This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

If you close your eyes, you can immerse yourself in it. The sweltering Sun, the sea breeze messing your hair and running the sharp scent of salt past your nostrils. The sound of the cicadas lighting up the trees with their songs, and the humid heat. During the day; the brilliant, sapphire-blue sky and the billowing white clouds across it. At night, it’s an inky black streaked by the starry Milky Way. This is a series of blurry photos from a blazing-hot July buried somewhere in your memories. This is Air.

If it seems strange to tie an adaptation of a member of the infamous nakige (“crying game”) genre to a specific season, it might help to think of it as Air‘s way of contextualizing its attempts to tug at your heartstrings; the joy and sadness of a human lifetime distilled down and squeezed into a single, eternal summer, bringing to mind similar works in different media, like Fennesz’ album of that same name. When the series began airing in 2005, I myself was a child, in Florida with my father, and the heat of the Sun feels as real in Air as it does in my own recollections. Air‘s vision of summer is mercifully devoid of crocodiles, geckos, and palmetto bugs, but the feeling is the same, and the tense dichotomy between “these days feel like they will never end” and “we don’t have many days left” is thick enough to break scissor blades. The summer lasts forever, until it doesn’t.

Air, you see, is not just a story, it’s a dream. A reference point, and a map for its structure and storytelling aims, that recurs many times over its twelve episodes. Its logic is dreamlike; characters are introduced suddenly and vanish out of sight when their stories conclude, the series is peppered with elements of magical realism, and the environment itself seems to bend around the characters’ emotions, especially in its last stretch when the cast winnows down to just two main characters. Its emotional impact is dreamlike, too; it can make you very sad without you necessarily understanding what’s happened or why. (If I seem to skimp on describing Air‘s actual plot throughout this article, that’ll be why. Some articles are very easy to write; this one was not.) Dreams are, too, a recurring story element. Our main heroine, Misuzu [Kawakami Tomoko], dreams of another version of herself, suspended in the sky and flying on wings of pure white feathers. Our main hero, Yukito [Ono Daisuke] is a crow who’s dreamt himself into the shape of a man, or perhaps the other way around. These dreams are just part of the larger dream of the series itself, one that only ends when Air concludes. It’s a vast dream, too, encompassing over a thousand years, from 994 AD to the summer of 2000. Millennium to millennium, era to era, life to life.

Fittingly, Air‘s depiction of the human condition is impressionistic and emotional. Its core concerns are faith, family, and the preciousness and brevity of life. At its best, it feels as light and ethereal as its namesake or as heavy as torrential rain; lifting you up and pummeling you back down. This isn’t to say it’s always at its best—this is now the third Maeda Jun project I’ve seen, and I’m starting to get a good sense of his strengths and weaknesses as a creative, and there are some questionable decisions in the show’s final stretch in particular—but the highs are very high, and they’re plentiful enough to make the series worth watching.

In terms of literal narrative, Yukito arrives to a nameless town (modeled on the real-world city of Kami, Hyogo Prefecture), searching for a place to stay and a way to earn money, yes, but also a half-remembered vision inherited from his mother; something about a woman in the sky. In an early indication of the series’ magical-realist bent, Yukito is a puppeteer whose magical control of his doll is treated as nothing more than a mildly amusing parlor trick. He meets Misuzu, an odd, clumsy girl who trips a lot and says “gao!” when frustrated, and is eventually roped into being Misuzu’s live-in caretaker by Misuzu’s surrogate mother, a drunkard aunt named Haruko [Hisakawa Aya].

From this setup, Yukito becomes entangled in the lives of a number of women around the city, possibly a consequence of the series’ origins as an eroge. (This adult VN -> clean rerelease -> anime pipeline used to be quite common, back in the day.) Stripped of their original context, Yukito meeting these characters and witnessing their stories takes on an anthology-esque quality. Among those we meet are the self-styled ‘alien’ Kano [Okamoto Asami], Kano’s older sister, the town doctor Hijiri [Touma Yumi], the rambunctious redhead Michiru [Tamura Yukari], and her older sister, the deliberately-spoken, astronomy-fixated Tohno [Yuzuki Ryouka]. Each of these girls has some issue that Yukito aids in, if not resolving, at least providing closure for. In the earlier episodes, anything explicitly supernatural is pushed to the margins and the tone is fairly ambiguous. However, in episode four, the series stops playing coy, and from the moment that a magic feather in a temple induces a shared hallucination of a bygone era, the show’s magical realism is fully realized.

The show’s main theme of family comes into focus over the course of these stories. Each one centers around a frayed familial connection of some kind—Kano’s strained relationship with Hijiri, Michiru being the disembodied spirit of Tohno’s miscarried sister, Tohno’s mother completely forgetting she exists, et cetera—all of which is just windup to the two main stories of the series, the one between Misuzu herself and Haruko, and a very different, but intimately connected tale that takes place a thousand years prior.

