Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
The show starts off pretty strong. It does a good job of setting up a melancholy and dreamy mood. As the episodes progress, you start to realize that this mood is extremely artificial. While forcing a mood is a common practice, in Ano Hana, it was overdone. Like anything made by A-1 Pictures, it's overdramatized, drawn out, and includes plot points that don't make any sense. It almost seems as if they expect us to fall for the same tricks over and over again. While a show like Your Lie in April had similar problems, YLIP still had redeeming traits such as the amazingproduction value, decent characters, and occasionally well-made dramatic elements. While Ano Hana does have decent production value (still not nearly as good as YLIP), the characters and dramatic elements are probably the worst thing about this show. The show rides on the expectation that you empathize with the characters and feel bad for them. However, this is very hard to do because none of the characters are actually likeable. As someone who thinks that characters don't have to be likeable to be considered good characters, I can say for certain that the characters aren't well made either. In fact, they are probably one of the worst set of characters I've ever seen in a show.
The characters are very stereotypical which isn't much of a problem for me. What is a problem, however, is how the characters' actions don't support their personality whatsoever. Almost every action that takes place is merely for the convenience of the plot. What makes things worse is the fact that there isn't much of a plot to begin with so basically anything action that is taken by the characters is for the purpose of making things more dramatic and eating up more time.
Going back to the point of how there isn't much plot, it surprises me that they were able to stretch about 4 episodes worth of story into 11. Besides the fact that they dragged the content and added unnecessary things for dramatic purposes, the reason that the story was able to go on for so long was due to one major flaw in the story: Jinta and Menma were unable to prove Menma's existence for 10 years. Yet we see in the show how easy it was to prove her existence. This is a huge plot hole but compared to the rest of the show's problems, it's honestly pretty excusable. Usually I don't find garbage or nonexistent plot to be much of a problem, especially if the shows's purpose isn't to tell a compelling story, but considering that Ano Hana is a drama, there should be a decent plot and decent characters but yet it delivers neither.
The one redeeming trait of this show besides its decent production value is that it is pretty emotional, but only at the end. It tries so hard to get you emotional and the fact that it only succeeded once is pretty hilarious. Nevertheless, this is probably the only reason I gave it a 2 instead of a 1. And to be honest, I've gotten more emotional on shows that weren't even focused on the emotional aspect. This goes to say how much of a waste of time this show is.
TL;DR: Garbage and nonexistent story, horrible characters, not enjoyable at all, but can be emotional.