Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 31 · 11:06pm Apr 19th, 2022
Been featuring a lot of movies lately, huh? Well, there's another this week, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but then I finally get to talk about Toradora! Those plus 6 other items, 2 of them rather recent, after the break
And speaking of recent, would it help anyone if I also included dates when things were produced? Based on something Chris commented on a while back, I'd added episode counts, but I don't know if age is a factor for people. I'm kind of afraid that if I do, people won't give older stuff a fair shake. Anyway.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a great movie, and not just because it contains baseball. Not that non-fans would get bogged down about it. The main characters like to play catch and practice batting frequently, though they talk about all kinds of things while they do, so it shouldn't alienate any viewers. It's based on a novel, which I haven't read (which is the norm—it's just to say I don't have any thoughts on differences from the novel, since I don't know what they'd be), and apparently by the same author as Paprika!, which I hadn't even realized was also based on a novel.
High school girl Makoto mostly hangs out with two guys, Chiaki and Kosuke, who are the trio of baseball fans, though she also has a gal pal named Yuri. While doing chores around the school, Makoto slips and falls on a strange small object. Later that day, she crashes her bike in such a way that she should have been hit and killed at a train crossing, but something about the combination of flying through the air and wishing events undone causes her to skip back in time far enough to prevent it.
She was on an errand to visit her aunt, an art restorer at a museum, so when Makoto gets there, she confides about her experiences. Her aunt seems at once strangely receptive to the idea that it's true while also possibly humoring what she considers fanciful imaginings. It was one of many clever touches throughout the movie that the aunt may actually have knowledge of this effect, though it's never confirmed. In any case, Makoto starts out using her ability, once she learns to control it, for very frivolous purposes.
As you'd expect, there end up being some strict limits to how this power works, and once she figures that out, she becomes much more responsible about trying to help those around her, and the movie takes a more serious turn as there are some legitimately life-or-death situations she has to contend with. As with any time travel plot, it can get tangled as to what things get undone and which characters could know which things. It's cleverly meshed, and I enjoyed watching it play out as Makoto tries to engineer everything for the maximum benefit, only to find out she's bitten off more than she can chew. Through it all, her aunt serves as a sounding board for what Mokoto's trying to accomplish and how her attempts failed, which makes for a neat relationship between them.
I haven't even gotten into the romance aspect, which is a strong B plot, as there are various crushes characters do or don't act on, and all that can change each trip through the timeline. I found it refreshingly realistic, not just in which characters like which other ones, but how that causes all of them to act, including... well, you know how toddlers can be totally ignoring one toy, but as soon as someone else wants it, suddenly they very much care about it? We've all seen that happen in the real world where romances are involved, and there was a sensitive treatment of it here.
I really only had two hangups about the movie, and I'll have to tiptoe around them to avoid spoilers. One, just that the power to alter history is incredible, and you'd hope that it wouldn't be the kind of technology any yutz would have access to. That kind of bugged me. And the resolution of the penultimate scene (the last plot development, as the rest is denouement) felt like a bit of a copout to me, as I didn't get a sense of what time gap would result. It seemed like it would be significant. That and I felt like the mechanic of when you actually use up a time travel opportunity was inconsistent. For most of the movie, it was smart about not being able to cheat the system, but one instance seems like a way to do the "wish for infinite wishes" thing. I'd have to think about it a bit more to decide whether all that was internally consistent.
Art was good quality, and while the characters themselves were less detailed than the backgrounds, it didn't bother me, and the motion was very fluid. Music was pretty good. It won a number of awards, and it's easy to see why, though I was a little surprised the average rating wasn't higher (insert usual disclaimer about usability of movie review scores). I'm also impressed that Makoto's VA in the dub had barely turned 13 when the movie was released, so even younger when she worked on it, and she did a great job.
Rating: very good.
Toki o Kakeru Shoujo, movie, relevant genres: drama, romance, sci-fi (only insofar as time travel exists).
And Toradora! Yay! I watched this almost two years ago after a friend recommended it as one of the best of the high school romance genre he'd seen, and I have to agree. Now that I've seen a lot more of them since, the plot doesn't stand out as that original. Few of the love triangles will surprise you, but the reason why one of them didn't work out caught me by surprise, which also led to a second plot element that really let this series shine.