Because, you see, the recurring image of the flying maiden is what ties all of these disparate stories together. Sometimes mentioned directly, sometimes only alluded to. Air reflects its own structure here, as this unknowable woman in the sky means something different to everyone. Air’s big halfway point twist, then, is when we learn the story of that woman. This is the other half of Air, a story taking place in the Heian Era, first at a secluded temple-palace and then all up and down medieval Japan. Kannabi-no-Mikoto, alias Kanna [Nishimura Chinami], an enshrined woman who is among the last of a mystical race of angel-winged people. Her attendants Ryuuya [Kanna Nobutoshi] and Uraha [Inoue Kikuko] serve to care for and comfort her at the shrine, drawing a parallel between these characters and those taking care of Misuzu. In an act of grim foreshadowing, Kanna’s life at the palace is disrupted when forces unknown infiltrate it, seeking certainly to capture, and possibly to kill her, leading Kanna and her entourage to flee and seek her also-imprisoned mother. Here, Air‘s visual presentation completely flips upside-down; these portions of the story are clouded over with heavy monsoons of rain, and when the Sun does poke out, it looks noticeably different than it does in the modern day portions of the story; less omnipresent and less oppressive.

Really, this part of Air is a different anime entirely, a feeling further enhanced by the two-part Air in Summer OVA which further fleshes it out (you could give yourself a “streamlined experience” by weaving both halves of Air in Summer into the main anime’s episode count). Kanna’s status as a winged person marks her as both something divine and an outcast. We don’t get many details; when we eventually meet Kanna’s mother, she only mentions that she herself is ‘tainted,’ and Kanna eventually comes to realize that her life, at least, what of it we see, may be the dream of someone else. (There’s a real Butterfly Dream thing going on here.) When she and her attendants can no longer escape their would-be captors, she unveils her wings. And thus, in one of the story’s two climactic points, Kanna is shot to death. Riddled with arrows against the backdrop of the white, caustic moon.

Death marks the final boundary for Air‘s narrative. Kanna’s story ends—at least for us—when she dies, and so too does Misuzu’s when the series returns to her side of the story for its final stretch. Back in the (relative) present, Misuzu’s illness, now fully revealed to be a curse, worsens. She loses the use of her legs, and eventually her memory starts to go, too, leaving her unsure of who Haruko, the woman who has been her surrogate mother for many years, even is. (This is another unifying thread between Misuzu, Kanna, and the rest of the show’s heroines. None of them have a normal relationship with their mother figure.) The final arc sees Haruko attempting to prove that she’s worthy of being Misuzu’s real mother, to herself, implicitly to us the audience, and to Misuzu’s actual biological father, a man named Keisuke [Tsuda Kenjirou].

In Air‘s last episode, we see Haruko’s desperate attempts to connect with her daughter finally begin to bear fruit, only for Misuzu to realize that she is, in a sense, still sleeping. Air ends with her death, as she and Haruko both accept that their time together is over. It hits in the heart, unifying the series’ themes of faith and family as Haruko reflects on her mistakes in treating Misuzu poorly¹. If you’re the type who can be hit by that kind of thing (and I definitely am), it’ll get you, but there are questions to be asked, here, and this is where we have to put on our rational hat a little bit.

For one, Maeda certainly has a thing for young, disabled girls, doesn’t he? I don’t necessarily mean that in an outright condemnatory way—although some would, and I wouldn’t even say they’re wholly wrong to—but it is a noticeable recurring character type throughout his work; a girl whose emotional fragility is reflected by physical frailty. It feels rooted in ableism and misogyny. Plus, on top of that, this ending is just sort of basic. Yes Jun, to paraphrase Young Thug, we all hate when girls die, but is that really all?

To be fair, in the case of Misuzu’s death, and the closing chapter of this story, it quite literally isn’t all. Misuzu’s soul reunites with Kanna, and it is implied (albeit only indirectly), that this frees both of them—since they are ultimately, metaphysically one in the same—from their shared curse. Still, there’s a very fine line being walked here. “Life is incredibly frail, and there is a certain tragic, inevitable beauty to death” is a perfectly fine notion. Adding just a couple of words in there to make it specifically about the disabled very quickly turns it ugly, and I am not sure Air manages to say the first thing entirely without saying the second even if it doesn’t ‘mean’ to, which is a shame, to say the least.

