Josee, the Tiger and the Fish

“Josee, the Tiger and the Fish” is an anime movie released in 2020. The genre of the anime is romance and comedy, but I don’t want to keep it in those categories. I want to categorize the anime as an inspiring one. It’s an anime with duration of 1 hour and 38 minutes, and I picked the anime to watch randomly without seeing any rating.

How much should I expect from an anime movie that was chosen randomly? I guess it should be decent, and feeling like “I didn’t waste my time” is enough. It’s not an anime like the genre says. At least the comedy doesn’t fit with it, and little romance is available. The anime is inspiring because it represents that chasing the dream is not as easy as it seems, and to stick to the dream, one needs determination. This one also represents that in life one person inspires another one, and that person can inspire the one who inspired the person. It’s something I felt in my real life in various incidents. It’s something that also reflects the desire for freedom, self-discovery, and courage instead of being afraid and uncertainty.

⚠Spoiler Alert⚠

“Josee, the Tiger and the Fish” starts with Tsuneo Suzukawa who is a university student having the dream of going to Mexico for his study and he was doing part-time jobs for saving the money to go there. He loves to explore ocean, and his character was kind and warm. Due to an accident, he met with Kumiko or Josee (Josee: the favorite character name of her favorite book). On the other hand, Josee (Kumiko) had a stubborn and sarcastic character and kind of isolated from the outside world for her disability of walking, who lived with her grandmother.

Her grandmother thinks that the outside world is dangerous for her and that she should not go outside, and she hired Tsuneo Suzukawa to take care of Josee. The interaction between Tsuneo Suzukawa and Josee was poor, but it gradually improved over time. She wanted to be free and see the ocean and was very curious about other things in the world as she wasn’t allowed to go outside. But Tsuneo Suzukawa used to bring her outside more often and for the first time she started to experience life outside of home and she also realized that the outside world was much more interesting and beautiful than she imagined.

She was able to make friends in the library also and she was able to realize that she was good at drawing, and she wanted to become an artist. Tsuneo Suzukawa was also getting close to his dream, and he received a scholarship offer, and that was the turning point. Josee’s grandmother died who was her only family. She was devastated and stopped dreaming about being an artist, and Tsuneo Suzukawa was against it. Tsuneo Suzukawa was involved in a serious road accident. Even if he survived, he also lost the ability to walk temporarily, and due to the accident, he also missed the offer to study abroad, which was his dream. There were fair chances that he might not be able to walk again, and he lost hope of what he wanted to. Seeing him in such a condition, Josee created/ draws a storybook called “The Tiger and the Fish” that reflected their relationship, and she inspired Tsuneo Suzukawa through the story not to abandon his dream, and it actually worked. Both of them actually inspired each other instead of both of them having their own struggle, and she also chose to chase her dream to be an artist. The story is simple, but the meaning of it is quite significant.

Rating: 73/100