Glay - Survival

[nozomi604]

I love this video. I found it somewhere back in the mid-oughties, on the animation site Catsuka, and rewatch it every so often.

Directed by Koji Morimoto; some of you might recognize his style from his segment of The Animatrix.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[darkoshi]

Is it a synopsis of a longer show? I watched it but wasn't sure what was going on.

And why did she walk straight into those boys? It seemed mean and haughty.. and like then she was punished by becoming a ghost??

[nozomi604]

I can see where you might get that impression! But no, the video is all there is.

So, the story is very abstract, and I'm not going to claim I understand it all. But here's my take on that scene and what it represents.

The teenagers are haughty; they push their way past the kids because they've left the world of children. They're also playing, but they can do mature things like dance in nightclubs and rent hotel rooms for parties, and as far as they're concerned some little kids playing in the street might as well not exist.

I don't think the protagonist was punished for that; it's more like "you forgot something". I understood the red landscape with the large moon as a kind of in-between space. She's opened the door on something, but she can't comprehend it yet.

After her strange experience, her friends seem silly and trivial. She becomes listless, moving through life without any motivation. Then, in a moment of despair, she realizes what she overlooked: the imagination of the kids, which could transform a mundane puddle into an entire world. When she carelessly walked through the puddle, which anyone might do, she messed up the scene the boy had been constructing. But it's still there, waiting to be discovered and appreciated.

When she has that insight, a vast landscape opens up to her. By the end of the video, she's overcome what was holding her back, and good-naturedly shows off her new confidence.

[darkoshi]

Ah, ok. So it's open to interpretation. Yours makes sense.