NANA

Information of Anime

Nana "Hachi" Komatsu is leaving her hometown to Tokyo to meet her boyfriend, Shoji Endo.  On a train to Tokyo, she meets a vocalist from a rock band called Blast.  The vocalist's name is Nana Osaki & she is going to Tokyo to meet her boyfriend, Ren, a guitarist from a popular rock band called Trapnest.  Sharing the same 1st name, they immediately become friends.  Fate would have it when they accidentally meet again by renting an apartment unit together.  From here, the two Nanas faces their future love lives & careers.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

The show focuses on the storylines of the two Nanas individually.  Nana Komatsu (who I will call Hachi from now on) kicks off the show by telling her story where she gets excited in seeing Shoji Endo again when she takes a train to Tokyo & meets Nana Osaki on the train.  From there, we first see Hachi's past on how she became a wreck when she tried to date a lot of men during her high school years.  After she settles down by attending an art school in Tokyo, she fails to see her future as she is still caught up with her love life.  It was only until one of her of schoolmates & friends, Shoji, showed her the way as he fell in love with her.  Hachi agrees to go back home under Shoji's advice in order for her to choose a path for her future.

Next it switches to Nana's past story.  In her story, we see her hardships of growing up with almost nothing until she met Ren from a friend who changed her fate as a vocalist for the band Blast.  From there, she became the lead vocalist for the group which would make her popular.  It would only last when the band members move on after graduating from high school & Ren leaves the band to Tokyo to move to a popular one named Trapnest.  Nana refuses to go with him because she felt that she would distract him from his path.  Later on, she decides to go to Tokyo to pursue her own path instead of following.

The story loops back to the start of the first episode in episode six & we finally see Hachi & Nana starting their lives in Tokyo together.  We see how Hachi is trying to become a dependable person & Nana reforming her band with Nobou "Nobu" Terashima suggesting to reform Blast.  With Hachi being a helpful childish person, she helps out in reforming the band as well.  As she does this, her love for Shoji creates a huge gap.  For this, she is punished by the Evil Lord as Shoji hooks with a new girlfriend named Sachiko Kawamura.  Because of Hachi's selfishness, she decides to not love another man as she feels she needs Nana only.  Again, it would be destroyed as Nana invites Misato Uehara from her hometown to see Blast's first live performance in Tokyo.  Hachi reacts to this which shocks Nana due to Hachi's behaviour.  The serious of the band would grow when Nana meets Ren again when she & Hachi watch a live Trapnest performance at Hachi's hometown.  Thanks to this, Hachi gets to meet Takumi from Trapnest as she is a big fan of him.  However, her "love" for him goes too deep.

Sleeping with Takumi creates a lot of problems around Hachi.  A lot of people can't accept him & Hachi knows it based on Takumi's character.  Nobu confesses his love for her even though it's late & Nana is feeling down in having all the people close to her going to Trapnest.  After hearing Nobu's confession, Hachi starts to think about how her relationship with Takumi was a mistake.  She decides to break it up & turn to Nobu in a very fast time.  However, Takumi doesn't think it's a breakup as he thinks Hachi is just angry.  But she is already going out with Nobu & already shows her affection to him physical.  Hachi is now pregnant & doesn't want anyone to know about it.  News breaks out when Takumi visits her & sees her actions.  He calls Nobu about the news & see what he'll do as it's unknown who the father is.

Because of the news, it shocks most of Hachi's friends.  Nana is confused & Nobu doesn't know what to do as he doesn't have money to raise a child.  However, Takumi says he would recognize it & plans to marry Hachi.  Chances of who the child belongs to leans very close to Takumi.  When Hachi agrees to this, Nana breaks down & the show focuses on her.

With the view changed, Nana is shocked to found Hachi moved out & living with Takumi.  At the same time, her band Blast is having problems making a debut. But a scandal photo of her & Ren pops up & causes a stir in the music industry between Blast & Trapnest.  The scandal was a publicity stunt to promote Blast in making their debut by riding on Trapnest's fame. Throwing her pride away, Nana uses that opportunity as Blast & Trapnest will be battling against each other.

During Blast's training camp & Trapnest MV production, Nana & Yasu get very close to each other after Yasu admits his feelings.  The relationship between Reira & Shin grows steady through email.  Reira & Ren sees Yasu's true intentions from being a lawyer to musician.  Takumi & Hachi's wedding is progressing slowly as they meet her parents.

