Seinen slice of life, with realistic artwork and emotions.

byNanimefaN on2018-09-06 03:15

A nice collection of stories taken from day-to-day life of normal people. The underlying theme is "hope".

byfafnir on2017-02-23 18:38

Fan of braindead entertaining, move along, nothing to see,

But if once in a while you appreciate something that make you use your brain and reflect about yourself and the world around you, you will appreciate this series.

Each ep is a short story, which intelligently and tactfully explore some aspect of human behavior or thoughts, society function or dysfunction, the effects of age, sex, education, origin, environment and how each affect the others and shape the human being, in good or bad ways.

I especially liked that it touched some hard/difficult subjects which are never or almost never talked about, even outside of animation, and im pretty certain at least one of these subjects will resonate with your own experience or with some other person you know.

byhorrorcore on2012-07-10 20:27

Great mature anime for grown up viewers. I recommend it to everyone who either likes dramas or who wants to watch something else then a bunch of young schoolgirls goofing around.

bymal2g on2008-12-22 00:09

Quite.

I recently came across in my not so local vendor of imported continental goods, a 2.5 litre container of vanilla icéd cream which I have grown rather fond of despite it's unremarkable but reliable qualities. Naturally, there are abundant similarities to that there and this here, otherwise I would not have wasted your time in the mentioning.This is an exercise in serious business, heavily let down by flaws in execution. But not actually bad; just mediocre when it is obvious it could have worked.

Art monketry would be one grating element therein. True, there is few necessities to showcase those [cynicism omitted] art degrees, but even so it turns out as less than able to perform on the graphic department. This may be because there simply is no foundation of "realistic" arting to draw on in the talent pool, no foundation of appreciation in the fan base, or a bad budget. I'm inclined to think the former two, as everything else was done to a fairly reasonable standard, but my personal bias against this general art style made it significantly more grating. Background fore ground and character design are, to be polite, bland.

The sound department tried. While they did pull a few dozen cheap tricks, the lack of trauma in the story they were called to support and/or highlight just did not call for a particularly meaningful musical score. Voice monkies were of fairly competent capability, along with reasonable mixing and sound engineering foundation to help deliver on fairly dull lines and expression.

The problem that you've probably guessed is that there really was no real substance to the stories they were conveying. While it isfar from standard issue stuff, it is not written to entice the viewer into sympathy, simply to tell a story that passes the time.

In this mild goal they succeed very well, but that setting out to waste time is hardly a noble achievement. Pulling and composing 13 individual and fairly original stories from a 20+ year old sauce book and making them still coherent for the current situation is no mean feat; and had the sauce book itself been heartrending, they could have really gone somewhere with it.

While this may well have been held back by completely isolated characters, I do not think it was all that significant. each individual, despite their limited screen time, has enough foundation and development to make them worth following for the duration of their little ballad, and no further. True, this is accomplished almost entirely by non-stop conversations, but it does make a nice change from the norm, albeit one that too much can be had of in very short order.

Sadly, I simply cannot find much in this series to recommend it, besides the fact that it is at least original. The art genuinely becomes a negative distraction at times, and generally slow pace means there is plenty of time to go meta-critical on it.

It was enjoyable, do not get me wrong, but not for any technical achievement, simply because it was a novelty.

...

Which, is pretty damning if you think about it too much.

tl;dr

beige
more grown-up
works to a limited extent
lacking in anything refreshing
not worth a concentrated exposure