On the other hand, you can try to ignore any themes built into Air entirely. That seems to be what much of the Japanese game-buying public did with the visual novel. Maeda has recounted² how many players’ main takeaway was that the game was “soothing,” and how frustrating this was to him. From a certain point of view, this is definitely true of the anime as well, and you’re free to strip it for parts if all you really need is a sumptuous bath of wonderfully retro visuals and sound. Indeed, in addition to its very deliberate sense of place, Air lives and breathes its era; it is Early 2000s as hell, and all of the signifiers that have become so inseparable from this era are present. This is especially obvious with the highly sexually dimorphic character designs, where the men are all tall, lanky, and comparatively realistic, and the women are all short, soft, and have huge headlight bug-eyes. There’s some really strong animation, too, especially in terms of the near-constant sea breeze that blows throughout the show. Every hair on many of the girls’ heads will happily billow in the wind throughout the series, it’s quite something. Reducing the series to its aesthetic components in this way, however, requires actively disregarding what Air is about. I can’t speak for the game, but I don’t think the series is helped by trying to flatten it into a Pure Moods CD, even given its flaws.

If you wanted to, though, you had an option there, too. The series’ companion album Ornithopter, a sprightly thing where trance and instrumental city pop meld and melt together into a hazy heat blur, is an interesting counterpoint to the sadder parts of the anime. Like a pleasant dream the night after a bad day, it seems to gently nudge us into remembering that life will go on.

Life did, in fact, go on for all involved with Air. This series was director Ishihara Tatsuya‘s debut in that capacity, and he shortly thereafter went on to helm the world-conquering anime adaptation of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and a number of excellent Kyoto Animation titles thereafter including Nichijou, arguably the best comedy anime ever made and certainly one of the best of its era. He’s still at it now, directing the currently-airing third season of Hibike! Euphonium. Main series compositionist Shimo Fumihiko is also still working, currently fulfilling that same role on the fifth season of cult series Date A Live. A good chunk of the voice cast is still active, not always a given for an anime that’s nearly 20 years old, although sadly Misuzu’s voice actress Kawakami Tomoko, perhaps best known as the title character in Revolutionary Girl Utena, passed away in 2011 after a battle with cancer. She was an incredible talent, and was taken from us too soon.

And then, there’s the case of Maeda Jun himself, certainly worth discussing given that he seems to have been the main creative brain behind Air. Maeda, of course, had a pretty successful career for quite a while after Air, working in a similar capacity as the main force behind Clannad and Angel Beats! (the latter of which became an anime that I deeply love), among other things. Then, in 2020, came The Day I Became A God, and, well, if you’re a longtime reader of this site, you know how that went. I more or less stand by what I said in that article, and Air‘s lowest moments foreshadow some of The Day I Became A God‘s core problems, but it’s worth noting that I was hardly alone, there. The Day I Became A God was so widely disliked that the backlash prompted Maeda to retire from writing for anime and the like entirely, and he claims he felt so disheartened by the reception that he apparently considered killing himself.

It never feels great to be a part—even a very small part—of that kind of reception. I would like to think Maeda has good work in him still, and overall, I’d say I quite liked Air, despite its flaws. (Certainly my feelings on Angel Beats! remain unchanged, as well.) But you can’t change what’s already been done, and if Maeda has decided to stick to composing, he’s at least certainly very good at that as well.

As for Air itself, the series, there’s a lot I haven’t touched on, here. The series’ first half has a lot of great storytelling moments that I have both skipped recounting for the sake of not making this article even longer and to leave some of the magic intact for anyone who reads this and wants to check the show out. I’ve also not really gone into the various highs and lows of the show’s comedic moments, of which it has a surprising amount. (The very short version; most of the humor is actually surprisingly great, but a few things have not aged well. Sexual harassment-as-joke is something we should be glad we’ve largely left behind.) There are lots of bizarre little details, like Misuzu’s constant referring to chicks as “dinosaurs’ children” (she knows her cladistics!), a dog that makes “piko-piko” noises instead of barking, and so on. Despite all I’ve written, I feel like I’ve only really scratched the surface, and the years of surrounding context that have built up around Air have only amplified that feeling.

In the end though, Air has given me a wider appreciation not just for Maeda’s work but for work in general. Art reflects life, and life doesn’t stop for anyone. There’s no point in not trying to enjoy every day you have, and the fact that Air could make me reflect on the value of my own life and the time I have left in it is, in a way, the greatest argument in favor of it being a worthy piece of art. Dreams can be beautiful, yes. But, we all wake up eventually.

^{1: In general, as I’ve pointed out in my previous writing on this series, their dynamic reminds me a lot of Rosa and Maria’s from Umineko. I do wonder if it was a direct inspiration or just a coincidence.}

^{2: In the initial version of this article, I said I couldn’t find this interview. However, since then, someone has backed it up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and if Google Translate is to be judged good enough to get the gist of the interview, that does in fact seem to be what he said, in essence if not literally.}

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