Several times in the past I’ve talked about shows I’ve termed “Slice of Nothing”. Typically, these are Slice of Life shows (and thus they don’t present an overarching plot) without another genre to contribute direction. It says nothing about their quality, they can still be good or bad in their own rights, but they tend to be meandering and low-key, and not stories in which much if anything is accomplished or achieved.
But it is possible to have a show that’s basically pure Slice of Life that doesn’t become Slice of Nothing. For example, we have Iroduku: the World in Colors (aka Irozuku, depending on who you ask).
Now, to be fair, Iroduku is technically a genre piece. This is the story of a witch girl in a world much like ours, but where magic exists in the open, who is sent back in time 60 years by her grandmother. Technically, it is urban fantasy. However… that doesn’t really inform the plot all that much. Even more than in Flying Witch, the magic is basically set dressing, and I think the vast majority of the story could have been rewritten to omit any supernatural elements.
The story begins with Hitomi Tsukishiro, a rather depressive high school girl and heiress to a witch family, who has lost the ability to see color. The world is black and white to her, and seems to be generally lacking in beauty and wonder besides. One evening, her grandmother uses rare and powerful magic to send her on a trip sixty years into the past, to which Hitomi does not exactly consent before it happens. Whisked away on an otherworldly schoolbus, she arrives in a strange room in our time. She escapes as she’s able (but not without being seen climbing out the window by some friends of the proper resident), but loses her special earring in the process without realizing it.
From there, she manages to connect with her family, who run the same little magic shop that she remembers from the future. In this world, it seems that magic is mostly used for basic art and entertainment, as a sprinkle of prepared star sand can create any number of wonderful yet not practical effects. Witches seem capable of more, but the show isn’t concerned with how their powers could be leveraged to change society, it’s interested in one girl’s journey. We can let them have that much.
Hitomi quickly connects with her family, and ends up also connecting with some people about her age, a group of high-school students who help her out and, having heard about her climbing out of that window, initially mistake her for their friend’s new secret girlfriend. The mix-up is cleared up quickly enough, and most people seem pretty accepting of her fanciful story and willing to be decent to one another.
But what about the boy whose room Hitomi was initially dropped off in? He’s Yuito Aoi, a grumpy and frustrated young artist. Hitomi encounters him hoping to get her earring, which contained in it a stone that marked her as part of her family, back, but in the process she discovers something that is quite amazing to her: when she looks at Yuito’s drawing, she can see color. She sees it first in the drawing itself, for which the audience is treated to a Hitomi-eye-view of a world in grayscale and one pane of color, and then all around her for a brief moment as the drawing comes to life. It passes quickly, but it certainly has an effect on Hitomi.
Once she’s more or less sorted out in her new time period, it is of course time for Hitomi to start going to school. Once there she reconnects with the peers who helped her out on her first day, resolves their misunderstandings, and is invited to join their club. The club in question is the Photography Arts club (that’s a combination of the Photography club and the otherwise one-member Art club). In addition to Yuito there’s Senpai and club-leader Shou Yamabuki (who specializes in Black & White Photography), his kind but kind of timid childhood friend Asagi Kazano (who likes rabbits), short-tempered vice-president Kurumi Kawai (Who does videos, and is kind of a shipper for Hitomi and Yuito), and eternally bickering with Kurumi, underclassman Chigusa Fukuzawa (Who is pretty friendly, trolling moments to Kurumi aside). They’re a pretty fun bunch, and while Hitomi doesn’t initially feel like she fits in, she is rather attracted to the camaraderie, as well as the possibility of seeing Yuito’s work and color again.
The next big turn occurs when Hitomi’s grandmother, Kohaku, returns from oversees. It turns out that Granny was quite the troublemaker when she was Hitomi’s age, and she arrives at school with a preexisting reputation for her magic having explosive effects. She’s about as vivaciously nutty as you’d think from that, and starts up with the reckless arcane property damage more or less right away. She also joins the Photography Arts Club, turning it into the Magic Photography Arts Club, incorporating the less destructive exercises of her ability into the generally artistic displays and presentations prepared by the club.
