Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
Anohana sadly fails fo live up to the hype surrounding it. It starts strong but quickly loses itself in pointless relationship drama for the vast majority of its runtime and only returns to form in the final episode. Looking at the tags, synopsis and many reviews, you might think this is a story about friendship and loss. I certainly did. And while those themes ARE the foundation of the plot, they aren't what the plot actually revolves around for 8 out of 11 episodes, which instead focus on the melodrama of the "unrequited love"-pentagon between the characters, with no progress on the actual plot whatsoever. Infact, Anohana literally goes out of its way to avoid plot progression as hard as possible, never attempting the most obvious solutions for countless episodes so it can continue to seep in pointless melodrama. (Spoiler example: Menma is constantly shown to be able to interact with the world just fine, yet there is never any attempt to show her moving objects or writing stuff to the other characters who doubt her existence, until it is plot convenient.)
Visually, the show is great and the sound is amazing, especially the opening and ending songs capture the themes of the show way better than the actual show itsself does. Visuals and audio are therefore very much the saving grace of Anohana, making up to some degree for the meandering plot so it never quite fully turns into a chore to watch.
The characters and their motivations sadly don't come across as understandable or natural. (Light spoilers ahead.) Some characters stay incredibly flat and unexplored (like the dark haired girl or Menma's parents for example) while with others, one almost wishes they'd stay less explored because their creepy obsession with a little girl can get seriously uncomfortable.
In general, it sometimes feels hard to relate to the obsession these characters have with their deceased childhood friend - they played a few times with a fellow 5 or 6 y.o. and then she died. But 10 years later, everyone is still in a state of utter obsession, their entire life revolving around that child that died back then. And when you get scenes like an almost-adult having a nightly sniffing ritual of a little girl's dress and kneeling and telling said girl's father how deeply in love he is with that 5 year old, "uncomfortable" doesn't even begin to express it.
The ghost girl in question herself rarely feels human at all, she's your typical bland moe bait, with 90% of her dialouge consisting of calling out the protagonist's name in cute ways and being inhumanly selfless, generous and inoffensive.
There are a few characters that stand out in a positive way; Poppo in particular does, and while she's at the center of the time-wasting relationship drama, Anaru as well, since at least her emotions make sense for a teenage girl and she's adequately explained.
In the end, Anohana is an acceptable, somewhat enjoyable show with a strong start and finish that might even elicit a tear or two at the end, but it's nowhere near the outstanding tearjerker it is hailed to be and the high expectations placed on it are bound to cause unnecessary disappointment.