Review of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

I would categorize Ano Hana as something more than a simple anime for recreation purposes. It’s something i’ll take for my life. It’s a life lesson, as cliche as it sounds. The story. Throughout the anime, we shortly get into the lives of a group of friends. Or as it’s presented to us - ex-friends. The reasons of the distance that now exists between them is shown bit by bit, as well as everyone’s feelings. The lost of a mutual friend can bound or destroy a relationship. In Ano Hana’s case, the grief was portrayed as something they wanted to hide, a weakness, a taboo due to theincident that lead to the death. The sadness, shame and guiltiness (within themselves or towards each other) were the main focus. It’s deeper than what the surface shows, and they do a good job showing that on the characters’ personalities.

The art. In this aspect, i have zero complaints. The drawing style matches perfectly the genre, it’s flooded with emotions but not flooded with lines. The expressions on the characters have intensity enough to add to the feelings, specially on the crying parts of it.

The sounds, be it in openings, endings or theme songs during the episodes were definitely a 10 for me. The sum of sentimental lyrics, sweet vocals and songs playing and overlapping at the exact needed moment complements the power of the narration.

Characters. There was, for sure, an awesome mix of personalities in here. The backgroud story with Menma was shown for every one of them, some happy, romantic and some with a antagony feel to it. But all of them very intimate, serving for the purpose of demonstrating how, no matter the relations between, all of the friends were extremely hurt and traumatized for life after losing such a dear friend. And we have to remember they were very young at the time. The author did a good job exhibiting how it marked them in that stage and how the feelings continued affecting as they grow up. Due to their age, it was just obvious they had no conditions of dealing with something as deep as death, as deep as grief. Only later on, after Menma’s appearance, they are capable of knowing why it happened, and realizing how they still had hate, blame and sadness in their hearts.
As for Menma, such a sweet character, but i still had some problems accepting her personality. She’s still a child, but sometimes her behaviour was quite annoying in my opinion.

I would grade my “enjoyment” and “overall” as an 8. It was a outstanding work and a very reflective and learning process for me. As said in the beginning, it’s deeper than the surface and you can see how the author tried his best to touch us with the story.