Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

It seems that in recent years there has been a rash of heartstring-tugging dramas featuring high school aged main characters trying to cope with unfortunate events. I normally avoid such shows, having been disappointed by them in the past. They tend to make use of a formula in which the main characters, having been firmly established as big cutie pies, are showered with traumatic incidents in an attempt to garner sympathy from the audience. The audience then watches as the aforementioned cutie pies either get crushed by the pressure of the events they've undergone, or stand up and triumphantly solve all of their problems withsimple, touching solutions. Either route presumably leads to tears on the part of the audience.

Believe it or not, that isn't good writing. Imagine for a moment that there's a “Please Enter Password” box to reach your audience's heart and mind. Writing in the above fashion is equivalent to smashing your face (or any other serviceable part of your anatomy) on the keyboard and hitting enter in the hopes that something will touch the right note. It's lazy, blunt, overtly manipulative, makes certain unflattering assumptions about the intelligence level of the audience, and leads to characters who are defined not by their own personalities, but by the (pardon French) shit luck that they've had in life. Characters become as simple as “the girl who was raped,” “the girl whose parents died,” or “the guy who is a blind, anemic, legless albino.” Memorable characters are those who have formed a unique, composite perception of the world based on what has happened to them—they are not simply defined by the event itself.

All that being said, I decided to give “anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day” a watch because the concept intrigued me, and there's always the chance that something can surpass the average in an over saturated genre. By the end of the series, I was pleasantly surprised. Anohana isn't quite what I'd call “great,” but it's relatively original, and it's leaps and bounds better than many shows which rely on the formula that I described above.

Anohana is about six childhood friends. The death of one member of this childhood circle of buddies drove them apart at a young age. Fast forward ten years; the five remaining friends are now in high school, and a very strange event has forced the friends to gather once more to help each other confront their guilt about what happened on the day that their young friend's life was cut short.

Part of what makes the show so charming is the multitude of ways it plays with traditional character development. The first is that, in a somewhat ass-backwards approach, the show begins by displaying the characters in high school, and then reveals what they were like as children through narrative flashbacks as the plot moves forward. Interesting concept; we're shown the way the characters have changed (or, in some cases, haven't changed) in reverse order. The second thing that's of note here is that every character has been affected by the same event, but they've all responded in different ways. Some throw themselves at school with a passion, some live simple lives of menial labor, and some have dropped all their aspirations and become shut-ins. “Dealing with guilt” is a pretty mature theme, and for a show to tackle it using a character study, in such a head-on manner, through showing and not telling, is pretty admirable. The plot itself is relatively simple and a little slow-moving at times, but these characters actually have enough depth that I was content just to watch them interact with each other.

The art and animation here strike just the right note: Pretty enough to give a semblance of realism, but not overly flashy. Backgrounds look nice and all that good stuff, but what really shines is the way that the characters have been designed and animated. Obviously childhood vs. adulthood is a running theme in the show, so it looks like special effort was taken to highlight both the similarities and the differences between the adult and child character models. High school isn't that far in the past for me, and I can honestly say that in terms of mimicking the motions of people in the 16-19-ish age group, I feel the animation here is spot on. The awkward sidelong glances at ex-friends, the slouchy manner of walking, the way they expertly handle their smart phones. Every motion that these characters make seems to echo that of real teenagers. A job well done, to be sure.

So where did the show go wrong? Well, it's a drama, and an essential element of drama is striking the proper balance of emotions. Subtly conveying feelings in a visual medium like animation is a difficult task. To its credit, I'd say Anohana gets it right for about seventy percent of the show's runtime. When the characters stand in uncomfortable silence, avert their eyes at awkward moments, smile wistfully as nostalgia creeps up on them, laugh at old inside jokes, or transition to using old nicknames and phrases instead of proper “adult” speech, that says a lot about their state of mind without out-and-out screaming and crying. However, there are plenty of moments where the series is guilty of the old sin of “laying it on too thick,” and resorts to...well...out-and-out screaming and crying. A few of these outbursts are forgivable—after all, sometimes things in real life DO get that heated, especially when dead people are involved—but by the end of the series, there is too much bawling and shouting, and too often. This knocks the show down a few pegs.

Another flaw, although very slight, lies in the soundtrack. It's not a bad soundtrack (the OP/ED songs are obscenely catchy, and the rest of the music is about average for the genre). But there seems to be one piano-driven melody that plays during just about every potentially sad/touching moment of the show. It's a good track, but my life would have been just fine if I hadn't heard it seventy-five times in the course of four hours, thanks.

The last main problem I had with Anohana is that, while the characters are interesting, it is necessary to remember that the show does, in fact, have a plot. Sometimes that plot seems to stagnate a little bit, and there are a lot of “false conclusion” moments where the characters think they've solved a plot-related problem, only to suddenly go “Oh wait...guess that didn't REALLY solve it.” These are gimmicky, cheap excuses for suspense, and the series would be better without them. Similarly, when the show really does conclude, the presence of so many false conclusions makes it not quite as satisfying a payoff as it could have been.

So, despite a couple of flaws, I found this to be a fairly enjoyable series. Well-crafted characters and decent writing, occasionally marred by some flaws in overdramatic execution, lead me to place this firmly in the “above average” realm. In my humble opinion, this is teenage drama done well.