Andrew Osmond celebrates Atsuko Ishizuka’s wonderful adventure series about 4 girls going to Antarctica, how it follows classic story traditions, and how it mixes ‘moe’ with drama.
A huge amount of anime – probably most of it – is about adolescence and the feelings it brings, of doing what you’ve never done, of surpassing limits in crazy ways, of becoming the person you truly want to be. There are templates, of course. There’s finding you have a gift for a sport, and striving to be the best in that sport. There’s having intense and embarrassing feelings for a classmate, and yearning to be close to them. Then there are fantasies where you gain a miracle power and must use it to defend your school, your town, the world.
Another classic teen story template is that of the journey, of leaving home behind and going somewhere so far away that you find a new you in the process. It’s in literature such as Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn, both adapted in anime (here and here respectively). An anime classic of the form is 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (aka Marco), a 1976 series involving future Ghibli founders Isao Takahata (who directed it) and Hayao Miyazaki. Serialized over a year, it’s the story of a little boy’s travels from Italy to Argentina in the 19th century.
Miyazaki went on to make “journey” films with pinches of fantasy (Kiki’s Delivery Service) or which were all-out fantasies (Laputa is practically an aerial Treasure Island). Many other anime journeys are fantasies: a clever one is the recent film The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes, about a boy and girl contemplating a magic journey from which they can never return. On the other hand, Makoto Shinkai’s films show youngsters traversing a less fantastical Japan. A boy crosses the country by train on a snowy night (5 Centimetres); another boy runs off to Tokyo (Weathering With You); a girl travels the length of Japan to her lost childhood home (Suzume).
The girl I want to be
Anime about adorable girls and their adorable friendships, the ones that get labelled moe or “cute girls doing cute things,” are often talked about as if they’re the antithesis of adventure, or drama, or even of story. But A Place Further Than The Universe showed that a “cute girl” anime can have all of those things and be one of the best anime ever. Call it a mix of moe and high drama, or a girls’ great adventure story. Either way, it’s wonderful.
It’s a 13-part series directed by Atsuko Ishizuka, first broadcast in 2018. You can stream it on Crunchyroll, while a new “standard” Blu-ray edition is now available from Shout! Factory. It starts as a witty take on the dream of “becoming the person you want to be.” For schoolgirl Mari – “Kimari” to her friends – that person is another girl, a stranger. Kimari glimpses her racing dramatically down a station platform near her home in the rural Japanese prefecture of Gunma.
Then Kimari notices an envelope that the stranger dropped without noticing, which contains a million yen (several thousand dollars). The next day, Kimari tracks down the stranger at school and returns the money. The stranger is hysterically grateful – she was smashing down a toilet cubicle in her despair when Kimari found her.
Kimari learns the girl, Shirase, has been saving the money with a very specific purpose. Impossible though it sounds, Shirase is determined to travel to the South Pole, Antarctica, That’s where her mother vanished three years ago on a research expedition. It’s a hero’s journey, and for the awed Kimari, Shirase is everything she wished she was herself.
For Kimari has always been frustrated with her timidity that stops her trying anything exciting. We’ve already seen how she tried to skip a school day and board a train to Tokyo, but she chickened out at the last moment because… Well, things could go wrong, couldn’t they? Kimari’s a stand-in for “ordinary” teens, spending their schooldays wishing they could meet someone extraordinary like Shirase. If you’re into meta-story interpretation, then Shirase is just the kind of person Kimari might dream up.
But Shirase’s no Supergirl. She may have money, but the idea of a high-schooler travelling to Antarctica seems preposterous, even given Shirase’s tragic personal history. Indeed, Shirase is the laughing-stock of her school; she’s mockingly nicknamed “Antarctica” because of her mad obsession. That experience has left Shirase self-reliant, a loner… and yet something about Kimari’s honesty touches her. By Part 2, the girls are close friends, and committed to travelling together to Antarctica.
But they’re not a duo for long. To their surprise, they’re quickly approached by another girl their age, Hinata. She works at a local convenience store, heard Kimari and Shirase talking, and she also longs for adventure. There’s a mystery about Hinata’s circumstances – she’s very smart, but she doesn’t go to school – which only gets explained much later. Then there’s a fourth girl, Yuzuki, who’s very unusual. She’s a teen singer and actress who gets into the story for complex reasons, but ends up just as firmly bonded with the group.
All four girls are voiced in Japanese by famous voice actresses. Kimari is played by Inori Minasa, who stole fans’ hearts as the ogre maid Rem in Re:Zero. Shirase is voiced by Kana Hanazawa, in a break from playing softer characters such as Mayuri in Steins; Gate and Shiemi in Blue Exorcist. Hinata is voiced by Yuki Iguchi, who’s Myne in Ascendance of a Bookworm. Yuzuki is voiced by Saori Hayama, who’s Yor in Spy x Family and Shoko in A Silent Voice.
Then there are the show’s adult characters, who become important in the second half. We learn that Takako, Shirase’s mother, was lost on a maverick expedition, whose civilian crew members were driven by their own spirit of adventure. Since the tragedy, Takako’s friends have their own obsession with returning to Antarctica. They’ve refused Shirase’s pleas to let her join them, but they will soon set out to the South Pole. If only there was some way to persuade them…
Spoiler alert – well, not much of a spoiler, as it’s given away in the show’s opening titles. The girls do find a way onto the expedition – no, it’s not “plausible” if you consider the dangers for a moment, but the in-story logic is good enough. The 14,000-kilometer trip won’t start for several episodes, but the girls’ adventure has already commenced. They must train together in the mountains and face scary mums who think these girls have lost their minds.
