Some cozy works about appreciating the natural world.

Inside: Outer Wilds, Summer Days With Coo, Tonari no Youkai-san

Outer Wilds
Walking Sim/Puzzle

A game where you play as an astronaut investigating your solar system for artifacts from alien precursors. You quickly learn that your sun goes supernova after 22 minutes, whereupon you wake up at the time of your first launch again. From there, you must discover the purpose of the time loop and if there is a way to save your solar system.

To avoid space travel taking days, the game takes significant liberties with astrophysics: the planets are all tiny enough to circumnavigate in a few minutes, and the whole solar system is only a few dozen kilometers in diameter. This also results in some crazy, fantastic planets, like a set of binary planets where sand flows from one to the other like an hourglass. This means all the planets have some interesting gimmick to them, making each one a puzzle, and there is a Metroidvania-like feel in how the clues you discover help point you to the next step of each mystery. However, if I have one criticism, it’s that I wish the game was clearer about where the divergences from real astrophysics were story-relevant rather than gameplay abstractions. In particular, there is one mystery that had me barking up the wrong tree the whole game: The sun begins each loop a healthy yellow and rapidly grows to red giant by the end, something that would take billions of years in real life… but it’s supposedly just going supernova naturally and not from anything the aliens did. What? I also kept assuming the Eye of the Universe was connected to Dark Bramble, but apparently we weren’t supposed to read anything into the anglerfish and the Nomai becoming increasingly obsessive and self-destructive in their pursuit of it. Still, it’s a very fun experience if you can get used to the awkward space travel (the autopilot helps).

Summer Days With Coo
Anime film, 2007

An animated film about a boy who discovers a hibernating kappa in his local river and adopts it, naming it “Coo” after the cooing sound it makes. (This despite the fact the kappa can talk, which is conveniently handwaved by him forgetting his real name.) It is tonally quite similar to most Studio Ghibli environmentalist films, right down to being incredibly depressing by having no real answer to the problem. Coo spends the entire film searching for other kappa but never finds any; the best the story can provide for a hopeful note is “Maybe they’re somewhere else and he just didn’t search hard enough?” but the reality still seems very bleak. It’s still a cute and poignant film about mythical creatures and the cultural tension of Japan’s rapid industrialization. If you like Ghibli films, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Tonari no Youkai-san / The Youkai Next Door
Manga/Anime, 2018-2024

This is a similar but much more optimistic anime series depicting a world where youkai are real and live alongside humans. I love this premise, and it does a great job of examining how magic and magical creatures would interact with mundane life. My favorite scene is Jiro explaining his fire powers are a divine gift meant to protect the town from evil… right before using it to light a barbecue, because of course you’d use fire magic for that if you had it. All the youkai are extremely cute and I loved all the exposition and worldbuilding about how they work. I particularly enjoyed that even traditionally evil youkai were portrayed as ordinary people, since I hate the idea that certain people are inherently evil.

Unfortunately, plot is the series’ weak spot. Even the slightest problems have to be elevated to the point of extreme melodrama (there’s a lot of crying), and characters spend multiple episodes talking around issues that could be (and ultimately are) solved by one conversation, which can be frustrating. In particular, Jiro’s backstory was extremely underwhelming and just left me wondering why it took him 100 years to come to the incredibly obvious answer. I did enjoy that conflict was often solved nonviolently, and I liked the reveal that Yuri cut off her family not because of anything they did to her but out of principled objection to their evil beliefs. Also, the finale makes it look like it’s going to end on The Magic Goes Away, but don’t worry, it doesn’t.

Perhaps as a consequence, however, the story is far less socially and environmentally conscious than Summer Days With Coo. Magic doesn’t seem to have meaningfully changed history, as World War 2 (or something much like it) still happened. (The story never gets into why World War 2 was fought and if it was fought for the same reasons, of course. Was Japan still allied with the Axis? Was Tazenbo a war criminal? We don’t know.) The Japanese characters all wear Western clothing, implying Western imperialism is still going strong. Everyone uses modern appliances and electronics, implying the global south is still being exploited and strip-mined. This was made over a decade after Summer Days With Coo, which makes me consider how environmentalist thought has changed over time. Japanese media, at least, seemed to understand the trappings of modern life were related to environmental collapse back in the 90’s and 2000’s, but now they’re just presented without comment. Previous environmentalist works couldn’t propose a workable solution, but they were at least able to identify and criticize the problem.