Barakamon is a twelve episode anime based upon the manga series. It follows Handa who is a professional calligrapher, writing / drawing characters as art. While he is talented, after receiving some harsh criticism of his work, he ends up moving out of Tokyo to an island with a small town. Naturally, it’s not easy moving out of such an advanced city like Tokyo into the backwaters. He has trouble understanding the townsfolk with their strange accents but one of the things that does hit home is how close and helpful everyone is.
Handa’s accommodation is a place that hasn’t been lived in for a while. Nevertheless, he finds a young girl, Naru, who despites his objections, continually return to pester him. The pair actually has great chemistry right from the very beginning. Naru’s honest and innocent approach to everything complements Handa’s more stoic personality perfectly, not to mention there are plenty of great gags involving the two. While Handa’s purpose to moving to this small town was to improve his calligraphy, you can already tell that Naru’s influence will be a positive one.
Handa, whom everyone else on the island affectionately calls him “Sensei”, naturally gets close to a few people living there, including two middle school students, a high school student, and the various villagers who are extremely helpful. This is actually a very wholesome and feel-good anime, since being such a tight-knitted community, everyone helps each other and this slowly changes Handa for the better.
While Handa is there to become better at calligraphy, he’s also growing up. Having been sheltered all his life, we can still see that he’s quite meek and inexperienced with a lot of things. He has no clue on how to cook, and he’s equally clueless with everyday chores that aren’t to do with his work. This leads to several really funny scenes and the anime is really consistent with its gags, especially with the exaggerated nature of things that works amazingly well despite the premise. There are a lot of lessons built into the story, like working hard or not giving up even if you didn’t get first place. It’s integrated fairly well and isn’t too in your face.
It presents a good simple life in non-city living, as Handa starts to get accustomed to the close community, and their culture. Not only do they speak an accented / dialect of Japanese, but they have different customs too. Plus, seeing the bond between Handa and Naru, as they each complement each other and having a lot of fun, is very sweet. Handa comes to realize that he’s having fun too, so it’s not always about the calligraphy. There are a few running gags, mostly involving Handa’s clumsiness or his absurd amount of phobias in some way.
The story and events are very casual. There’s nothing too heavy, and only from time to time do we see Handa be serious at training his calligraphy, since the anime’s focus is less on that and more on his daily life. This leads to fun episodes, from Handa trying to catch insects, to participating in local customs, to trying to figure out what to do after the water heater has broken, all these sound mundane but are completely the opposite.
Being so young, Naru and her friends have hyperactive imaginations. They capture the energy of youth really well, with the perfect balance of assessing a situation with clarity and illogical thoughts. Naru will zip around, and jump to conclusions while being gullible to anything she is told by an adult. Yet other times she sees things so clearly, cutting through all the distractions that an adult might have when trying to over-analyse a situation.
While predictable, it’s still such a heartwarming scene when all the friends that Handa had made on the island come together to support him, and be his inspiration. Handa, without him knowing it, has grown a lot since, and is finally making up for what he had missed out on in his youth when he was forced to focus on calligraphy by his parents.
The anime has a strong ending where it is a bookend ending and showcases how much more mature and independent Handa is (even though he’s still very dependent on others for even the most basic of things). While the final episode didn’t have as much screen-time as you would like in relation to the other characters, it’s great that Handa is moving forward one step at a time, instead of immediately succeeding.
Overall Barakamon, despite the somewhat dull premise of a character specializing in calligraphy, is a surprisingly good anime. This is due to the strong and likable characters, as well as Handa himself, despite being socially awkward, interacting so well with everyone. It’s a feel-good wholesome anime that sells the (somewhat stereotypical) simplicity of living away from the city and having a close relationship with everyone living in town.
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