This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
Aura: Koga Maryuin’s Last War, is a simple tale about bullying with a more complex and nuanced worldview than that description alone might imply. The basics are very straightforward: high schooler Satou Ichirou [Shimazaki Nobunaga] was, in his middle school days, deep in the chuunibyou delusion mines. These days, after an incident we remain in the dark about until the final act of the film, he’s cleaned up his act and is a respectably normal guy. Satou Ryouko [Hanazawa Kana]—no relation—is decidedly not normal, herself caught up, imprisoned perhaps, in fantasies of that very same type. Hers are about the “Other Side”, a world in her own mind that she has left to become The Researcher, her wizardly, scholarly, witch persona, versed in scattershot occult knowledge. The bulk of Aura is about these two characters and their relationship, by turns close and relatively rocky, and how they deal with the world around them. Ryouko spends much of the film on an ill-defined quest for what she calls “dragon terminals,” but in a literal sense, this movie is about two misfits breaking through to each other. However, I say “in a literal sense” for a reason, because –
AURA: Koga Maryuin’s Last War, is, also, a bittersweet but ultimately triumphant love story. The tale of The Researcher {Satou Ryouko}, a wise sage from another world, and how she comes to find solace in another who has shared in her supernatural experiences. That other, of course, being Koga Maryuin {Satou Ichirou}. It is the tale of two lost souls—more than that, really, given the gaggle of background characters known as the Dream Soldiers who are, also, reincarnates from the Mirror World—who reach out to understand each other in a world that is hostile to them at every turn. But, of course, such things are rarely so simple.
Bullying, in the most straightforward sense, is the main conflict driver of Aura. Ichirou was bullied in the past for his Koga Maryuin persona. Ryouko is bullied in the present for her Researcher persona. This manifests in all the usual ways; social ostracization, foul graffiti slathered on Ryouko’s desk that calls her a whore and tells her to die, the theft of her shoes, and the occasional more physically direct confrontation. One of these bullies actively beats Ichirou up. Another, a gyaru, is responsible for most of the shoujo manga stock bullying previously aforementioned, and also makes a habit of flicking bits of paper at Ryouko. Late in the film, she even blackmails Ichirou by threatening to leak some embarrassing photos from his Koga days. (Aura must, chronologically, be one of the very last anime to use the old “mean, bitchy gyaru” stereotype as opposed to the more common “nice gyaru” of the present day. Can you imagine, say, Kitagawa Marin doing this shit? Unthinkable.) Complicating matters is teacher Dorisen [Mizushima Daichuu], who essentially assigns Ichirou to watching over Ryouko.
The Dream Soldiers admire him, too, for being willing to stick up for Ryouko. And for a time, especially in the film’s middle third or so, it seems that they might come to some sort of mutual understanding without any dramatic occurrence, two souls in resonance.
However, mere admiration is not enough incentive as the film reaches its climax, as the bullying becomes entirely too much for either of them to bear, and we learn the full truth of the incident that broke Ichirou out of his own chuunibyou persona. One wherein his parents discovered letters he wrote to the “princess” of his persona’s home reality. In them, he describes his parents as mimics, false people in a false reality, and they, of course, react badly. (Neither they, nor the film itself, seem to question why someone would develop a psychological complex in which their parents are impostors. If I have a chief criticism of the film, even “on its own terms,” it’s this.) After cutting off contact for a time, the final confrontation comes with the revelation that Ryouko has climbed onto the school’s roof. She plans to do something drastic.
Suzumiya Haruhi, eat your heart out.
There, she has assembled the Dragon Temple. To even the most mundane eyes, it appears as a school desk Angkor Wat, heaps and heaps of the things piled high into a pseudo-sanctum far too complex for a high schooler to have reasonably assembled alone, much less in a short time. If you are wise enough, if you are looking for the magic, it’s here. Right at this moment, an arcane suicide attempt that doubles as the light shining through a keyhole. AURA could have become bleak here, if it wanted to. It could have been the Bridge to Terebithia anime that never was. But it does not! Ryouko, the Researcher, the witch, here also a princess, is rescued by a dashing dark hero. The day is saved! And he gets the girl.
Ichirou sheds his shame for the sake of the girl he loves. Donning once again the guise of Koga Maryuin, he takes a prop sword and bashes through the desks, cracking Ryouko’s temple apart as he approaches her, pleading that she has to live in the real world with him. To live and suffer, to cherish the adventures they can squeeze out of our mundane reality. He tries his damnedest to make the case that it’s all worth it, but ultimately what gets to her is that simple plea for connection. That the two of them are the same.
AURA, then, stands at a crossroad in more ways than one. Mundane and magical. Of the past and the future.