A guy named Ryuji had a couple of good friends in elementary school, a boy (Kitamura) and a girl (Minori), but he went to a different middle school than they did. He has the bad fortune of a face that just makes him look mean, even though he's kind and quiet, so everyone's scared to approach him, and he goes through middle school friendless. However, he will be reuniting with those two in high school, so when he shows up for his first day, he's looking forward to reconnecting with them.
Two problems immediately occur. In the intervening years, Minori had made friends with a girl named Taiga, who is very small and very much a spitfire. So when Taiga and Ryuji collide in the hallway, everyone's ready for a fierce fight, given her reputation and his appearance. Yet they both brush themselves off, calmly apologize, and go about their way. Crisis averted.
When Ryuji gets home, he finds a love note in his bag. He's a smart enough guy, and he quickly figures out what must have happened: Taiga accidentally dropped it in there when they ran into each other. It's his first day, and he doesn't know anyone well enough for them to fall in love with him, so no way could it be meant for him. He'll just look for her at school the next day and give it back to her. Crisis averted.
Which is all true. But Taiga can't bank on him figuring that out, so she follows him home, and land o' Goshen, he lives across a very narrow alley from her, with her den window perfectly aligned with his kitchen window. She can just sneak in there after dark and grab the letter back before he finds it and gets the wrong impression. But he catches her red-handed.
Eventually, she calms down and realizes he's a kind spirit who's willing to help her, and to her advantage, the person she'd meant the letter for is Kitamura. Ryuji can help! And now coming back to the second problem I alluded to earlier, Ryuji had spent his three years apart from Minori developing a big crush on her. And I can totally relate. It's so easy to fall in love with someone who's not there, where you have this idealized version of them in your head, and you're not getting any feedback that they're not interested. As long as they're talking crushes, and Minori just happens to be Taiga's best friend, they can trade matchmaking tasks.
Only they spend so much time together planning all this that everyone else assumes they're dating. Minori doesn't want to horn in on Taiga's romance, even if she returned Ryuji's feelings, given how tough it is to find anyone compatible with her. And for Kitamura's part... well, I'll just say there's a bit of history with him and Taiga, and it was a nice piece of characterization for her to delve into how that went and why. It even sheds light on another plot thread that starts up around this point: Taiga lives alone, and she's horrible at it, so Ryuji does as much cooking and cleaning as he can for her, but it's easier if she just hangs out with him and his mom, since they're right next door anyway. And she settles in so cleanly that Ryuji's mom considers her part of the family. But why does Taiga live alone? There are some teases of contact between her and her divorced parents, and it seems like she's closer to her mom. Ryuji encourages her to reconnect with her father, as the bits and pieces of incidental contact Ryuji's had with him make it seem like he's not such a bad guy.
This was a brilliant piece to add to the plot, because it opened up so many possibilities of where it could go and opportunities to branch off the cliched love triangles. He just wants Taiga to be happy, but she's in a fragile place, and even minor setbacks could be devastating to her, plus Minori's known her for years longer than Ryuji has, so you'd think she'd be the one taking the wheel if it was a good idea. This really was the catalyst that brought more originality into the plot and set up the series' most emotional moments. That carries everything up to the climax.
And then it dropped the ball a bit, imo. I found the denouement weak. I guess Ryuji couldn't really have done anything differently than he did, but I don't understand why Taiga made the choice she did over the last couple of episodes, or why she chose to do... whatever it was at the end. I could chalk that up to teenage stupidity in thinking it would be dramatic, I guess, but it just seemed weird.
Partway through, they bring in yet another character, Ami, who's a model and an old friend of Kitamura's, and she's an interesting sort. She can lay on the charm, but Taiga dislikes her from the word go, thinking it's all a veneer over a core of inner bitch. Only Kitamura knows for sure if she's right, and he's surprisingly blunt about it. Ami serves her purpose, though I really wish they hadn't made her a potential love interest for Ryuji as well, since then it's devolving into a harem anime.
The OVA is just a slice-of-life bonus episode about making lunch for someone. There were also four mini-episodes called Toradora SOS! Hurray for Foodies (Toradora SOS! Kuishinbo Banbanzai), which are just quick silly things where they debate whether one food or the other is better, and the moderator always declares it a tie.
