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Fune wo Amu

Release Date: Oct 14, 2016

MAL - Rating: 7.73

Official Poster

OP: "Shiokaze (潮風)" by Taiiku Okazaki (岡崎体育)

The Staff:

• Directed by Toshimasa Kuroyanagi

• Animated by Studio Zexcs

• Music by Yoshihiro Ike

Similar Anime: Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, Shirobako.

Life comes and goes, you're born, you grow up, you learn, you work, you retire and you die. Life might seem mundane from time to time, and can at times even feel boring or a drag. As an 18 year old who doesn't know what the future holds, this sometimes scares me. Almost all of us will end up living fairly average lives, ordinary lives, you could call them. Life isn't as glorious as most Anime make it out to be, and this is why people use Anime as a form of escapism, a way to get out of their ordinary lives and experience something larger than that. Anime and almost all other media show the most incredible things; great adventures that we will never experience ourselves, perfect romances that are too good to be true, and lives that are too good, and fantasies that make our ordinary lives seem boring. Fune wo Amu is a story about our boring and mundane lives, it's about a 27 year old man working at a dictionary company, and while this might sound like a very boring story, Fune wo Amu shows that there's beauty to be found in the most ordinary of things.

We're grown to expect a certain thing from Slice of Life Anime over the years. When we see the Slice of Life tag on a series we expect a glorified story about the daily life in our the teenage years, growing up and maturing as a person, or just a story about enjoying those years in school with friends and clubs. It's no wonder that's what we expect from the genre, because it's what most Slice of Life Anime are like. But as we all know, life goes on after high school, and every once in a while an Anime comes around that explores the lives we live as an adult, working instead of going to school. Fune wo Amu is a story like that, and it's one of the most engaging and beautifully simplistic stories to have come out in years.

Story

The story follows the lengthy process of compiling a dictionary, bringing a genuine sense of drama to the lives of people who immerse themselves day after day in the constant flux of language. Mitsuya Majime is 27 and in his third year of employment at the major publishing house Genbu Shobo when he is transferred to the Dictionary Department. The company is known for its excellent lexicons, and has been laying the groundwork for a major new release, Daitokai (The Great Passage)—a 2,900-page tome of the Japanese language. Led by a 37-year veteran of dictionary compilation named Araki, an editorial team of three others is chipping away at the project: a somewhat sketchy fifth-year employee named Nishioka, a contract employee who handles clerical matters, and a linguistics scholar named Matsumoto, who works as an external advisor to the project. Although Majime was regarded as something of an odd fish in the Sales Department where he worked before, his resume includes studying linguistics in graduate school, and Araki has hand-picked him to join the group in advance of his own impending retirement. Socially inept, Majime's only interest seems to be in collecting antiquarian books. Then Kaguya Hayashi, his landlady's granddaughter who is training as a chef in Japanese cuisine, moves into the old apartment house where he lives . . .

From Crunchyroll News

Important Characters:

Mitsuya Majime - The titular character of the series and focal point of Fune wo Amu. A man with a lack of social skills but a kind soul and a passion for language, he gets thrown into the world of dictionaries and the audience does alongside him. Where at first he's uncomfortable around his new work environment, he grows as a person and learns to find his way in life and love, gets out of his bubble and shows us that it's never too late to find your place.(voiced by Takahiro Sakurai)

Masashi Nishioka - Majime's new co-worker. Doesn't have a passion for language or dictionaries like Majime does and generally feels out of place in the dictionary department. Usually handles clerical matters. Nishioka provides us with a more experienced perspective in Majime's life. Nishioka has lived and experienced what life can bring and from Majime's perspective is not only his example of a person that's comfortable around people, he's also his close friend and colleague. (Voiced by Hiroshi Kamiya)

Kaguya Hayashi - Granddaughter of Majime's landlady and Majime's housemate. Chef in training and around the same age as Majime, and the female lead of the series. Kaguya represents Majime's main goal; he wants to express what he feels for her but because he's stuck in his awkward bubble doesn't know how to so do. Kaguya is a kind and calm person much like Majime is. (Voiced by Maaya Sakamoto)

Aestethics:

Studio Zexcs isn't the most well-known of studios, but they really did an amazing job in this series. The beautifully simplistic tone of the series is shown throughout the visuals of the series beautifully; The Character Designs by Haruko Kumota are elegantly beautiful, the backgrounds are detailed and realistic, and the animation is overall Smooth and expressive. This all comes together to makes the series look realistic, engaging and just stunning overall.

The music in the series is some of my favorite I've heard in Anime. The visuals are accompanied by a soundtrack that varies from calming guitar tunes to big band orchestral themes that are all used to their optimal extent. Sadly, the OST has not been released yet so I won't be able to give any examples.

Personal experience (and why I think you should watch it):

Fune wo Amu is one of the most unique Anime I've had the pleasure of watching. It's a very down-to-earth and authentic story that shows the beauty to be found in the most ordinary of things. It's realistic, genuine and shows us something that we usually don't see in Anime. It shows us that time in our lives that most of us haven't experienced yet but almost all of us are going to. You don't stop growing as a person even when you're an adult and Fune wo Amu shows this gorgeously.

What I respect so much about Fune wo Amu is how it handles its adult characters and workplace environment so well. We see a glimpse into the life of a 30 year old man who just landed a new job in a dictionary company, which sounds like the most ordinary and boring job you can imagine, but it shows that there's beauty to be found in the simplest things. Aside from exploring what it's like to live in a workplace environment, it also explores what it's like falling for a woman at quite a late age, and since Majime doesn't have any experience with romance he doesn't know how to handle this, which is one of my favorite parts of the series. Fune wo Amu shows the building of a starting relationship as an adult beautifully as well. Usually in Anime romance is very angsty and awkward because we're looking at 16-18 year olds, but in Fune wo Amu we're watching adults build a relationship and it's a beautiful comparison.

Aside from the Main Character showing the life of an adult rather than a teen, it also shows us lot about language, work and the Japanese culture. The Main Character's Co-worker Nishioka is in a relationship with another coworker of his but in Japanese society this is seen as taboo, so they'll have to hide their relationship as much as possible and it shows beautifully how that goes in society. They walk to work together but need to keep a distance, and they can't go on dates in public, which makes it very difficult for both those characters.

So putting it all together, it's just a fantastic and down-to-earth story not about maturing as a highschooler, but maturing as an adult and finding your place in life and love. About settling down. About an awkward yet kind late-blooming man who finds love for the first time at the age of thirty. About building a friendship with your co-workers and spending tens of years together working on one product. It's a fantastic story about maturity, life and growing as an adult and is something that I'd say shouldn't be missed.

TL;DR: Fune wo Amu is a very genuine and down-to-earth story about a man still growing as an adult, and finding his place in love, life and work. It shows us that there's beauty to be found in the most ordinary things and does so in the most incredible of ways. Fune wo Amu is unlike anything else, but aside from being unique, it's also just very well-written and engaging to me. It's not just a story about building a dictionary, it's also a story about building a life.