Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

Anohana really sticks with me. Something about it just invades my thoughts on a day to day basis and reignites the passion I had felt while watching it. Some distinct aspect of it swims like a sperm cell past all of its counterparts and impregnates my mind with a syrupy contemplation. I nurture it tenderly, feeding it the warm milk of introspection, until I finally give birth to a physical manifestation of my thoughts. I look upon the offspring of my labor with pride, its attributes resembling both my subjective and objective views of Anohana. It crawls toward me, its fleshy limbs outreached, its expressionone of familial adoration. As I take it into my arms, I know in my heart what I have to do. I beat it to death with a wrench and flush it down the toilet.

Anohana sucks. I can barely stand to think about it, but somehow I can’t escape it. I think it’s because it represents everything I hate about anime. Whenever I see any shallow character trope, any unnecessary innuendo, any poorly delivered melodrama, any vague supernatural premise or any lost potential in any other anime, I think of Anohana. This cursed show haunts me like a prepubescent ghost child, slobbering all over me and crying in my ear when I don’t feed it enough hatred. At least my ghost isn’t as skin-crawlingly obnoxious as the little girl in Anohana, but that bar is set impossibly high. In order to even come close to that standard, you’d need to somehow create a character with an even flimsier set of motivations and behavior that leans even more toward that of a pet dog. Then you’d need to place the dead underage dog-child in a love triangle with horny teenagers, kidnap a few animator’s families and boom you got yourself a show on par with Anohana.

I felt embarrassed watching it. I felt ashamed to be indirectly associated with the demographic that Anohana panders so desperately to. I felt insulted to be on the receiving end of its pathetic and manipulative tearjerking attempts. And most of all, I felt depressed by the fact that a demand exists for this incompetent mediocrity.

9/10 for letting me live my ghost loli gf fantasy, but overall 5/10 for destroying my faith in cartoons as a medium.