I liked the art a lot, and the music was pretty good too. I especially liked the first-half closing song "Vanilla Salt." It's good overall, but the beginning was particularly cool.
Rating: very good.
25 episodes + 4 mini episodes + 1 OVA, relevant genres: romance, comedy, drama, coming of age.
Almost caught up back through "the." Maybe I'll finish it next time!
Lu Over the Wall (Yoaketsugeru Ru no Uta, movie)—middle school student Kai lives in a town where fishing is really the only industry, but he has a love of music. His friends Yuho and Kuino recruit him to be in a band, but since such things are looked down upon, they have to practice in secret. The ideal spot is a rock formation everyone is afraid of, due to legends of savage merfolk living there, who will eat any intruders. But of course the legends are wrong, and young mermaid Lu is attracted by the music. Thus Kai learns that merfolk are no monsters, and he sets about changing everyone's minds, including a few who want to exploit the situation. It's a cute enough story, but it suffers from a few drawbacks. One, it's incredibly similar to Ponyo in both tone and plot. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that was one of the weakest Ghibli films, imo, because of the (for lack of a better word) juvenile story without the clever underpinnings that normally elevate their work to things that have broad appeal across a wide age range. Two, the pacing was all over the place. It needlessly dragged out several places that were obvious or uninteresting. Three, it often had this weird repetitive randomness to it which reminded me of really old Disney movies or 60s-70s Hanna Barbera stuff and how the visuals went. Art was odd, too, seemingly going for a deliberate simplified look that fought the visual richness it was going for, I felt. Music was okay. Rating: decent, relevant genres: fantasy, drama.
Mardock Scramble (3 short films)—Rune Balot is a fifteen-year-old prostitute in Mardock City who's caught the eye of famous gambler and underworld figure Shell. Though the girls who catch his eye never last long: they soon turn up dead, and he's had all memory of them removed so he can't be questioned. Rune serves as a valuable chess piece, then. The good guys (I never had a good idea of what kind of organization they were beyond some manner of think tank) know her number will be up soon, so if they can grab her just before she gets killed, they can have her testify against him. But they're not quite that lucky. Dr. Easter does pull her from the explosion, but she's in sorry shape, and another thing I'm not clear on: this works to his advantage, so he may have intentionally let it happen, which would be rather callous. In doing so, he can invoke Scramble, which is a legal exception allowing the use of experimental technologies in extreme cases needed to save someone's life. He makes her into a cyborg. Then she's not only a witness but a powerful ally against Shell's henchmen, including a group of body part fetishists, who thankfully don't live long (they very quickly get annoying), and the OP Dimsdale Boiled. See the egg theme in all those names? Dr. Easter even has an egg-shaped ship, and he teams up Rune with an AI named Oeufcoque (French for eggshell). There's even more imagery: using the egg theme to branch to Humpty Dumpty, then Alice in Wonderland references to Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. There's a lot of nudity of Rune, and while some of it felt gratuitous, the majority was reasonable, plus tied in some clever (imo) Garden of Eden imagery. At first, it's more gunplay and brute force in trying to bring Shell to justice, but then it turns into a gambling strategy plot as that becomes the means by which they can recover Shell's memories. Pretty good intrigue plot, though hard to follow in places. Art was very good, music alright. Rating: good, if you don't mind it being somewhat confusing, relevant genres: action, thriller, drama, sci-fi, cyberpunk.
Mieruko-chan (12 episodes)—high school girl Mieruko suddenly gains the ability to see ghosts one day. Eventually she encounters a few who seem to be benevolent, but the vast majority are grotesque and aggressive. Which doesn't matter, since people in general can't see them, and they can't interact in any meaningful way with the physical world. The exception is if they become attached to a particular living person, essentially haunting them, or they realize someone like Mieruko can see them, in which case they enjoy harassing them. Mieruko has to do her best to ignore ghosts so they won't catch on. This is mostly episodic, though a couple of plot arcs do get introduced. For one, Mieruko has a good friend Hana who is sensitive to ghosts despite being unable to see them, and they make a third friend, Yulia, who can. There's also one about a guy they meet in the park who gives them the creeps, and one about a seeming pact Mieruko makes with a god at a shrine. That last one drew my interest most—the god's familiars were pretty badass. Her overall attitude does come to some closure, but none of the plot threads do, which isn't that surprising, since the manga is still going, but it always leaves the series as unsatisfying when that happens. So, plot-wise okay, art was good, music average. It's billed as a comedy, too, but I never found it that funny. My big reservation is that it was incredibly gratuitous, which... well, when I looked up what else the studio had done, it's pretty common for them. Constant almost up-skirt camera angles; lingering, overly detailed, unnecessary scenes of the girls changing in the locker room; girl wearing baggy pajamas that suddenly become skin-tight and revealing when she bends over to pick something up, of course shown from behind. It just comes across as pretty trashy. Rating: decent, relevant genres: horror, comedy.