Indeed, not only in plot but in presentation, Aura resembles an anime of the 00s proper more than one the 2010s, with its somewhat muddy color palette and generally moody emotional timbre. Of course, it is always helpful to keep in mind that every single anime studio did not instantly switch from grays and browns, sharp shadows, and airbrushed metal surfaces to KyoAni-style pop colors and tons of flashy VFX the very second that the calendar flipped over to January 1st, 2010. It is instructive, as the last decade fades into the rearview, to remember that any stylistic trends of a given time period are just that, as opposed to absolutes.
Consider AURA, also, as a magical work. We are never given reason to believe that Ryouko and Ichirou’s fantasy is anything but. But consider that there are multiple senses of the word “fantasy.” Consider, too, that all fiction is equally fictional. It bears repeating, could a high schooler truly have assembled those desks into such a magnificent altar? What of the minor character Kume [Morikubo Shoutarou], responsible for the dragon-shaped nails that spurred the imagination of both Ryouko and Ichirou? He identifies himself as a creator of small wonders, despite acknowledging that such things are rare in this world. And, again, there is the temple of desks that Ryouko constructs.
Depending on your proclivities, these sorts of questions will strike you as either the most fascinating thing about the movie or a heap of totally pointless navel-gazing. It is not hard at all to read Aura as a straightforward anti-escapist fable, a cautionary tale of how things can go wrong if you’re not living in the real world, and how no amount of retreating into your own delusions can solve the problem of loneliness. I suspect that this is more or less the “intended” reading of the film, and am well aware I am swimming against the currents somewhat with this piece.
But, that ignores that it is precisely becoming Koga once more that gives Ichirou the connection to Ryouko he needs to save her. And anyway, who cares solely about “intent?” Once a work of art is released into the world, it grows wings of its own.
So which is it, then? I, your humble reviewer, have tried, here, to represent both ideas in alternating line breaks. I, the writer.
And I, the witch. Ultimately, both are real (or fake) in their own ways. Such is the case, too, with AURA itself.
“As a film”, further criticisms could of course be levied. The directing, from Kishi Seiji at AIC ASTA, is a competent execution of the denpa visual style that, had, by this point, become well-established, but it is perhaps a bit lacking in true personal “oomph” other than its final climactic scene. (Even that feels very SHAFT-indebted, albeit not in a bad way.) There’s a bit of nudity that is beyond unnecessary, even as someone who is normally fine with that kind of thing. You could also argue, perhaps, that the gyaru antagonist has no real arc and is simply shoved to the side as the film ends.
But these are all craftsmanship issues, and I’m not reviewing a table, you understand? This isn’t some functional object, it’s art. None of those flaws being corrected would be worth anything if the film didn’t speak to me. That they’re present doesn’t undermine the fact that it does. AURA is a patently ridiculous movie, there is no shortage of scenes or screenshots you could take out of context to make it seem like the most absurd thing in the world. It’s also brilliant, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
If nothing else, it is absolutely fascinating to consider Aura‘s place in the broader continuum of chuunibyou-related pop culture. Because, by any reasonable metric, the chuunis won in the end. Setting aside the most obvious indicators (eg. that light novel adaptations comprise the bulk of anime adaptation today), there is an overall generally more favorable attitude toward these individuals over the past decade and change. You could very, very easily argue that Ryouko is genuinely mentally ill. And yet! The story treats her with no small amount of sympathy! Not that Ichirou’s more grounded perspective isn’t treated so as well, but if we were truly just supposed to write all of this off as Ryouko Being Weird, I don’t think the ending would be written the way that it is. And Aura isn’t unique in this regard! Compare it to its closest cousin, KyoAni’s seminal Love, Chuunibyou, & Other Delusions. Despite the chronology telling us it has to be the reverse, Chuunibyou essentially picks up the thread that this film leaves off, recognizing that the dividing line between the so-called worlds of fantasy and reality is itself somewhat illusory, and that in any case the two halves can exist in harmony. (A rather perfunctory post-credits scene on the part of this film perhaps notwithstanding.) Whether the world today would strictly be kinder to Ichirou and Ryoko I can’t entirely say, the bullies they railed against certainly still exist, but I’d like to think that more than ever, Ichirou would be empowered against them.
Part of Koga’s speech in the film’s final minutes asserts that the enemies of this world are invisible. This is a subtle, but very accurate, distinction. “Material reality”, so to speak, cannot be changed by fighting off dragons, slaying demon lords, unsheathing a cursed sword, or so on. But, it can be changed nonetheless. The weapons are different, the battles unseen, but they rage on, around us, every day. So fight on, Dream Warriors, we will win a kinder world for ourselves yet.
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