Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
If you have read other reviews before mine, you are now under the impression that Anohana is the greatest thing ever created since sliced bread.However, if you would like to hear me out, I have a few gripes with this anime. It's not that I want to hate this anime to sound different. I don't hate Anohana at all, but the praise heaped over it always confuses me. So here are my unfettered thoughts about Anohana. Story-5. The story was, according to me, a so-so one. It mainly deals with the loss of an old friend, how the characters deal with it and how their livesare affected by it. Just one problem. How do you keep grieving over a death which occurred ages ago like it only happened yesterday? What I look in an anime is its storytelling.And whether you want to believe me or not Anohana sucked at story telling. I had to drag myself to see each episode. There was nothing stimulating that I could find or anything remotely exciting. What I mean to say it's boring.That's it.
Art-8 Well I can't say anything bad about the animation if you forced me to. From background to the character models, everything is well made and sweetly animated.Moving on
Sound-6. Both the op and ed are hardly memorable. Next
Character-3 My biggest complaint about this anime. I swear I never saw such deadbeat characters. Every freaking episode you have this unremarkable hero brooding and looking dull as fuck. It's like a massive vacuum popped out from his tatami mats and sucked out all of his soul. It's true that death does affect you badly. But I wonder why couldn't his retarded father take him to a psychologist or so. I pride myself on remembering all the characters even after a year of watching a show. But its only like 3 or 4 months after watching this anime and I see myself struggling to name all the characters. Menma is annoying. That it. She is your typical klutzy girl who gawks and apes at everything she sees and behaves as if she was born yesterday.Rest of the characters are hardly worth mentioning.
Enjoyment-3 None whatsoever. By now I would be put inside a shredder by the rest of the anime community. But I will speak my unreserved thoughts. Well to be honest Anohana isn't something which is meant to be enjoyed. It's a commentary of how death affects a person. But it felt completely flat if anything else. I didn't try Anohana for giving me thrills and chills, but I didn't ask for being bored either.
Ending- Here's where a stone cold motherfucker like me wept like a poor child. The ending was really sad and poignant. The final moments of the anime were enough to make Kim Jong Un take a tissue and wipe his tears.
Overall- By now I probably occur to you as a guy who wants to look cool by thrashing a popular anime. But before you hit the Not Helpful button with gusto, let me say this. An ending makes or breaks an anime. Anohana, having a beautiful ending managed to manipulate the viewer's emotions into thinking it's an amazing anime. But rewatch it and you might just get what I am trying to say.