Conde - Botchan and Student Days

Watching these films this week somehow made me do a lot of thinking. These films in my opinion were not very good artistically and some of the plots to me were kind of week, but when you look a little deeper past that you start to realize that the Anime's display some real things that happen in both Japans society and America as well.

Starting with Botchan..

Botchan takes a teacher and puts him in a situation where he has to teach kids that he is unfamiliar with and he is very different from. Because of this, the way the students react to him are not like how they would react to another teacher that they maybe have known for a longer time or have more similarities with. This is something that happens very often today in society, and many of us know tat from just experience in the classroom. In high school when there is a new teacher, students usually treat them worse. When it's a new teacher, students have the attitude like "Oh he's new, he hasn't been here as long as we have so there is no way that he can be the boss of me." That attitude is shown very well in Botchan because these kids that the man has to teach are completely rebellious and they do not want to listen to anything. I think that the creators of this film did a very good job of capturing the image of what REALLY goes on in an all boys classroom. I went to an all boys school myself and I know for sure that this is very accurate, even at the age that I am.

As far as student days..student days even though in a very poorly done manor, they take a concept that is very serious in all communities today and display it, suicide. Even though in this film, the student that commits suicide overreacts it still captures reasons why suicide happens today. Suicide for young people usually happen over relationship issues, problems at home, stress from school and other problems that they have to deal with. Usually, it results from a mixture of all of these things combined, when someone feels they have been pushed so far over the edge and they have so much to take care of that they can no longer handle it anymore. These issues today are serious and it is a very sad thing, but they do happen. I think that student days does do a good job with this, even though considering I do not think the art style of the anime was very good or interesting, they do take concepts that are recognizable today and use them to make the story a little bit better. That is done for both of these films and I am able to see how they are classics because of it.