After many things occurred, I managed to get AnoHana back from Pearz. (Mainly, she watched ep02 and couldn't take it anymore.) This was an anime that I wanted to watch because it was just the type of thing I'm usually into; it hasn't really been what I expected so far, but it's definitely something that's interested me a lot.
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| Such a long name... |
For the sake of consistency, I'm covering ep01 along with ep02, even though Pearz has technically done the first episode already. I had thought that I would do a batch with ep03, but there actually is a lot to talk about, so I'm breaking it up. That was surprising~
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| The children! |
As Pearz has already mentioned, they didn't try to hide the "big secret": Menma is dead. We could tell from pretty early on, considering it was very clear how Jinta's father ignored her - and then the opening, where her adult form was replaced with a flower? You'd have to be a brick to not understand, I think.
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| I feel your pain; I need to tie my hair back too. |
One of the biggest problems I had, while starting this anime, was the fact that this topic hits kind of close to home. I found myself nitpicking everything, and then getting angered at some possible outcomes of the story (for example, the power of ghostly magic getting all the friends together again; that's pretty wishy-washy). I had to let that go after being unable to continue more than a minute without needing to pause and rant to the ever-annoyed Rho. *cough* I'm over that now.
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| I see enough bottles of nail polish to ask: where is the base coat? the top coat? She sucks. |
The fact that the friends live in the same town still but have grown apart to the point of avoiding each other is extremely believable. They harbour a lot of pain from their memories, something that they can't individually work through for their own personal reasons. Nonetheless, I still wasn't prepared for them to so readily come together; that did feel a little weak.
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| Wow, he grew fast... |
The entirety of ep02 was pretty much about Jinta, Poppo and Anaru coming together to play Nokemon Gold on the Ninpendo DZ (never mind that Pokemon Gold was actually for the Nintendo GBC; they might be talking about Pokemon HeartGold, which was for the Nintendo DS, although that's not the name they used...I digress). I guess, in terms of how easily they came together: Poppo doesn't seem to have any suppressed trauma (that's not to say it didn't affect him; he just coped better), while Anaru seems like she's been looking for a way to reconnect with Jinta, to a degree, and Jinta is... Well, based on the scene where the friends all left the clubhouse one-by-one, he was the one more "left behind" rather than having it be his own decision.
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| I can't remember Pokemon ever being this hard...although the hanging out is endearing. |
I assume that Tsuruko and Yukiatsu will be the next ones to "tackle", while solidifying the rekindling of the friendship between these three. One thing I find a little contrived is the idea that both Yukiatsu and Jinta (the main males) liked Menma, with Tsuruko and Anaru liking the two of them, respectively. So Menma has died, leaving the two females to be able to get together with the two males (I assume Poppo is too good for this). If that's the path that this anime will take (and the safe bet for now is that it will), I actually won't look forward to that. I can understand that, when you're young and/or hang around someone for a long time, you can begin having feelings for that person. But to actually have them end up together, with the idea of "hope in the future" (as shoujo tends to do) is a little ridiculous. I'm not even a believer that a circle of friends should inter-date.
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| He's sniffing it. The dress. He's sniffing the dress. Great. |
Another aspect of this episode was Yukiatsu randomly saying Menma at random periods when we randomly saw him. His final scene, wherein he breathed in the scent of her dress, was pretty summing as a whole: it's all creepy. Oh, and something's going on, obviously. I'm hoping it's not the obvious "Yukiatsu used to like Menma and is very affected by her death" and something more interesting like "Yukiatsu had something to do with Menma the day she died, maybe even her death". That would be interesting.
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| What the hell is this? Damn Nokemon; I don't have them all memorized yet! |
I hope this story leads to Jinta doing things by being driven by what he thinks is his stress (it could still be~), resulting in mending broken relationships and bringing the group back together. I wouldn't like it if ethereal encounters (i.e. Menma interfering as much as possible) was what brought the group back together. A little bit of supernatural is interesting, but that would just feel kind of like a cop-out. The story of loss and estrangement is familiar to many.
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| The shine circles remind me of my bone injuries. *shudder* |
So, to sum it all up, I'm pretty interested in AnoHana for now to see how it goes. It's not too slow-paced to not have anything to blog about, which had been my worry at the beginning. I hope they don't go down the obvious paths and adopt cliches (like everyone liking each other, ghosts bringing people together, and so on). We'll see; AnoHana ep03 is still downloading as I write this. So slow...
~Aaro