Ocean Waves (Umi ga Kikoeru, "I Can Hear the Sea," movie)—this is a short-ish film Ghibli made where they turned it over to the junior staff as a learning experience. There's a cold open of a young man reacting to someone he sees on the opposite train platform as if he recognizes her, then it flashes back to the guy, Taku, when he was in high school. His friend Yutaka eagerly tells him about a Tokyo girl named Rikako who's just transferred to their school mid-year, in a decent-sized city that's still somewhat out of the way. She's rather pretty, and it turns out she's athletic as well, but nobody really warms up to her, and Yutaka is her only friend for a while, as he's on the student council and had been the one to show her around. Eventually, she does befriend one girl, but Rikako is still seen as odd, cold and distant. While on a school field trip to Hawaii, she suddenly approaches Taku and asks to borrow quite a bit of money, claiming that she'd lost what she brought with her. Thus begins the strange goings-on that she gets Taku into. It's a pretty standard high school love triangle plot, but what elevates this one is how bizarre and yet reasonable Rikako is. So many things in this genre have some idealized character models they use, where everyone is such a good person at heart, and this movie just drips realism to me, where Rikako is the right blend of psycho and stupid that your average teenager exhibits, and Taku gets really tired of putting up with her shit. Strong on characterization but weak on plot—not only does it go right where you expect it to, it also suffers from the genre's tendency to end in a halfhearted conclusion that mistakes open-endedness for gravity. Not that open endings can't be powerful, but there's a trick to justifying them. Art had that Ghibli aesthetic, but on the simpler side, and music was average. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, coming of age.
Polyphonica (Shinkyoku Soukai Polyphonica, 12 episodes), Polyphonica: Crimson S (Shinkyoku Soukai Polyphonica: Crimson S, 12 episodes)—this takes place in a somewhat steampunk-y world. Spirits and gods are affected by music, to the point that unusually talented musicians can exert influence over them, and sometimes enter into lifetime binding pacts with them to use their powers in exchange for musical support. There are training academies for such musicians, and graduates end up working for professional agencies that hire them out for various missions: military operations, public works, even personal tasks like exorcising a haunting spirit. With music as such a central theme, this series had better have good music, and indeed, that's why I chose to watch it: I'd enjoyed the composer's work on Noein. It's based on a game, and it really shows. The first series doesn't have much plot to it. It does center around an employee of one such agency, Pholon, who managed to attract the attention of an extremely powerful spirit, Coaticarte, also known as The Crimson Princess of Destruction, at an early age. He goes out on missions that are mostly unrelated to each other, though by the end, there's a common thread of trying to defeat a terrorist organization. It just kind of crops up without being developed, and at the end, it leads to a boss fight against a spirit that had been given only the slightest context. So yeah, it does feel a lot like a perfunctory game. Some of the side characters do get development arcs at least. The second series is a prequel, from when Pholon was still a student, and it covers some of the same material the original did in flashbacks, including using some of the same surprise reveals. Though the prequel is an original story and has a much more coherent plot thread that runs through the entire season. I liked the overall concept, though in execution, the music-powered devices that aid the spirits in battle could look a little silly at times. I did appreciate how they used several types of instruments, though: Pholon's is a piano, his boss's is a violin, a junior employee/student who's sweet on him is a percussionist, etc., and each even prefers a different style. Mostly, it's classical, but a couple of them use more jazz or rock styles. I also rather enjoyed that Pholon is a good singer, and he's a countertenor, no less. The art and music were both good, and the musical interest probably kept me engaged more than the series otherwise would have. Rating: good, though in the lower part of that range, relevant genres: drama, action, fantasy, some romance.
