It’s Clannad. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.
What They Say:
Ever since the death of his mother, Tomoyo’s life has been in a downward spiral. Nagisa’s declining health has been so fragile that she’s been forced to repeat a year of school. But when he agrees to help her restart the school’s disbanded Drama Club, they learn that sometimes, if you find the right people to help you, you can get a second chance at happiness.
Join the ambitious Tomoyo, who dreams of becoming class president; Kotomi, a troubled genius with a secret past; and the mysterious Fuko, whose connection with the world has become so tenuous that she’s literally fading from existence. Discover the healing power of kindred souls, and experience the complete classic story of life, love, and the power of the human spirit in two extraordinary series: CLANNAD and CLANNAD AFTER STORY.
The Review:
Audio:
For this viewing, I listened to the English dub, which is offered in DTS-HD 5.1 (as is the Japanese track). All of the channels come through clear with no dropout, and there’s some nice directionality with background noise, though the dialogue stays mostly on the center channel. But it’s rich and sounds nice.
Video:
Visually, this release shines. There are no technical flaws with the transfer and the colors come through bright. Character models look nice, and are all varied well despite almost all having the “generic” (iconic?) Key eye-style. With so many characters, it could be forgiven if there were some similar styles, but everybody is unique. Even the twins, Kyou and Ryou, are distinctive. Very nice looking anime.
Packaging:
This release is nice and compact. The six discs (three for Clannad, three for Clannad: After Story) are housed in a single Blu-ray case. The front cover has a picture of the girl and robot from the “other world” standing in a field. The back has screenshots and a series summary with all of the technical details. Each disc has a picture of one of the girls on it. There’s nothing particularly special about this release, but as somebody who has the old STACKPack DVD release of Clannad: After Story, I appreciate how compact this is.
Menu:
The menus for this release are pretty basic, but well designed and functional. The right side of the screen is occupied by the same picture on the front of that disc while the OP theme plays in the background. Each episode on the disc is listed down the left with languages and special features below. Like all Sentai Releases, there is no Play All button, but finishing an episode automatically leads into the next one, so it’s not a big deal. These are definitely DVD menus rather than what is normally seen in BD releases, but they are easy to follow and do their jobs. No real complaints.
Extras:
Being a Sentai release, there’s not a lot on the Extras front. There’s the standard OP/Eds for both Clannad and Clannad: After Story, as well as some Sentai Trailers. The only addition to the norm is that there is an English cast commentary track for the sixteenth episode of Clannad: After Story with David Matranga (Tomoya) and Luci Christian (Nagisa). It’s a nice addition, but it might have been nice to have more, too. Still, for what we usually get, I’ll take it.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Clannad is a series with which I have a lot of history. I adored this series the first time I watched it, and I tend to jump at the chance to re-watch it any time I can. As one of the more famous series to get a release over here, if you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s at least likely that you’ve heard a decent amount of hype about it. So I’m not going to hype it more. I’m going to tell you why I think it stands out compared to other titles similar to it and leave it at that. And to reiterate the warning above, it’s going to be hard to discuss some of these things without some major spoilers.
What really drives the story of Clannad for me is the strength of the protagonist. With a lot of harem titles, the emphasis is usually put upon the girls in the harem, and the protagonist is usually something of a blank slate when it comes to defining personality characteristics (except for being wishy-washy…they are often wishy-washy). I guess I don’t know for sure, but I assume this is something of the “wish-fulfillment” nature of harem titles. Make the protagonist somewhat generic, and your viewer can put himself in the role.
Tomoya Okazaki is anything but a blank slate. He has the unfailing kindness that marks the harem protagonist, but he has a personality surrounding that. He’s approachable because he loves a good practical joke, but he has depth because he has his own dark past that he is continually wrestling with. The relationship (or lack thereof) he has with his father is heartbreaking to watch, in large part because of how much it appears that both have given up trying to repair it. Contrast that with how quickly and easily Tomoya connects with Akio—it highlights the difficulties that Tomoya has with his father as well as just how deep the wounds they bear are.
