Here’s the 2nd part I promised. As I mentioned before, I’m going to be listing everything I either watched or maybe even re-watched over this very lazy summer break of mine.
Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day (2011)
Everyone processes grief in their own way. This is a show that addresses that perfectly.
The first thing I watched this summer, Anohana was such an amazing experience for me that really tugged a lot at my heart and honestly hit closer to home than almost anything else I’ve seen. I’ve been through a fair share of events in my life that have had me dealing with loss and this is a show that I think portrayed the feelings of long-standing unaddressed grief pretty much spot on. It’s one of those anime I think everyone should see at least once in their life because you really never know when a piece of media might help someone get through something really tough.
As for the overall quality, the show is perfectly bite-sized at an easy 11 episodes. The animation and music are amazing. The pacing is pretty much perfect for the entire run, and this is only helped by the way the characters are written. The story follows a group of 6 friends, all flawed in their own ways, and the way these flaws are addresses eventually brings the story around in a way that finishes everything perfectly. The ending of the show had me crying my eyes out with how well done it was. This is one of those shows that I think is a great example of working with a little to create a lot, as with the limited cast and short runtime, you wouldn’t expect it to do as much as it does. But the people working on this show definitely knew what they were doing and took full advantage of their bounds, creating something they should be very proud of.
Highly recommend this show to anyone, especially those who are into emotional dramas (like me). I wish I had more to say about Anohana, but it’s really just one of those shows I think is best experienced blind, so just go watch it when you get the chance. Also a fair warning should be put out there that the first episode is kind of wack and not indicative of the rest of the show, don’t let it put you off.
Air (2005)
A show I picked up as an introduction into the works of Maeda Jun and Key, as all over the place as this show was, I still enjoyed it quite a bit.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “what the hell is this artstyle man?” I completely understand where that question might come from. I will admit the designs of all the characters in this show are a bit repulsive. But even as dated as the visuals are, I’ve still grown a bit of a soft spot for these giant moe eyes and bangs with more linework than their entire body that you’d see in a lot of mid-2000’s anime. Something about it is just oddly appealing to me? I don’t really want to see anything made with the style anymore, but it represents a different era that I find oddly intriguing to look back on, as my time on the internet started at around the very tail end that “era.”
Now for the show itself. Air is a drama coming from Maeda Jun of Key Studio, who both are known for creating some classic visual novels, one such being the widely acclaimed Clannad, which was later adapted phenomenally by Kyoto Animation. Along with that, they also produced Angel Beats!, an original show regarded as a “classic” in a lot of online anime discourse. So with all of this taken into account, I wanted a somewhat short introduction into the works of Jun and Key, so I figured this might be a good start as it also happens to come from my personal favorite anime studio.
This show is obviously an adaptation of a visual novel, so the way the plot goes about can seem a bit messy sometimes when the studio involved tries to hit all the major plot points of the original work. Since visual novels are made to have different paths, adapting them to anime means either A. sacrificing all other paths and focusing on adapting only one, or B. going through every path individually in a linear sort of way. Air decided to go with the latter. The show focuses on about four(ish) different girls and the story of the main character guy helping them through something in their life. The problem with the way this show went about that was how when an arc for one of the girls finished, said girl would most of the time just stop showing up in the show at all in favor of the next girl getting most, if not all of the focus. This is what made the show feel a bit strange at times, because you start to build up a sort of attachment to a character, then their arc gets resolved and you never get to see them again.
Even with that pretty big problem, I did still at the end of the day quite enjoy the experience of watching Air. The characters (while some were short lived) were all pretty enjoyable to watch. They had interesting dialogue and what made me want to keep watching was seeing the ways they would interact with one another (this seems to be a common strength of most Key works as well). The animation was also quite good, which is impressive considering it was only the second TV anime to come from Kyoto Animation. The backgrounds and the environment felt very real, which feels silly to say because the anime actually does take place in a real small town on the coast of Japan named Kami in the Hyogo prefecture. Other than what I’ve said, it’s hard to put into words what made this show enjoyable other than just saying for what it was the plot was good, the characters were entertaining, and in general the show was well made. It was a good melodrama, and I’d recommend it to those who are into that kind of thing.
Angel Beats! (2010)
Another widely praised show I had been planning to watch for a while, Angel Beats is something that turned out a personal disappointment.
There’s a lot of shows the online anime community seems to go crazy about, praising them to the ends of the earth as one of the greats that will always seem to come up in discussions of, “what anime made you cry the most?” Angel Beats is one of those. As a big fan of dramas and supernatural fiction, Angel Beats was a show I was very excited to watch. Like mentioned before, it was yet another work from Maeda Jun and Key Studio, also known for the original Clannad visual novel, and I had just gotten off of watching Air which I definitely enjoyed and also happened to come from the same people. To say the least, I had high expectations for Angel Beats. For a while, those expectations were being met pretty well.
I was loving this show at the start. Angel beats had one of the best beginnings to an anime I had seen in a while. The concept of the show was really intriguing, the characters seemed pretty alright, and overall it was damn well made. The first little arc involving the girl from the band I thought was great, and the alternative op they had for only episode 4 blew my mind when it came on. However even with everything this show had going for it, there were a lot of things that started to build up a lot of frustration within me as I was watching. The show’s cast was way too big for how short it was. It seemed like I hardly got to know anyone at all, and it just seemed like everyone there was created to fit a certain trope (actually, that’s exactly what 90% of the characters were). You had the kuudere, the tsundere, the bro, etc. And here’s the thing, tropey characters can be fine. Some of my favorite characters from shows I like are just walking tropes. But the way Angel Beats went about expressing these tropes is pretty much exclusively in its humor, or sorry, “humor.”