Then comes a plane journey, and an odyssey on a huge ship through tumultuous seas and tons of ice (the ship’s an icebreaker). At the end is a place where very few people have been, stunningly beautiful and extremely dangerous, where the girls must support each other with their strength and courage.
From one angle, this is a show about growing up, about a landscape widening into expanses of endless white, where girls must grow bigger to brave it. From another, it’s about how much grown-ups and budding teens already have in common, especially the adventurous types. In particular, it becomes clear that Shirase is every bit Takako’s daughter, for both better and worse. The adults have the same stakes in the journey as the kids, but they’ll find it hard to bond with them, for these adults left Shirase’s mother behind.
Moe in Antarctica?
Okay, so this is also an anime about schoolgirls. These girls, moreover, have a fair amount of cuteness between them. The wide-eyed, enthused Kimari is the cutest of the bunch, but all the girls show cute sides at time, especially when they’re pushed together as a unit. Even the stern Shirase melts into butter at a glimpse of a penguin. The opening titles push a clear narrative image – moe girls in Antarctica. Or if you prefer longer labels, this is a “cute girls doing cute things at the South Pole” show.
To an extent those labels are right. There are many scenes that do feel like “cute girl friends” shows. When the teens are talking fast and enthusiastically, with lots of exclamations and teasing put-downs, then it’s very in the vein of K-ON!, or Kinmoza, or Non Non Biyori. Many scenes are of the kind which “slice of life” anime have long perfected, such as the girls squeezing up hilariously in a tiny tent or trying out fearsome foreign foods. Some images could be described as fanservice-ish, but only out of context; there’s very little male gaze.
The show’s main difference from most moe anime is that it’s purposeful. It starts with the vigor of a classic kids’ adventure story, but it’s also grounded in truthful details. There’s a delicate subplot about Kimari’s established best (girl) friend – at least she is before Kimari meets Shirase. Meanwhile, all the other girls know the journey is serious business, that it’s dangerous, and it has massive emotional stakes for Shirase.
Even episodes that look like slice of life fluff turn into something weightier. When the girls stopover in Singapore, for example, it looks like it’s just going to be a travelogue (there’s a flavor in the above clip). But then one girl mislays her passport, putting their whole journey in jeopardy. It’s a comedy-drama gem, forcing the girls to communicate honestly in an emotionally fraught situation.
A later episode has the girls doing interviews with the expedition’s adults, and helping a youth who’s crushing on Gin, the formidable woman captain. That’s fluff, right? But then Gin must talk to Shirase, who knows that Gin made the call three years ago to stop the search for her mum. Suddenly we’re in very deep waters.
The whole show is balanced between cute bits and serious bits, between moe and drama. That’s signposted even in Part 1, where Shirase’s lost all her hard-earned money and is bashing in a door in the girls’ toilets, and a tremulous Kimari must somehow introduce herself to her. It’s funny, awkward, and uncomfortable. It’s the kind of situation which the great anime director Satoshi Kon described as those “where you cannot tell if you should be laughing or feeling sorry for the characters.” It foreshows the combo of snappy cuteness and sudden gravity that the show handles so well.
Comedy-wise, the show has moments that may make you think “only in anime.” These don’t involve lechery or fanservice, but rather the girls’ innocence. In Part 2, the teens go to the infamously seedy Tokyo district of Kabukicho (shown more threateningly in the film Weathering With You). Here the girls have a go at using their female charms to “lure” adult men, as part of a deranged plan. Awkward and uncomfortable don’t begin to cover it; yet the girls’ cluelessness keeps them wholesome and funny even when the scene’s so wrong.
A boys’ story with girls?
When the Antarctic journey finally starts, the series is imbued with meticulous convincing details. Through the girls’ eyes, we learn about crossing some of the stormiest seas on the planet (and coping with chronic seasickness), beyond which lies an ice-scape as alien as the moon. These scenes recall the European Tintin comics, which took readers to meticulously detailed real places.
It’s arguable that the basic story in A Place Further, of a youngster setting out on an epic journey, would have been once thought of as a boys’ adventure. However, that stereotype has been eroded for decades, not least by anime like Suzume and Kiki’s Delivery Service. One film I remember from my own childhood is Disney’s 1985 live-action film The Journey of Natty Gann, about a girl and her wolfdog making their way through Depression-era America.
In 2022, I interviewed A Place Further’s director, Atsuko Ishizuka. She said her series “was about girls going somewhere far away, and that was the mission that they had. But it was about their emotions, their relationships – not big in terms of scale. The girls go far away but their emotions are not so huge, they’re more intimate. They’re discovering people who are closer than their own families, so they become sort of soulmates to each other. It’s very much internal conflicts and emotions and relationships.”
Ishizuka contrasted Universe with the anime she made next, the feature film Goodbye, Don Glees!, which is available in multiple streaming and home formats. It’s about three boys journeying into the Japanese mountains, and it’s available on Blu-ray from Anime Limited. “In Don Glees, it’s about ‘me and the world.’” Ishizuka said. “(The boys in the film) are discovering pride in their own identities. It’s about friendship, but it’s more about where they are in the world, in society. So, I thought that boys would be more suitable for the storyline than girls.”
You may or may not agree with that. I’m personally not sold on the director’s argument, and I also found Don Glees far more clunky and less satisfying than its predecessor. But A Place Further remains a delight, satisfying both in its individual episodes and in its overall arc.
Unlike anime films, it’s unusual for TV anime to be praised in mainstream media outside Japan. A Place Further, though, was listed by the New York Times among 2018’s best International TV series, next to the last season of The Bridge and Britain’s A Very English Scandal. The paper called it “an absolutely authentic depiction of how friendship can overcome adolescent anxiety and grief.”
