Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

I would like to start this review by doing two perhaps very odd things: 1. admit that I am very much biased in favour of this type anime dealing wtih serious emotional stuff, so that I will constantly be fighting the urge to give in to sentimentality and give this a 10/10 2. pay a compliment to a reviewer (Uriel1988) with an opinion very much opposite to my own, *while at the same time admitting that I agree with most of his criticisms of this series*! Seems highly contradictory, doesn't it? And yet I am going to try and pull it off... How to categorize a series likeAnohana?
Mentioning the main themes of loss, grief, trauma, the supernatural, jealousy and regret goes a long way towards fully describing this series. But there is also a crucial further aspect, and that is its deeply romanticized approach to both childhood and relationships between children. Romanticized to a degree where all realism (apart from the supernatural aspect, of course) simply goes out the window.
As Uriel1988 was fully justified to point out, so much changes between the ages of 6 and 16 that it is highly dubious that any 16 year old will be this scarred or obsessed by the loss of a friend (not even a relative or a girl/boyfriend) 10 years earlier. Let alone five 16 year olds. The simple fact that the 5 surviving members of the Peace Busters Club do have such scars and/or obsessions signifies that by watching this anime we have crossed over into a fantasy world where people are almost saintlike in their emotional attachments and where children in the midst of puberty behave as though they are retired adults looking back on their childhood through rose-coloured glasses. And that's all fine and good if this series is understood as such.

A world in which pre-schoolers go 'Dawson's Creek'?
Still, the main reason that I cannot give this series a 10/10 but only an 8/10 is that I can only suspend my disbelief to a certain degree. I can flow with the saintlike teenagers, the cutesy Moe-ghost of Menma and even the somewhat overly melodramatic portrayal and sudden resolution of the traumas of the surviving Peace Busters. But it was just too weird to see 6 year olds portrayed as having a 'Dawson's Creek' degree of smartness and intuition when it comes to love triangles and jealousy and such. I just don't buy that and it brings me to the question this series most makes me want to ask: would it really have been so objectionable to slide all these events to later points in the lives of these people? What if Menma had died age 12, where she could have been a much more well-rounded character? Then 10 years later could have been the time when the 5 survivors graduate college (or not, in the case of Jinta and Poppo) before they start their first real jobs and it all would have felt somewhat more believable in terms of matching these characters' behaviour with their age.

Characterization and flow of the story
Since realism is obviously not something the writers were going for here, the characterization feels rather thin as well. Just about all of the members of the Peace Busters are likeable enough in their own right (although for some it takes a while to be revealed) all basically stay flat characters. And that causes problems with filling all 11 episodes that this series consists of, since it means that there isn't much to fill the episodes until the almost inevitable solution is reached in the final one. This explains the addition of the 'fireworks arc', I feel. But it would probably have been better to either take the time to better flesh out the characters or to simply cut down this series to about 6 episodes. That's unusual, but it would probably have made for a much more compact and more satisfying story.

Art and music
Both were quite nice, I felt, with some interesting visuals (probably bases on photos of real locations, but still) and moving music.

So, over all an 8/10, with the understanding that this is an emo-anime that does not aim for realism.