AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond considers the popularity of the historical-mystery series, now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The Apothecary Diaries, now streaming on Crunchyroll, is a TV anime different enough to appeal to viewers who’d usually shun the medium, while keeping anime’s fanbase on its side. Apothecary is one of the top-rated shows on both the two main English-language fan sites, Anime News Network and My Anime List - the latter uses Apothecary’s Japanese name, Kusuriya no Hitorigoto.
It has an engaging story; its leads have a lopsided chemistry. It finds an unusual genre balance – part period drama, part detective story, part teasing rom-com. It’s a generally “cozy” series that still invites darkness, like infant deaths and the ravages of venereal disease. Created by a woman, Natsu Hyuga, Apothecary Diaries has a pervasive feminist sensibility in how its women support each other under the “patriarchy,” without depicting the men as monsters.
The series is now in its second season, but newcomers are advised to start at the beginning. The setting is a fictionalized historical China, though the country’s name and other specifics aren’t given. (It’s centuries rather than millennia away; a recent episode involved books created by a metal printing press.) Much of the story takes place within the sprawling grounds of an Emperor’s palace, but this isn’t about rulers or generals.
The main character is a serving girl, called Maomao. The first episode briskly explains how she was abducted and sold to the palace – no human rights in this world. It’s a reflection of the series’ anti-epic approach, though, that Maomao isn’t trafficked hundreds of miles across her nation. Instead, her new “home” is a day’s journey from her old peasant life.
The abduction is covered in five minutes flat, with Maomao resigning herself to servitude, resolving to keep her head down and survive. What undoes that sensible decision is Maomao’s own nature. She’s an exceptional commoner who can read; she’s also extraordinarily knowledgeable about scientific matters, especially poisons. Fatally, she’s incorrigibly curious, and she can’t stay indifferent to the misfortunes of others, even those in an entirely different class.
In the first episode, she ends up intervening when two infants are in danger – both children of high-ranking concubines to the Emperor. One baby dies, but the other is saved. While Maomao tries to keep her actions secret, she’s quickly found out by Jinshi, a dashingly handsome - indeed, beautiful - eunuch who serves in the palace. His exact authority is ambiguous through the series, though he’s far above Maomao, with connections to every corner of the palace.
From there, the show follows Maomao’s progress as Jinshi insists on using her skills to solve mysteries and help with medical matters. In doing so, Maomao becomes acquainted with the Emperor’s concubines, who have the duty of producing his male heir. (There was an heir at the start, the baby who died; the surviving child is a girl.) Maomao also becomes involved in the rivalries and intrigues of the palace. More than 25 episodes in, the deeper conspiracies are still only half-hinted.
Why animation?
As with many anime, nothing about the synopsis suggests an animated series, a subject lending itself to animation. Once, this would have been something for animation fans to argue over. I raised the issue in an article for Anime News Network in 2000. In the course of a longer discussion, I asked several critics and practitioners why anime blithely animated stories that could have been told in live-action. Indeed, many Japanese properties are adapted in both live-action and anime. Current cases include the historical adventure Golden Kamuy and the pop-singer thriller Oshi no Ko.
In 2000, my expert panel brought up budget considerations – never forget how cheap it is to make anime. They also suggested animation could stand in a different emotional relationship to the viewer than live-action, and that an animator’s artistic world could be “better and more expressive.” I remain ambivalent about such answers, though I have little to offer myself. In any case, how meaningful are these questions now, when live-action and animation blur so closely? How, for example, do we quantify our responses to the sci-fi heroine Alita when she’s alternatively rendered in stylized 2D anime on the one hand, and as a huge-eyed, motion-captured Rosa Salazar on the other?
All I can say is the obvious; that in Japan, animation and live-action are perceived less as mutually opposed media, and more as parallel choices. (I discussed this more in an article on another site.) After decades of anime exports, this Japanese mindset seems to have been accepted internationally, even among critics who aren’t fans of anime. When the cinema films A Silent Voice and Your Name were released overseas to much praise, I didn’t see reviewers complaining that their stories could have been made in live-action with minimal effects. (Though some animation connoisseurs may have resented them for that reason.)
Illustrated radio?
How does Apothecary Diaries animate its story? It’s attractive but very basic by the classic standards of Western animation. The series doesn’t make overbearing use of static visuals, like some “action” anime of the 1990s. Character movements are smooth, the poses and expressions are well-chosen, as one would expect in a competent anime. But the show has an almost complete absence of outstanding images; for instance, the dazzling bursts of movement you see in today’s “quality” anime, which have become the signatures of studios such as Science Saru and MAPPA. The series is animated by Toho Animation Studio in collaboration with OLM, which also animates the Pokémon franchise.
