“Yukito-san, I Love You!”
Source: TV
Layers: 1
Sketches: 2
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Added 3/30/2007
Updated 3/23/2013
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CAUTION! MAJOR SPOILER!
Episode 66 (Sakura’s Most Beloved Person), cut 130B. Alone with Yukito in the “Star Path” room, Sakura finally summons up the courage to tell him how she feels. “Yukito-san?” she asks. “What is it?” he says, turning to her. “I . . . Yukito-san . . . I . . . I . . . ” she stammers (the matter made worse because in Japanese the subject and the object always go before the verb).
Other scenes that parallel this one move in for a tight facial close-up of one or the other of the characters, but Madhouse does something here that at first seems contrary to expectations. Instead the camera pulls back to a long shot, showing Sakura standing by Yukito, fidgeting and trembling, then finally pulling herself up, nearly standing on tip-toe, to say “Yukito-san suki desu!” (= “Yukito-san, I love you!”) The rough sketch above creates that exact moment, one of the great turning points of the series.
Why is it embodied in this long shot rather than the expected close-up? Most obviously, because that’s how CLAMP visualized the scene in the manga (second thumbnail), though from a different perspective. Also, seeing the scene from a distance emphasizes how much taller and older Yukito is, and so it dramatizes the futility of Sakura’s infatuation. Perhaps the artists understood that, if we saw Sakura’s intense longing close-up at this exact moment, the scene that follows (well summed up in my portrait cel from the very end of this scene) would be just too poignant to endure.
Notice that animation director Hishashi Abe's rough (featured above) embodies a couple of changes that make it more like the manga image than the simpler layout (first thumb). The second note explains how Sakura comes up slightly on her left foot at this moment (seen more clearly in the manga image, seen in the second thumb). Also notice how the stars have been placed around and in front of the two in the rough, where the layout simply had them hanging behind them. A third sketch (not imaged) described how Abe wanted some of the stars moved out around the two characters, again in imitation of the way CLAMP made it look for a moment as if Yukito and Sakura really were up in the heavens among the stars.
SENSEI CHECK!
This scene is made the more poignant by its allusion to one of the most familiar myths in Japan, the story of the goddess Tanabata and her mortal lover Hikoboshi, who were separated by divine displeasure and turned into the stars Vega and Altair. Just before Sakura makes her confession, she stares up at a star map showing these two stars, which shine brightly close to each other in the summer sky but are separated by the Milky Way, a great river of stars that keeps them apart.
Once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, the two lovers are allowed to meet, on a starry path made over the Milky Way by the heavenly beings. But if it rains that night, the river rises and the path cannot be made, and so the two have to wait another year for the chance to be together again -- and perhaps another -- and yet another -- for the date always falls in the middle of Japan’s rainy season.
The plot of the manga and anime parallels this myth, though in an ironic way: Sakura, like the moral Hikoboshi, loves a celestial being (Yukito’s true form). And even though this terrestrial Star Path brings them together, tragically, it also brings them to the point when Sakura has to give up her love for her idol and start growing up.
Yes, a small image, but an immensely important moment in CCS.
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