Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

I went through three phases while watching this. Phase one (episodes 1-3): looks interesting, however, Menma is really irritating. Phase Two (episodes 4-7): It is absolutely rubbish, the screenplay has more many holes in it than an old rag, and Menma was still really irritating, however, the other characters also rapidly started becoming very irritating, so I expected they would end up rating the same as Menma. Phase three (episodes 8-11): everyone is irritating, and I was just cynically enjoying their race for which of them would piss me off the most as a result. Plus, the right royally entertaining last episode ensured that they all crossed the finish line at once. Congratulations. +++++ Even if I hadn't known beforehand that the author was the queen of melodrama herself, Mari Okada herself, I would have easily realized that as I was watching it, because there are all her trademarks without exception: a bunch of main characters, whose character is reduced to a single distinctive trait, every character suffering from some trauma, being into some fetish, complex romantic entanglements between multiple characters, lacking simple boundaries, pathetically emotional ranting, and all over the place are fragile, broken and tormented souls. Sometimes either Mari or the script editors manage to water down such a deadly cocktail to make it easier to swallow (as in Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea, for example), but this was so clear that I kept going from cynically laughing to being close to throwing up - most intensely in the aforementioned last episode. There's probably no point in listing everything that does not make sense and is wrong, so I shall just mention what was good: certainly the opening, the animation and quite a bit of the ending. For these and for the fact that I watched it to the end, I give a stronger 1 star. (29/03/2021)

Did someone close to you die and it was an accident? It's your fault. Or the survivors' fault or whatever. So let's eat guilt for eleven whole episodes, only to cry at the end, talk it out on the deck, and everything's fine again, everyone's a sunny person again. Menma is annoying, yet everyone loves her – it's only because she hasn't grown up and become a bitch. I thought the best thing about the anime was the ending. I listened to that one every time it played. Then the animation – loved it. Yup, and the rest of it is terrible. Superficial, weepy, going nowhere, stupid. I'm sure there are anime that mourn a dead friend/buddy much better. Even though most of them suck, because this masochistic basking in suffering over the loss of a loved one is almost without exception handled horribly in the Japanese setting. AnoHana is no exception, even though the dead girl does come back dead and happily assists us in the torment (and that's why everyone loved her so much?!). A weak 2 stars. (28/05/2015)