Apothecary Diaries is dialogue heavy, so much that it invites the classic Chuck Jones jibe of “illustrated radio” – the great animator’s derogatory label for limited TV animation that you could follow just by listening, without any pictures at all. In the case of Apothecary Diaries, though, you’d miss all the show’s beautifully detailed backgrounds, comprising a world that’s expansive without being epic – the palace’s carved craftsmanship, curtained luxury and vibrant flowerbeds.
There’s also Apothecary’s interesting use of a familiar anime trope that I find tolerable at best, and often tooth-grinding. As in many anime, there are humorous moments in which characters suddenly transform into smaller, simpler cartoons of themselves, with cheesy expressions of anger or desire. After decades of anime, I accept these moments, but I seldom like them, especially when they break the mood of dramas about life and death. (It’s notable these moments seldom figure in self-contained cinema anime; try finding them in films by Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon.)
But in Apothecary these scenes work much better than normal. Their slapstick is restrained, and it’s clear the “deformed” scenes show how characters perceive a situation, and how they picture themselves. Mostly the perception of these scenes is Maomao’s, and the moments jibe with the girl’s wry, detached humor. One of the best is in Part Four, when Maomao is repeatedly thrown out of a concubine’s room by angry maids. She’s drawn like a girl-shaped soft toy, bouncing off the floor, and she makes the “bounce” sound herself to show that’s how she’s seeing it.
Like many cartoons, the anime also has special moments of quality, though their rarity could be a joke in itself. The penultimate episode of the first season (23) involves an important character’s backstory. There’s an interesting idea straight away. This male character is severely face blind, unable to recognize the people around him. He lives in a subjective Wonderland in which every character’s head is replaced with a round game piece. Every character, that is, except for one beautiful woman; the set-up has shades of Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion Anomolisa.
Just as interesting, though, is the way that this flashback episode alternates between almost static images and flashes of “real” animation which are far more tender and passionate than most of the series. The episode is also vivid in story terms, telling a tragic tale where we think we already know how it ends, only for it to finish somewhere very different. The next episode, ending the first season, treats us to a grace note set-piece. It involves a woman’s whirling dance for an audience that’s only metaphorical – at least, that’s what she thinks till she finds someone watching her.
A lopsided rom-com
Of course, Apothecary’s popularity is due to its characters and story, and it would still be popular even if presented far more boringly than it is. I’ve already mentioned the show’s balance between a sense of cozy warmth and an honest acknowledgement of the harshness of history.
On the rom-com side, viewers won’t be surprised when Maomao’s male superior Jinshi starts taking an interest in the girl that’s more than pragmatic. Nor, indeed, when the script hints he’s more than a palace functionary, and he might not even be a eunuch. But there’s a vivid scene midway through the story when Maomao reminds Jinshi of the gulf between them. After all, Jinshi might be forced to execute her one day. “I won’t complain if it’s a hanging or a beheading.”
One of the show’s jokes is that, while Jinishi plainly notices Mamao more and more, she rarely thinks of him. That’s despite Jinshi being a cartoon of male beauty who makes other women swoon. His glamorous charisma is shown as an aura of twinkling stars, but this time it’s not being seen from Maomao’s viewpoint. She’s happier in other company, bathing with the “family” of brothel women who raised her, in remarkably non-prurient scenes.
The subversion of a sexualized male gaze is part of the ethos of the series. It’s shown most nakedly in a comedy episode in which a buff, lovelorn soldier, who knows Maomao and is desperate for guidance, ends up stripping in front of her while she regards him dispassionately. It’s the kind of “himbo” joke that causes online fans to riot when it turns up in a Hollywood blockbuster (remember the female Ghostbusters?) That it can figure in one of the top anime exports suggests anime can get away with the kind of politics other media can’t. Maybe that’s why it’s animated.
A dash of Sherlock
Indeed, this ethos may well be why some fans stay with the show. But it hooked them with something else. As many viewers have spotted, Maomao can be easily compared to Sherlock Holmes, and not just because she’s a puzzle-solving genius with no interest in romance. No, she’s also an eccentric fixated on poisons – she’s been poisoning herself since childhood, with the rashes and blotches to prove it. Any Sherlock fan should think of the detective’s comparable proclivities; for example, beating cadavers to see if they bruise. (There’s a gag about how Maomao could easily have been a grave-robber.)
Maomao isn’t the first transposed Sherlock to become an anime icon. That would be the owlish youth-detective L in Death Note, locked in battle with a magic-wielding Moriarty called Light Yagami, in Death Note.
