Summer Time Rendering is a horror anime, which means you’re going to have to deal with some baseline expected levels of horror stuff, and also a fairly widespread quantity of anime bullshit. See, what starts out as an eerie rural mystery, in that sort of island gothic you see in Japanese stories about small out-of-the-way island communities starts to unfold and show itself to be a story about more than that. You may think, at first, that this is going to be a murder mystery or a crime drama, then bam our protagonist dies and then –
wakes up –
and the story restarts.
That protagonist, Shinpei Ajiro, is a boy who grew up on the island, and moved away for culinary school. He’s a good, earnest, kind person who is carrying a sadness about him, a sadness we learn in the first episode is tied in with the funeral he’s attending of his friend-or-sister Ushio Kofune. It’s through following him on the day of this funeral that we learn of Shinpei’s context, his family relationships, his anxiety, and also his ways of detaching from moments to consider things from as objective a position as he can manage.
Now he’s in a time loop, and like many people in a time loop narrative, he immediately doesn’t believe it’s happening. I mean, why would you. His action is reasonable, then, to operate as if he was just imagining things, that he was having a weird bit of deja vu (that culminated in being stabbed to death by his sister-figure).
It’s this puttering around, slow boil punctuated by sharp, intense action that the time loop structure does so excellently: when we see characters in similar but sometimes subtly different scenarios over and over again (and see them die, over and over again), which get increasingly confusing and outlandish for those characters too. It means that you get to see these characters in their best and worst moments and see how many of those moments are rare reactions to circumstances and how many of them betray a deeply-seated reasoning based on their personality.
How many times, and in how many ways, can you see someone give their life for someone else?
It’s a heady topic, and it’s a topic that this series plays into with its regular loops where you’re both going to see characters dying. That’s not even getting into the way that the conceit of this universe is built to give you more in-depth examination of a character’s inner life than almost any kind of series that doesn’t just stick you in their heads, with the presence of characters who can photocopy a person’s mind.
Oh yeah, did I mention that? Hang on, let me start again-