Therein lies one of my biggest issue with Angel Beats, I just didn’t find it funny. Anytime the show went for a joke I would just roll my eyes in response, and the show went for jokes for a large majority of the show. There was only one character I found myself consistently laughing at, and that was T.K., who was just a comic relief guy that would randomly blurt out phrases in English which I realize now sounds a lot less funny than it actually was in the show. When your show relies so much on comedy for its enjoyment, and said comedy is just annoying to the person watching, they start to dislike what they’re putting themselves through. I had legitimately started to think to myself as I was watching, “I’m too old for this.”
It got to the point where I just didn’t care about any of the characters or their overarching plots. I would get glimmers of hope here and there in characters and potential for something I felt I could finally latch onto as being really good, but then the payoff just wasn’t there for it. The ending I thought was at least good, it just felt like the show rushed super fast to close everything out by the end. The final scene felt super forced, and when you aren’t at all attached to the characters on screen during a scene that is supposed to be super emotional, it makes it very hard to feel the intended emotion at all. The show ended and I can honestly say I was happy it ended, because the show was just becoming a slog to get through.
Even with all of the complaints I have with Angel Beats, I still won’t call it a bad show. As I mentioned before, it’s very well made, the animation and music are great, and overall the concept of the show is actually very interesting, and let me reiterate that the start of the show is legitimately amazing. My problems arise in that I just wasn’t attached to anything at all by the time the plot started to get closer to closing out. My gripes with the show started to outweigh the pros and overall I can’t say I really enjoyed my time. I know it’s one of those shows that’s super special to a lot of people, so at the end of the day I will still recommend it to people on the chance that they end up loving it. You never know what you might like, so I guess the best thing I can say about Angel Beats is that it’s just not for me.
Eureka Seven (2005)
What I thought would just be just a fun action mecha turned out to be much more than that and a new contender for my personal favorites.
Now this was a pleasant surprise. Part of the reason I created an account on MyAnimeList was in hopes of finding gems that may have been lost from the public eye with the passage of time. Eureka Seven is a perfect example of that. This was a show I randomly stumbled upon while wasting time browsing MAL, and what caught my eye was just how nice it looked. This is a show from 2005 and it looks better than probably half of the anime coming out this year. My curiosity brought me to looking up the op on YouTube and from there I was hooked. I got a friend of mine involved who I know is a fan of mecha and doesn’t have a problem with longer shows (this one is 50 episodes), and once we both were off for the summer we gave it a try.
Eureka Seven starts off a bit smaller scale. The main protagonist Renton is simply just living his boring life in his boring hometown, the only thing pushing him forward being his childlike dreams. He is confronted with becoming part of the group he idolizes, a dream come true right? But he eventually learns things aren’t the way he hoped. To describe Eureka Seven simply, it’s a coming of age story about coming to terms with your heroes not being who you thought they were. It’s about embracing the counter culture and rising above those who may be holding you down. It’s about people directly confronting where they’ve messed up and trying to fix it so the future can make a turn for the better.
To add to this, Eureka Seven is a show that isn’t afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve. There are points in the show where you can see distinct references to other famous titles such as Evangelion, a show you can see influence from throughout many parts of Eureka Seven. Along with that, you could possibly see ways in which it influenced shows that came about later on, for example Gurren Lagann, where like Eureka Seven, the willpower of the individual is basically linked to their physical power.
The show slowly shifts overtime in many ways. Characters you start out despising become personal favorites by the end. The once small-scale adventure story about rebelling against those who hold us down eventually becomes a story about saving the entire world, all revolving around the romance of the two main characters Eureka and Renton. The pacing of this is phenomenal and not a single episode is what I would call unnecessary filler. Even episodes that don’t really mean much for the grand story I’d still call important because they develop the relationship you as the viewer have with the cast more and more.
Therein lies the greatest strength of Eureka Seven, its cast. Everyone is so distinct in both their designs and personality. On top of that, the chemistry between everyone in Gekkostate makes seeing them interact such a delight. It’s so easy to root for everyone by the end of the 50 episode run because of just how lovable everyone is.
Eureka Seven is an original anime from studio Bones, known nowadays for huge hits such as Fullmetal Alchemist, Mob Psycho 100, or My Hero Academia. Even with this being one of their older titles under their belt, they still showed amazing prowess in their craft. Watching Eureka Seven really does feel like just a ride. The animation is so smooth. The soundtrack is a mix of fun edm and rock, along with a bunch of brilliant orchestral pieces for when the show is a bit more serious. On top of that, watching giant mechs riding surfboards through the sky is just plain cool.
To put it simply, this show is amazing. I loved it all the way through, and while it definitely had a hiccup or two near the end, it was still able to bring things home in a way I thought was great. Even with its longer runtime at 50 episodes, I highly recommend this anime to anyone. It’s fun, it’s unique, and the cast of the show is among one of the best I’ve seen in anything I’ve watched. If you have the time and will to commit to something with a bit more length (that is without a doubt justified,) give this one a try.
If you managed to get this far, thanks, I appreciate it. This turned out to be a bit longer than I thought it’d be, but I’m still pretty happy with it and I’ve been enjoying just venting my thoughts into my keyboard. Look forward to part 3 in a couple days.
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