In an ordinary town, a girl taking pictures of the clouds from her school rooftop happens upon a cat riding the wind. Soon she finds herself learning about the Wind Handlers, people such as her teacher who can secretly control the wind. She goes with her friends out of town and learns to control the wind like they do, but while they are there a mysterious festival takes place amidst a huge storm, and one of the older villagers dies. They return with that experience and their newfound talent to their ordinary lives at school, returning to the humdrum activities of the Digital Camera Club, who are just two friends taking photos of the sky. So where does it go? Do they stay in that ordinary world, do they explore this secret new world they've found, or do they do a little of both? Having seen all of Windy Tales I think the answer is both, but honestly there's little to delineate which is happening when, nor what impact they have on one another. It leaves me distinctly confused, because while the premise I've just given for the show is similar to the one you would find looking it up online, in reality that describes the first few episodes in great detail, and tells you absolutely nothing about the rest of the show.
The most striking thing about Windy Tales by far is the art, a rough-cut style that evokes the feeling of being cut out of colored construction paper and pasted together layer by layer. In feeling like paper, it seems to take to the extreme the anime-inspired art of Takashi Murakami known as “Superflat”, deliberately eschewing any sense of depth even with expansive or spacious shots. Coupled with the off-kilter character design, with extremely small hands and feet as well as mouths cut on both sides by wide cheeks, it takes a fair while to adjust to the visuals, and I'm not fully convinced it was the right choice for the show. It falls somewhere between typical animation, where everything is rendered as it should look, and the sort of minimalism found in My Neighbors the Yamadas that allows your mind to project all the fine details onto a rudimentary yet expressive backdrop, and while some aspects like the many sky shots are helped by this hybrid mixture, overall it seems to not fully capture the good parts of either.
The incongruity caused by the artwork is somewhat lessened by the soundtrack. Kenji Kawai brings his usual high standards to this work, wistful and dreamlike without falling completely to the backdrop. While neither the opening nor the ending fit the tone of the show that well—particularly the energetic ending chorus—his pieces help to tell us what sort of feeling each scene or episode has, which helps us navigate the changes between comedy, slice-of-life, and the more contemplative notes about growing up, or about the mechanics of the wind.
Unfortunately we have little outside the music to help with this process. I have no issue with Windy Tales introducing the concept of people who manipulate the wind and then putting it in the background to focus on the more mundane aspects of their lives, but the Wind Handlers plotlines are incoherent and add nothing of substance to the story, not even serving as a metaphor for how they feel in their daily lives despite the ability to control wind being directly linked to one's emotional state in the early episodes. The end result is much more focused on the slice-of-life aspects of the characters, but with a debilitatingly slow pace it's hard to enjoy these scenes. The children grow as a result of their contact with the Wind Handlers, and we see tangible change in their lives, but it feels less like an exploration of how people grow through adolescence and more like a video of their lives played in real time. Sure we eventually get to the learning moments, the meat of any good character story, but that feels more like an inevitability or a matter of course than thoughtful writing.
Part of this is just that it's hard to compare a show as slow and artistically variant as this to the more common varieties of slice-of-life, which happen at a much faster pace and generally treat the art style as a necessary but unimportant technical hurdle rather than a vehicle for conveying a mood. I'm happy that they decided to experiment with the art and music, even if the overall effect is a bit uncomfortable. I'm happy they introduced a supernatural mechanic, one that could have pushed it into straight fantasy but that instead served as just another dimension to the characters' stories, even if they ended up not meshing well this time. It headed in a direction that I am always excited to see, and so it genuinely pains me to have to admit that I didn't enjoy Windy Tales overall. I still don't regret giving it the chance.