But what, you may ask, about Hitomi’s magic? She’s capable, technically, but she’s not very good at it. Her inability to see color is part of that – Star Sand, which seems to be the basic fuel of all magic, comes in and is prepared to particular colors signifying its power, and Hitomi of course can’t tell one from the other on her own. However, she’s also just not very good to start out aside from that, and her impairment is not one that’s completely fatal to the idea of doing proper magic. Thus, Kohaku (as well as Kohaku’s mother and grandmother) will be trying to teach Hitomi how to do witch stuff in addition to her normal studies.
Once Kohaku is introduced, the show enters a proper sort of slice of life phase. Not a lot happens, technically speaking – the Magic Photography Arts Club puts on a couple displays, particularly preparing something really impressive for the school culture festival. But that’s looking at the show from a broad-strokes point of view. Quite a lot happens each episode, which is why I don’t count this as Slice of Nothing, it’s just that most of it is changes in the relationship dynamics, or even just the audience and/or Hitomi gaining a better understanding of how things are. For instance, for all that Chigusa and Kurumi bicker, they seem to be close. Similarly, Asagi has a crush on Shou, of which he is classically oblivious. Hitomi tries to get closer to Yuito, at first out of curiosity more than anything, and discovers that he’s grappling with his own inner demons, including a deep dissatisfaction with himself that leaves him not wanting to show his art to other people, which Hitomi’s love for its ability to convey color to her helps him get over.
At the same time, the kids go on activities, with specific photo-taking hikes, little student art installations, and the like. They’re small events, objectively, but the show is good at making them feel like big deals without turning to the cheap way of getting overly pretentious or melodramatic. Perhaps it’s less that they feel big, and more that we understand the characters enough to feel what they’re feeling about a pretty night view or a chance encounter with a stray cat.
The main themes are as such: Hitomi learns to appreciate life more and open up to other people, slowly but steadily coming out of her shell. In the process, she really bonds with Yuito, and even begins to fall for him. In the meantime, Shou develops an affection for Hitomi, which doesn’t please Asagi at all seeing as she’s carrying a torch for him. In the meantime, Yuito is more convinced to follow his dreams, and really starts to open himself up to Hitomi after a magical incident where they find themselves in a world born of his drawings, and in a dark space Yuito finds the image of a young Hitomi painting the world black in her depression and finds himself doing his best to get her to smile.
Entering a painting ends up becoming the main event for the Magic Photography Art Club’s Culture Festival presentation, with Yuito getting through his fears and preparing a fantasy world of color just for the experience. They’ll also be selling postcards and displaying art photographs, but when the time actually comes it’s the magic trick that has lines out the door.
Along the way to the Culture Festival, Shou confesses (and is refused by Hitomi, to the happiness of no one, but at least it’s honest.), much work is done to prepare the Culture festival display, Hitomi gets comfortable with her magic, we spend a ton of very enjoyable time just more or less hanging out with this group of friends… and just before the Culture Festival hits, when Hitomi is finally at home and hoping to do things like go through a romance arc with Yuito or enjoy her bonds with everyone, it turns out that she’s going to need to go home, and soon.
The ritual manages to be delayed for long enough to make some great Culture Festival memories, and Kohaku (in charge of the time magic for the return trip) makes sure that everyone can be with Hitomi at the end, when she goes back to the future. Her send-off is great and emotional, including a very particular last moment with Yuito.
When Hitomi arrives in the future, Kohaku (grandma version) is quite happy to see her, of course having remembered the slow way what those days were like. Hitomi, while somewhat heartbroken, is stronger and wiser for it. She even finds a few things, records of the time she spent in the past, and a childrens’ book in which she could still see color when she was young, written and illustrated by none other than Yuito. And, as her place in time and heart are somewhat healed, it seems that color will return to her world to stay.