The Aquatope on White Sand (Shiroi Suna no Akuatopu, 24 episodes)—this starts out really similarly to another series I reviewed recently, Opera Girl!! A girl named Fuuka has been kicked out of a pop idol group for reasons that aren't revealed until a bit later, though not only does that similarity extend to it not being the girl's fault, in this case, I will say that she was punished for doing the right thing. So as she's giving up on her dream and heading back home, she instead on a whim takes a different flight to Okinawa because the promotional posters made it look so peaceful, which she desperately needed right then. She has no plans for what to do once she gets there, but chance encounters with several of the locals lead her to a notable but age-worn aquarium named Gama Gama. The legendary director is mostly retired, and his teenage granddaughter Kukuru is acting in his place. Fuuka falls in love with the aquarium, and the fact that few people there recognize her, so she decides to spend the summer there helping out. But attendance is dwindling and the place is in poor repair, so it's probably going to close at the end of the summer, and Fuuka would have to leave by then to go back to school anyway. At the show's halfway mark, that plot point gets concluded, and the second half is about what consequences that has for everyone going forward, which I don't want to spoil. This is mostly slice of life, but it does veer into drama in places, which is fine. It's just that it's always clear from the pervading tone that things will turn out well for everyone by the end.
And hey, this series gets a second paragraph! That's because I want to go on a little bit of a tangent. The series starts out being about Fuuka, and while it never transitions away from her completely, it does soon become more about Kukuru, and they develop a strong friendship. I mentioned a couple blogs ago that I hadn't really watched any chiefly yuri series, and I rather liked Maria Watches Over Us. I've also said that I'm far from the point of wanting to solicit recommendations (and my intro from a couple blogs ago alluded to such, then I didn't notice that I hadn't gotten down to this review yet), but I find myself looking for good non-romantic yuri series as much as I'm looking for good baseball series. Not that I won't watch romantic yuri, but non-romantic is a lot harder to find. And there are plenty of examples of female friendshipping out there. It's hard to draw the line where those relationships become intense enough to qualify as yuri, and I've seen this series described as one. I don't think it's quite there, but if you've seen something good that might scratch that itch, then please let me know. I just added a dozen things to my watch list a few months back in search of that, though most of those do seem to be romances (and as I write these up sometimes weeks before I post them, I've already watched some of those).
And to close it off with a third paragraph—this is a heartfelt series, and my only reservation about it is a trope that's been increasingly bugging me lately (plus it's yet another entry in the "main character's parents are dead, and she wants to live up to their name" genre). We've all seen plenty of fighting shows where if you want to win, you have to work harder. That's it. If you want it more than your opponent, you will win. Your skill level will rise to your determination level. Except we all know that there's only some truth to that. I may want to be a movie star, but if I have zero acting talent, no amount of work will overcome that. It takes both. In more and more drama or slice of life series lately, I've seen that same attitude applied. Going through career struggles? Depression? Relationship issues? Just work harder and push through them. Everything will be better. I get that's part and parcel of Japanese attitudes toward professionalism, so maybe it's just a cultural thing that's seen as what you're expected to say, but it doesn't apply universally, and frankly, it feels unrealistic in lots of dramatic situations. I don't know. We have the same kinds of things in this country. I remember discussing what happens when a stranger or mere acquaintance asks you how you're doing. In the USA, unless we know the person well, we'll just respond that we're fine, since we don't want to burden them unnecessarily with our troubles and we don't want to air our private matters. But the person I was discussing it with says in his country, they take the question at face value that the person does want to know, and you respond honestly. So maybe that's just a disconnect on my part. Anyway, cute series with likable characters, and everything turns out well. Art and music were both very good, and there's plenty of factual stuff about ocean life presented. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, slice of life, educational?
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 21 here
vol. 22 here
vol. 23 here
vol. 24 here
vol. 25 here
vol. 26 here
vol. 27 here
vol. 28 here
vol. 29 here
vol. 30 here
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is on the very short list of pieces of media which made me openly weep.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is an excellent movie, glad you got to watch it!
