One of the wrongdoings of the political side of the story was the increasing restrictions of Earth immigration to Mars, and deporting people back to earth. When you project Mars’ relationship to “Mother Earth” onto the song “Mother” it sort of makes sense, so that’s cool.

I think the dimension that worked the most for me was looking at the song from the perspective of Angela. Angela is the closets thing we get to an antagonist in “Carole and Tuesday” at least in Carole and Tuesday’s life. They are pitted against each other as rival sand they are opposites. Carole and Tuesday are very innocent young girls, who are making music all on their own and everything they accomplish comes from the two of them working together with very little resources. While Angela is a child actor turned singer, who is managed by her mother, does not write her own songs, and uses the help of corporate robotic music making technology. Angela has every advantage and she looks at Carole and Tuesday as if they are enemies.

By the end of the show Angela is in a bad way, but Carole and Tuesday reach out to her with this beautiful song and prioritize her involvement. It is very nice that Angela is finally making friends and gets to participate in something great as a kickstart to get her life back together, however, I really like how Carole and Tuesday at no point saw Angela as a rival. They were good natured they extended this olive branch to Angela when she needed it the most and never thought of doing anything less.  They even have her performing center stage.  Angela has a “Mother” aspect to her character for reason that would qualify as spoilers so I won’t elaborate, so the song “Mother” could be taken as a very personal song for Angela, and Carole and Tuesday wrote it for her.

There might be other angles to approach “Mother” but I think I’ve said enough. It is a really nice song, and obviously it has been in my ear and on my mind a lot for the past while.

Until next month, keep on rocking in the free world.

- King of Braves

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