And they are wounds that cannot be healed. No matter how well Tomoya is able to help all of the people around him solve their own issues, the ones that lie at the root of his own problems have no real happy ending. Tomoya and his father come to something of an understanding when all is said and done, and an argument could be made that there is room to grow between the two of them, but there is no relationship there as of the end of this series.
Tomoya’s unfailing kindness continually leads him to essentially stick his nose into other people’s business and help them in any way that he can, but in essence, this is also how Tomoya is able to keep running from his own problems. A fight with his father in the past damaged his shoulder, leading him to have to quit basketball, which in turn led him to quit essentially everything else. Helping others is a way for him to ignore the fact that he keeps running from his own issues. Any time somebody (Nagisa, more often than not) tries to talk with him about his father and/or other issues, he quickly changes the subject—there’s always somebody around that needs his help.
At least, there is until there’s nobody left, at which point he tries to bury himself in his work and his new wife (another great thing about Tomoya compared to many harem protagonists—he picks a girl in the end!). As long as he has Nagisa, he can keep ignoring the darkness hovering over him. But even when Nagisa passes away giving birth to their daughter, Ukio, he cannot face his own demons. Instead, he abandons Ukio to her grandparents and wallows in his own misery. He is not able to follow the same lessons he keeps giving to those around him to keep going and keep fighting and never giving up. He can’t learn those lessons because the truth about Tomoya is that by the time we hit play to watch the very first episode, he has already given up.
It takes Akio and Sanae essentially tricking him—and therefore forcing him—into taking responsibility for his life before he can begin to put it all together. He begins to learn how to be a real father and begins to move on from the death of Nagisa. He begins to learn how to process and/or live with the demons that haunt him. He manages to come to an understanding with his father, even if it isn’t the tearful reunion we’re expecting, and he starts to actually live life in a way we haven’t seen from him through the entire series.
And what this means is that when Ukio falls sick with the same illness that took Nagisa, Tomoya is more than capable of taking charge. He doesn’t run away this time. Again, he knows what he needs to do to be the father that Ukio needs, even as he recognizes that she is not going to recover. Rather than wallow in his own misery, he does what he needs to do to keep her in comfort. All of his prior difficulties prepare him for this moment; he finally recognizes the lessons he’s needed to learn, and he passes with flying colors—hence the fantastical ending to the series where his pleading wish is granted and he is returned to the moment of Ukio’s birth, this time with Nagisa surviving and them—with their daughter—having a happily ever after. It takes a few years, but Tomoya is able to help himself in the same way he helps everybody else.
As a final note, I would like to briefly mention a couple of the OVAs that succeed each series. Where Clannad is based on a visual novel, there are a number of scenarios involving Tomoya ending up with girls other than Nagisa available for mining. As a fun exercise, they wrote one episode for each season—existing outside the continuity of the rest of the series—that explores some of these storylines: one that details his relationship with Tomoyo, and one that delves into the love triangle between him, Kyou, and Ryou. The Kyou Arc episode seems to be the one that gets the most attention, and while that’s a good episode, I find the Tomoyo Arc episode to be some of the best twenty-two minutes of anime I have ever seen. It can’t really stand on its own, because it expects you to know who everybody is, but this episode abandons any pretense of humor and lightheartedness and goes straight for some tense drama, and it is brilliantly done. It’s easily my favorite episode in the entire series.
In Summary:
If you didn’t skip the write-up above after I mentioned the spoilers, you might have gleaned that Clannad is an anime that doesn’t skimp on the emotion. It has a lot of humor, but there’s a lot of drama there, too, the most serious comes when Tomoya is forced to confront his own issues. As interesting as the various situations he and the girls find themselves in can be, it is Tomoyoa’s own personality and conflicts that drive this series and make this one of the paramounts of the genre. Highly recommended.
Features:
Commentary, Clean Opening and Clean Closing Animation.
Content Grade: A+
Audio Grade: A
Video Grade: A
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: A
Extras Grade: C
Released By: Sentai Filmworks
Release Date: December 5, 2017
MSRP: $149.98
Running Time: 1225 minutes
Video Encoding: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 16×9
Review Equipment:
Magnavox 37MF337B 37” LCD HDTV, LG BP330 BluRay Player w/HDMI Connection, Durabrand HT3916 5.1 Surround Sound System
