Botchan (Nissay Family Special)

ぼっちゃん にっせいふぁみりーすぺしゃる

Aired: 1980

A standalone television anime produced by Tokyo Movie Shinsha for Fuji TV's Nissay Family Special slot, sponsored by Nippon Life Insurance. The special adapts the celebrated novel 'Botchan' by Soseki Natsume - the canonical Japanese writer of the Meiji era - to follow a brash, blunt-tongued young man from downtown Tokyo who, fresh out of a Tokyo physics school, takes up his first teaching post at a rural junior high school in Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku. The hero's straight-spoken Edo temperament collides with the entrenched social hypocrisy of a provincial town, drawing him into clashes with the smug Akashatsu and his sycophant Nodaiko, an alliance with the bullish Yamaarashi and a tender devotion to his old maid Kiyo back in Tokyo. The film's painterly backgrounds evoke late-nineteenth-century provincial Japan, while Takeo Watanabe's score lends the special its quietly elegiac period feel. It is a separate work from the many live-action television adaptations of the same novel.