The two main characters are victims of their deceiving appearances: Ryuji is a gentle giant with the mean mug of a delinquent, while Taiga is a diminutive doll with the violent temper of… well, a “Palmtop Tiger”. Opposites are a key theme within Toradora. Even small things like matching bento boxes and school gossip can spiral into massive misunderstandings. The true joy of watching Toradora, at least in my opinion, is how it manages to dramatize the mundane.
It’s a story of an unlikely friendship found on a mutually shared goal, like an anime version of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. The premise is simple: Ryuji Takasu (voiced by Junji Majima) and Taiga Aisaka (voiced by Rie Kugimiya), both classmates and neighbours, try to set one another up with the other’s best friend, with whom they have a crush on. How does it hold up after all these years? And what lasting effects has it left on anime as a whole? So, in the hopes of better understanding what made the show successful, I re-watched all of Toradora. Perhaps this is a result of how popular it truly is, and how impactful it was on anime culture in general.
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It’s even available for free on Crunchyroll. Now, after more than a decade, Toradora can be found on almost every streaming platform. In fact, at least on a superficial level, many of Toradora’s elements are derivative in nature: a clumsy “tsundere” main character, an assortment of friends with different character archetypes, and episodes themed around common Japanese high school events. What’s remarkable is how, unlike other contemporaries within its genre like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Clannad, Toradora doesn’t incorporate any supernatural elements into its story. Even now, it remains one of the most watched anime of all time. Sure, you could stick to watching Dragon Ball Z on Toonami, and that would be fine! But if you wanted more variety in anime, you were encouraged to dig a little bit deeper.Īnd it was in this era that Toradora! was released.Īs a light novel adaptation with a star-studded voice cast and a snappy soundtrack, Toradora rocketed in popularity upon its release. As a subculture in the West, anime was only as deep as you wanted it. Hell, even a simple Google search could set you up with the newest episodes. With the advent of live streaming services like Crunchyroll, Netflix and Prime Video, fansubs have mostly been made obsolete and anime has never been easier to find. In the days before accessible anime, the struggle was real.
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Viewers would download subtitled versions of seasonal anime through torrent sites, while others, like me, would watch them on YouTube in three-part 8-minute chunks. For everything else, people had to resort to fansubs: a niche collective of bilingual anime fans who dedicate their time to translating anime into English for the fun of it. Only the most popular of serialized anime were ever given an English dub or, rarer still, English subtitles. The only thing limiting Anglophones from indulging in everything Japan had to offer was licensing. Anime conventions have become an annual tradition figurines, posters and other forms of anime memorabilia were available in toy stores and hobby shops. Anime was truly beginning to enter the mainstream, with dubbed versions of Naruto, One Piece and Bleach being aired on American television networks on Friday evenings and weekends. Long ago, in the lost era of 2009, Japanese anime in America was still very much in its adolescence.
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