The final part of the show looks into the relationship between Hachi & Nobu.  It focus on years later where Sachiko is now born as a little girl & Nobu & Nana remain friends with some love still lingering between them.  Hachi is still living in her old apartment.

My Personal Review

Nana is geared towards teenage girls due to it's love theme.  Although there is no law saying that guys can't watch it, I just thought that I should give a heads up on it.  Nana is quite popular in Japan as the manga was made into a movie first before it became an anime.  There are lot of musical artist making songs for this series as tributes as well.  All this happened in less than a year.  Nana is very popular for some reason.

Animation

The character designs have that manga style to it.  The eyes are either quite big like saucers or small & pointy.  The chins are quite sharp on the bottom too.  Also, the bodies are quite long.  It's pretty good actually.

The backgrounds used in the show are quite unique & a bit on the plain side.  There isn't a lot of detailling in it, but it's not bad enough from distracting you from the show.

The colouring is dull, but well-balanced in terms of toning.  It looks like two tones of colours are used on each object or flesh.  The colours on the characters, mainly the girls, tend to be a bit pale.  I never found any bright colours that distracts or strains my eyes.

The animation movements are natural.  It almost depends which Nana story is told.  Nana Komatsu's story tends to have some silly movements happening from her as she is like an airhead-type of character.  For Nana Osaki, it's mainly realistic movements.

Sound

The sound effect are natural & realistic.  They sound like the things they are suppose to in real life.  Volume wise is ok.  Not too loud or soft.  The balance is well done for Nana Osaki's story since there are some scenes where we hear the band play & the audience making some noise.

The voices are okay as they fit their character well.  However, Nana's seiyuu changes depending on the situation.  It played by two people, one for normal acting & one for singing.  Luckily, the voices isn't way far to make you feel that Nana was someone different.  The same applies for Reira Serizawa as well.

There are quite a lot of music in this show & they aren't too bad.  However, they don't seem to stick to my head very well.  It's mainly rock in that's either soft or hard.  However, I really love the ending themes of the show.  Going deeper in the story after the second season mark, I started liking most of the songs; particularly the insert ones.

Story

Nana is written pretty interesting.  We have two girls named Nana & we follow their love & career paths throughout the series.  It's almost like two stories under the same brand name.  With the exception of the first episode, the two stories don't seem to link until it reaches episode six as it "restarts" the show in the present time.  The only thing they have in common is the first name.  Although the two stories are interesting & offer something different from the other, I'm not sure what the creator was thinking when writing this series.  Nevertheless, the show has caught my attention on how the two girls live their lives in Tokyo as they help with one another.  It seems to be heavily based on Hachi's views at the moment, regardless of who's story is being told.  With 47 episodes, it may be possible for the show to shift to Nana more in the future.  However, it gets balanced out when their lifestyles would cross with one another & become almost one path.

Another thing about the show is how it uses numbers as references & jokes.  Nana means seven in Japanese.  Hachi means eight.  You can see the two Nanas react tired or happy when they see the number seven anywhere they go or people making fine of them using numbers as nicknames.

As the show goes deeper, we see how rock stars live their lifestyle as Blast gets closer in getting a major record label deal.  Both members are having problems & seem to be in a battle with one another.  Also, the love elements are heavily used here between the two sides.  The show uses the rock music & lifestyle very nice here.

As the show continues to get deeper, it faces on more troubled young girl issues by going to a bit more extreme with pregnancy.  Also, the confusion of love is still there as Hachi looks back into all her mistakes in her past relationships.

The ending isn't what I wanted.  There was too many things left open.  What happened between Nana & Nobu, how was Blast's debut & are they still making music, what happened to Trapnest, the marriage between Nana & Ren, etc.  There was so many things left untouched even though the show did a fast forward in time.  But it didn't explain much except the relationship between Hachi & Nobu.  The navigator did mention this show being the first season. However, it's unknown if another season is actually in the works or planned.

Overall Conclusion

Nana isn't for everyone.  It's made for young teen girls & it shows.  At first, I didn't know why the creator put two Nana stories but I managed to see it as the show progressed.  But the stories are pretty good.

On a grading level of ten, Nana gets an eight.  The show is quite interesting in terms of having two shows for two different girls with the same first name.  With love stories on the side based on a female's point of view, I'm pretty sure that it will hook the female audience into it with interest.  The ending of the show was very weak though as it left too many things untouched.  Reading the manga will most likely fix those holes.

Last updated on June 16, 2008