Although the game Air came out after the game Kanon, this anime was actually released before the second version of the Kanon anime.
It has two major stories, the first following Kamio Misuzu, who is the focus of the anime. It has two other girls, Tohno Minagi, and Kirishima Kano. While focus is directed towards Minagi and Kano during the telling of their particular stories, the major focus remains on Misuzu throughout.
The main male character, who is the primary person to have interaction for each of the girls, is Kunisaki Yukito. He is a traveling entertainer, who uses telekenesis to move his little doll around and entertain. He arrives in the town in hopes that he will make some money.
He is also looking for "A girl in the sky", who he claims to have wings. He is trying to find her because it is apparent that it is his family legacy, as that his mother was searching for this same girl, as well as his grandmother and great grandmother. The girl is distinguished by an illness, which causes her to have dreams that play in reverse sequential order, with the last part of the story being told first. Yukito comes to realize that the current incarnation of the girl is in fact Misuzu.
The girls of Air. Going clockwise from bottom left: Kamio Misuzu, Kirishima Kano, Tohno Minagi, and Michuru.The first story to be focused on is Kano. She proclaims herself to be a member of "Planet Dilly-Dally", and meets Yukito after her friend, the towns' stray dog Potato steals Yukito's doll. She is distinguished easily by a yellow piece of cloth tied to her right wrist. She claims it is to keep her magic powers locked away until she is old enough to use them.
She does not actually have any powers; she is occasionally "posessed" by an unkown force, which is thanks to her touching a magical feather in the local shrine, which is later implicated to be a feather from "the girl in the sky". In an attempt to keep the posessing spirit away, Kano's older sister Hijiri tied the cloth around her sister's wrist and told her it was to keep the magic powers safe until she was of the right age, or she would lose them. This was told to Kano after she realized something was happening to her.
The second story follows Tohno Minagi. It is an important fact that she is an only child to have come from her biological parents. She was going to have a sister, but due to a miscarriage the baby was never born. The news crushed her mother so much that it led to the family falling apart, and the father moved away and has another family of his own.
This story includes the form of Autoscopy, although it is not in the same way as either Kanon or Clannad. The person who is in the state is Michiru, who is the unborn sister of Minagi. Minagi was also devistated by the miscarriage, and after time she created the autoscopic event herself, and Michiru was created. Both Michiru and Minagi know that Michiru is not real, and both know to some extent that Michiru is nothing but a "fragment of a dream".
Yukito is more of a bystander than anything else in this story. He realizes facts on his own, and tries to help bring Minagi and her mother closer together, which is something that was only partially achieved after the miscarriage; her mom calls her Michiru, and had completely forgotten about Minagi.
The third story follows Kamio Misuzu, who has had the majority of the focus throughout the entire series. She is the reincarnation of "the girl with wings", and has the reverse progressing dreams. She lives with her aunt, Haruko, which is due to her family forcing Misuzu on her when it was known that her parents themselves wouldn't take care of her after they split up. They have a mutual agreement to live their own lives and not dig too deeply into each others, even though they continue to live under the same roof. Yukito comes to live with them in the first episode, when Misuzu shows compassion to Yukito's lack of a living situation.
Thanks to Misuzu's dream progression, after each night she gets physically worse and worse, though only noticeable signs are presented when her story begins to take control of the series. Yukito feels connected to the situation, though he doesn't know how. He decides to leave after Misuzu has a very hard strike against her well-being, but comes back after he remembers his mother's words regarding how their family line is supposed to watch over those who are born with the curse Misuzu has, and that the doll he has is filled with the wishes and hopes of his predecessors, hoping that their wishes will be fulfilled and used when the "girl in the sky" is found. He arrives and tells Misuzu that he is not leaving again. He then adds his own wish to the doll, and vanishes.
Halfway through her story, it switches to an entirely different story, set one thousand years in the past, and follows the literal story of the girl with wings, who is named Kanna.
The characters in the past. From left to right: Ryuya, Kanna, and Uraha.Kanna is a winged being, who are revered as messengers to the gods, and feared for the power they could potentially wield, and thus she is guarded. Unlike all the other winged beings referred to in the past, she is the only one who actually does not know how to fly.
The story begins with Ryuya being tackled by Kanna, who was trying to fly away. Ryuya is one of her guards, and is a center of focus for Kanna. Kanna and Ryuya become good friends shortly later.
Uraha is one of Kanna's servants. She and Ryuya love to joke and tease Kanna. Tension builds up fast for all three when they think that, for someone so revered to be a messenger to the gods, it is weird for the person to be locked away and restricted to small areas. Kanna has the desire to meet her mother, and Ryuya and Uraha want to get her away from the confinement, so with Ryuya's skills as a swordsman they are able to escape, and begin searching for Kanna's mother.
During the travels, they are blocked by monks, who are trying to rid the world of the winged beasts. Kanna tries to save Ryuya and Uraha by flying away (which after a moment of struggle she succeeds at), but is then bound and cursed into a cycle of reincarnation and suffering. Uraha and Ryuya decide to leave it to their decendants to find the reincarnations of Kanna, which leads to where the majority of the anime itself plays out between Yukito, who is a decendant of Ryuya, and Misuzu, who is the reincarnation of Kanna.
Upon the conclusion of their story, it returns to Misuzu's. The story does a quick recap of the events leading to the dissapearing of Yukito. There is one noticeable difference, in that a crow, who is a reincarnation of sorts of Yukito himself, is introduced and befriended by Misuzu. The focus of the remaining episodes is on Misuzu and Haruko.
Potato the dog, holding Yukito's doll in it's mouth.The story of Ryuya, Kanna and Uraha is short in the initial anime. However, the two OVA's that followed the series's conclusion delve a little deeper into the story of the three. This littler side story has enough information and plot to have been made into an entire series in and of itself, but the four episodes given are well enough time to have covered what needed to be covered.
The story for the entire series leaves some things left to wonder, but those are not things that were vital to the story. It was a little rushed, but not enough for one to have to go back and watch the story over again to see why something was the way it was. It is a very worthwile story, and one that can fall into the collections of great animes in history.
~Koubo
