Otona Joshi no Anime - Supper (Yuge)

Year: 2013
Studio: Production Reed
Director: Toru Takahashi 
Script: Tomoko Konparu

Cheating on your better half is not the most respectable thing a person can do, but when placed within context, even infidelity can be exonerated. Well, raising a moral debate is actually not the point here, when all is said and done, Supper is a compassionate tale with a simple but heartfelt message at its core – love is a life source, it heals wound and fills void.

Mimi is a housewife living apart from her austere husband and demanding in-laws. She's very much the  image of a traditional woman living by the rules – docile, excessively courteous and always dutifully fulfilling her domestic role. The story is told through Mimi's monologue. As she cooks dinner, she reminisces about her life and how she met Kou, the man she lives with. Kou works as a garbage collector and on one fateful day, he saves her from getting her hand crushed by the compressing mechanism in the truck. She falls in love with her hero at first sight. Luckily, her feeling is reciprocated and the two begin living together. For the first time in her life, Mimi feels alive and motivated, but all the while guilt-tripping herself for being a burden to him. Being the loving man he is, he puts her anxiety to rest with these words: forget me not. Kou is her world and her beginning, so when he is late for home one day, she becomes consumed with negative thoughts of him getting into all kinds of horrible accidents and the fact that her secret identity isn't known to the outside world. I'm rather fond of how this particular scene played out with Mimi sitting in the kitchen wearing Kou's jacket as if symbolically trying to reach out to him. It's a profound moment loaded with emotions. When he finally comes home, they hug and to my surprise, engage in a rather comical conversation about how many pieces of chicken he ate, not the heart-wrenching melodrama I was expecting. However, in no way I'm suggesting it's bad, quite the contrary, the seemingly mundane execution of perhaps the most important scene in the story lends itself to a more sincere expression of their relationship. And finally, Kou tops it off with a proposal that everyone in the audience has been waiting for (this is where you go kyyaaa and aww). Good job man. We come back to the present time, Mimi receives a phone call from her sister requesting her to come to her wedding, but more importantly she also relays a message from Mimi's husband – he isn't about to forgive her for dumping him but he's willing to let her go. Well, looks like he's not as heartless as he appears and thanks to him being the "bad guy", Mimi's story is able to conclude on a blissful, if not rather predictable note.

The visual is an interesting blend of real life imagery and hand-drawn animation coated in pastel colours. Judging by the amount of off-model moments, it probably didn't have a large budget to work from, but with just simple lines and basic shading, the effects resonate well with the tone of the story.

To viewers instilled with feminist values (including myself), Mimi's way of looking at the world and her role in it may be not be something we readily advocate, but as I already mentioned, this tale is not so much about criticizing social institutions that deprive women of free choices and mould them into passive housewives, but rather someone in a powerless situation finding true love and drawing strength from it. It's a bless projects like this one exist through which we are offered a glimpse into the life of Japanese women, a population that's regrettably under-explored in mainstream anime.

Overall: 7.5/10