Flashbacks in Anime: An Expository Tool

If you're a regular consumer of anime, you've likely seen many flashbacks that take you back to something you've already seen, from the beginning of the series to earlier that episode. Many people find them to be little more than wastes of time, which is understandable, but they can also serve useful purposes.

To begin with, as a note of clarification, this is not referring to flashbacks that show character backstories and new material, from scenes that are a couple minutes long to entire story arcs. Instead, this is about scenes that have already been shown before.

One reason flashbacks can be necessary is to remind viewers what is going on or past events they may have forgotten. As a non-anime example, The World Ends With You establishes early on that Neku has two Player Pins, but he doesn't understand why. At the very end of the game, one of Neku's Player Pins is destroyed, but the spare allows him to keep going, and the game flashes back to that scene to remind the player of something that had never come up again.

Speaking of reminders, they, especially the recaps, can be necessary for people who are watching weekly broadcasts and do not own the DVDs or have access to streaming services.  In the course of about a minute or so, the show can quickly remind people where they're leaving off of, and get them back up to speed. Obviously, these recaps can come off as a waste of time.

Sometimes, the flashbacks can be used to convey information. For example, if, during a battle, one character gets taken by surprise by another's attack, a flashback can show that a seemingly innocuous action was actually the other character setting their plan into motion. It's even possible to have the flashback scene show details that were not included the first time the scene was shown.

Flashbacks can also serve to show how far characters have come since earlier on in the story. For example, in One Piece, after the normally stubborn Nami begs Luffy for his help, he agrees and leaves his treasured straw hat with her, despite having refused to entrust anyone with it. The manga flashes back to Luffy refusing to let Nami touch his hat earlier.

More cynically, though, flashbacks can be a good way to pad the runtime of an episode. Doing so not only limits how much original animation must be made for the episode, but also reduces how much ground the episode covers, making it easier for an adaptation of a weekly manga, such as One Piece, to allow its source material to get further ahead.

Flashbacks are narrative tools, and so can be effective to the story when used judiciously, as well as detrimental when overused.