So, I’ll freely admit, that was a LOT of show that I summarized there with broad strokes. But in my mind, there are two ways to approach a show like Iroduku: either you go broad strokes and don’t worry about the grace notes that actually make the show tick, or you go into detail on all those grace notes and have a review as long as my Darling in the Franxx trilogy. Between the two extremes, I erred on the side of maintaining my sanity.
So, as an addendum, what is a normal episode like and how does the show flow? A normal episode is, well, Slice of Life. There’s often a particular theme to the episode, but the structure is rather loose and we tend to get a little movement on all the lines (and lives) we’re watching rather than focusing on a particular character to the exception of all others. Even in the episodes that have big time development for Yuito and Hitomi and their romance (which is arguably the ‘main plot’ of the show), we get at least a certain amount of lower deck material.
As far as the flow, it’s not as slow and meandering as you might imagine from that. Certainly, the show takes its time with its material, but I never felt bored, or like this amount of time didn’t need to be taken. A slice of life show is always poised very carefully between two falls: on one side, it doesn’t do enough to really suck you in and you get bored. On the other, it does too much and becomes soap opera melodrama, losing the relatable nature that it wanted to have. Iroduku walks the line expertly, and never strays from its balance. This means that every episode does move, and pull you along with it… it just does so in a way that’s more trying to be a window on people than following a well-defined path.
And, as a bonus, the show is gorgeous. Both the color and black and white expertly convey what they want to, the wonder of the full world, the light and darkness of Hitomi’s that’s captured in Shou’s photography as well and has its own odd beauty at times, and especially the near rapture of Hitomi seeing color in her dreary gray existence.
So, what are the show’s faults, then? Well, for one, it’s kind of an exercise in foregone conclusions. When you hear the idea that this is a romance where the leading lady is back in time to her grandmother’s time, you kind of know that this only ends two ways: time loop or mild tragedy. And you can’t expect the former if you spend even a couple minutes taking in the town of Iroduku, so that leaves the latter. On another note, there’s the fact that the magic is, ultimately, window dressing as I said at the start.
Because let’s take a look at the basic story: A girl is sad. She gets sent somewhere else to live with family, hangs out, makes new friends, comes to believe in herself, falls in love, but ultimately has to go back home earlier than she had hoped. This could be done with geography as easily as with chronology, and that’s kind of a shame. True, we do at least see a good deal of magic out of this world once Kohaku is on the case, but because this is a world where magic is present and public and yet hasn’t changed history or how normal people live their lives, there’s little sense of it being important or impactful.
Further, Hitomi doesn’t largely relate to her peers like she’s back in time. She’s in high school, she should know some degree of history or civics from sixty years in the past. And aside from that, she should be used to a different kind of life than she has to live in. Imagine if you were transported 60 years into the past. Even if we’re going to assume you can’t cheat the stock market or alter major world events, there’s still going to be a huge culture shock that Iroduku just… never addresses. Hitomi notices she’s out of her AI assistant’s service area and then just lives like a modern high school girl, not one who would have reams of technical knowledge and learned patterns of life that don’t fit in. Perhaps that material would have been a distraction, but it means that the time travel magic aspect isn’t really used.
And continuing on, Hitomi is now peers with her grandmother and living with ancestors she probably never met. But, outside of having to be gently taught to not call Kohaku “granny”, she never interacts them like there’s a special bond. She reacts to them the exact same way she would to somewhat distant relations (in the case of her elders) or a cousin she knows (in the case of Kohaku), the same way the main character in Flying Witch relates to the relatives she’s rooming with. There is a huge missed opportunity to create something odd and special in how Hitomi relates with people.
All in all, I think Iroduku sifts out to an A-. It’s a fine slice of life that shows you can do slice of life without doing Slice of Nothing, and it’s a pretty show that is great to just watch… but it’s also a show that doesn’t quite live up to its potential. What we get is good, mind you – an A- is still an A-ranked grade, and thus quite high – but there’s a sting of might-have-been that’s not about the lost first love at the end. I’d really recommend the show as it stands, I just have to go on and wonder.