Review of Sing "Yesterday" for Me

I found something endearing about this show at the very first episode. Not something I could put my finger on. I ended up realizing the level of work the show put into creating a depiction of relationships confined by people's innate inability to say what they think. For some this can be a struggle to bear through, but for the sake of creating believable and flawed human relationships, it was a bold but necessary decision. For me, a strength that shines through is the animation's ability to convey character emotions through small ques given to the audience through facial and body language. While the level ofanimation quality itself is not anything to ride home about, it is acceptable and has its own uniqueness, which distinguishes it enough from its genre counterparts.

The characters are generally well written, though this does not mean you will necessarily like all of them. Real people aren't always very likable. Each has their own back story and grounding for their own narrative decisions. Some of those stories are more empathetic than others though. These stories are meant to direct the viewer towards understanding why the show ends the way it does and why the characters end up where they do, without implicating exactly what decisions they will make.

I suppose this is where I start to have issues with the narrative decisions of the show. Firstly, there seems to be some dragging of the feet, so to speak, in terms of important events happening throughout the run time. Often it feels like character interactions repeat themselves as some of them continue to wallow in their ways. This is kind of the point of the show, but I won't go into that as not to spoil anything. The ending also takes a bit of a leap in terms of audience expectation. Based on people's reception to the last episode it doesn't seem its just me who feels this way. The ending will still make many people happy I think, but it did in a way feel undeserved and kind of out of left field because of some character's decisions.

Overall, I feel that the themes of losing direction in life and being tied down by the past will resonate with a lot of viewers. The down to earth portrayal of characters also adds to their believability. Some weird narrative and pacing choices do bring the show down for me though. Overall, I think it is a good show worth watching if you have any interest in the romance/drama genre.

7.5/10