Review of Sing "Yesterday" for Me

Spoiler free article: A short description that's just a bit longer than normal synopsis to give you rough idea what to expect from this anime. Conclusion for TL;DR at the end of the articles. Reading time: 3 minutes read Review: The story are delivered to be as realistic as possible due to it's targeted audience (seinen), so it's a grounded somber slow story for the most of the time, some people might dislike it, but that's the charm of the show for me. They build up slowly, along with the occasional flashback that's timed precisely so that viewers not confused with the timeline of back and forth. Thecharacters are well developed, even the side characters are given a decent exploration (albeit not as broad as the manga, mainly due to the short 12 episode constraint). The 4 main characters are painfully realistic human being, this might make someone unconsciously dislike them as they represent not only the good side, but also the bad side such as frailty, stupidity, ignorant among many. But I must agree that among this 4 there's one that's a sore thumb pain in the ass, and like it or not, there's always people like this in real life, an adult body with a child mind inside...

Now for the flaw that I really really need to point out, they skipped a lot of things, for the first half of the show, a couple of characters are not introduced, so I thought, oh, maybe then in the latter half or in season 2, but no, they decided, let's rush the last episode, and make it a happy ending somehow. I gave it a solid 8 for the first 11 episodes, then it dropped due to this stupid decision for the last episode. Even if I didn't read the manga, I won't be able to accept such ending, it's so rushed, time skipped a lot, left many details mentioned unexplained. I know they just want to not let any loose end by rush ending it, but me personally would love it keep going as usual and left us hanging without 2nd season.

The visuals are just breathtaking, they made the characters even more beautiful than what they are in the manga, the usage of panels to emphasize a certain scenes are just genius, with a soft color palette it's able to visualize all kind of atmosphere in a somewhat somber serious tone. The animation are surprisingly smooth for anime with this genre. Another thing to add is the details to the facial expression, even the subtle change are visible to the face, the small frown, the small smirk, every single muscles of faces moves subtly, not a lot of anime made this subtle change and instead they just changed the whole expression since it's easier.

The music are just great, as one of the few anime that have no opening song, the job then carried by the ending, and the ending couldn't be better in conveying the message of the anime, 3 different ending songs with a consistently high quality is very rare, but this anime successfully pulled this feat. The voice actors are right on point, just from looking at the character designs I imagined, ah this character should have voices like this, and they nailed it, and just like the theme songs, the quality never dropped! The sound effects are the dark horse, it seems so mediocre at first, but god knows when, it's suddenly becoming the key player in many important scenes, the wind howl, the fluttering petals, the ripples of water, ambient background noises, and many other things, it's so far behind, yet so close, perfect score for this department!

Conclusion:

Reasons to watch:
-High quality of both visuals and audio (despite the lack of opening)
-Decent story with wide cast of characters that matter, slow and realistic

Reasons NOT to watch:
-Rushed ending and a lot of things skipped, might be better to just read the manga