Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

Anohana is an anime that you find almost once in a lifetime and certainly not like anything that'll make you go on a share-craze, pestering everyone around to watch this beautiful anime. Anohana's enjoyment is more personal. Its story is tender and touching, pulling the most deeply buried strings in us with poignant vignettes of childhood friendship. You'll cry, long and hard and feel rotten for a week after watching this anime. Does that mean you should steer clear? Does all this emotion mean that it's a soppy, romance, over-dramatised teenage drama? NO It's light, refreshing, funny and quirky as well and most of the feels don't reallycome from heavily embellished romance drama. What does give rise to the emotions are friends being slowly pulled apart and then re-uniting to accept their feelings about why they broke apart.

The anime is fragile. It's balanced very finely between slice of life and fantasy/supernatural. It's balanced between comedy and tragedy. It's balanced between romance and, well, non-romance.
It's this quality that makes this anime so beautiful.

And I'm not ashamed to admit, I CRIED after I watched it. And the movie too.

Certainly a great must-watch anime.