My Love Letter to "Agents of the Four Seasons: Spring Dance."

Connection, Yearning and the Ultimate Sacrifice: One's own Life.

Anime season is packed with some serious contenders for anime of the year. There are those worthy of the hype from talented mangakas, animators, voice actors, teams behind the scenes, and animation studios.

One of my favorite studios, WIT has released works of art, one of them being “Agents of the Four Seasons Spring Dance.” When I first saw the trailer, I didn’t know what to expect. Is this an action anime? Romance? Drama? To my delightful surprise, it is a blend of deep storytelling, world building, and multifaceted characters that face such situations considered heavy for their young age. Similarly to Takopi, heavy themes around connection, loss, friendship, abandonment, and ultimately, sacrifice are what drew me to this work of art.

It’s difficult to write about a compelling work like “Agents” without revealing spoilers. “Agents of the Four Seasons” deserves to be watched with full presence and attention. What draws a viewer into this world is the connection between the characters, their connection to their landscape, and ultimately, the choices they believe they must make.

A heavy theme again for our characters, is sacrifice—something that many can relate to.

“If I were to die, then others would be safe.” “If I were to die, then everyone else would get what they wanted.” “Since everyone wants me gone, it’s better if I die.”

This is a belief and state of being that our characters navigate while also navigating connections they feel and are in with one another: friendship that surpasses the boundaries of what is platonic or romantic, but rather, a love that centers connection, protection, care and loyalty. The first experiences of connections, where building and nourishing the practice of getting to know someone and build trust, blossoms into a love worthy of protection. For our characters, for them protection looks like the ultimate sacrifice: their lives.

Which begs the question: in a world where we get to know our characters in and throughout time; where time is part of the landscape of understanding the story, the world our characters live in, and their turning points occurring in their most precious stage of life, as children: if our characters are compelled to die for one another to protect those they love, what would it mean to live for each other?

If sacrifice is the ultimate protection, what does it say about the world our characters navigate, and what does it say about our world at large?

The raw intensity of the voice acting is superb. The animation–sublime. The story is compelling, where waiting each week for a new episode seems like a lifetime. The characters are phenomenal. Every episode is an invitation into a world that moves the viewer to be, feel and think long after the episode is over.

For me, it leaves me with thinking about the ways in which we use art as a medium to navigate, understand, critique and imagine new worlds that we may have once thought were not possible. The agents of the four seasons are fighting for a new world where protection means living for one another. That is something we can do in our world. Rather than die, we can live, care, love and nourish to see a new world bloom in our lifetime.