5651932
I'm curious which aspect of it did. There are several very emotionally charged moments. To me, the ending was a bit of a letdown, but that's minor as regards the plot. I was taken with how Makoto kept using her ability to avoid people telling her they loved her, and even after she found out she had precious few jumps left, used it to do that one last time. I just keep thinking, though, when she finally does meet up with Chiaki in the future, she's gonna be, what, 30 years older than him?
5651954
I believe it was the ending. The first time I watched it was like a decade ago, so I don't remember exactly.
I had more or less the same issues with Mieruko-Chan. The first ghost encounter, I actually did find felt quite harrowing and tense, but it started to bother me with subsequent encounters that they didn't establish any higher stakes very concretely. Not knowing what these things might do to her was effective enough at first, but then you see them interacting fairly harmlessly with other humans and it's harder to take them seriously. I've heard they show more definite dangers later on, so maybe it gets better on that front, but the horror aspect losing its luster coupled with the very horny attempts at comedy or something didn't give me much reason to stick around.
Love the opening though.
I've heard a lot of good about Girl Who Leapt, easy to see why :D
5651974
Yeah, the opening (and closing, for that matter) were pretty on point, and they flagged comedy for me more effectively than anything that actually happened in the series. But an old rule with horror is that you have to keep increasing the stakes, as the same scare loses its effectiveness, and this series never did that. The axe guy on the train, maybe a little. And the fact that some of the shrine god's minions actually seemed to get killed. I was waiting for him to tell her she only got three because he didn't like destroying the ghosts, and it was time for her to start helping the bad ones so they could become the good ones. But no. Seriously, though, the god's minions were pretty damn cool.
Two years:
Since you watched Toradora? Ah. Because, well, at Taiga and Ryuji's first meeting, they do not "both brush themselves off, calmly apologize, and go about their way." Taiga, despite being about a foot shorter than Ryuji, hauls off and punches him so hard in the face, she knocks him over flat on his back. And when Taiga breaks into Ryuji's apartment later, she has a big wooden sword with her that she only stops attacking him with when she jabs a hole in the rice paper wall between the front room and Ryuji's mom's bedroom.
As for the shows'ending, what makes it work so well for me is the way it culminates a theme the show explores throughout: a comparison between "Western culture" and "Japanese culture." And it's really nicely done because the show recognizes that both have pluses and minuses and really celebrates the way modern Japan has the ability to take the good parts of both while discarding the bad--look at the "cultural festival" episodes followed by the "Christmas party" episodes, for instance, showing that there are good and bad "Western" ideas as well as good and bad "Japanese" ideas.
Can you tell I was a literature major in college? I mean, it was Ancient Greek and Roman literature, but still...
Taiga and Ryuji's plans as the series approaches its ending, I contend, are shown to be very much in the "bad Western" camp. It's only when Ryuji stops and thinks that he ends up changing their plans to something more in line with a "good Japanese" paradigm. That then triggers Taiga to stop and think, too, and she feels she has to do the same thing even to the point of throwing away everything she's seemingly gained as the series has progressed. The very last scene, then, shows that both Ryuji and Taiga were right to do what they did, and it's happily every after--more or less--from there on out!
That's my theory, at least.
Mike
5652076
To me, a single punch from her is a rather calm response. I was being a bit tongue in cheek there, the point being that they didn’t get into a brawl like the crowd was expecting (hoping?) they would. And yes, she was aggressive in her efforts to retrieve her letter. She did sneak in, but then abandoned any play at stealth.
About the ending… maybe it is just a difference between eastern and western values, but I’m not sure of that. I can get if she needs to go on a journey of self-discovery or something, but to completely disappear with no contact? Not even to let anyone know she’s okay? All she’d have to do is tell Minori, the one she’s most comfortable with, and it would get to everyone else. And I have zero idea what her plan was in hiding in the closet when she did return. She didn’t look poised to jump out and surprise Ryuji, nor did she look like she knew he’d sense her there. I don’t see what her plan was.
5652096
I had gotten the impression:
That she had been in contact with the others. At least the way I recall it, they don't seem shocked or confused at the end when Ryuji goes racing into the school building after catching sight of Taiga in the upstairs window. And her in the cabinet just struck me as a parallel to the way she rolls out of that same cabinet before the first actual conversation they have back in the first episode. Neither time does it make a whole lot of sense for her to be in the cabinet, but there she is each time...
I've since watched several of these "high school romance" shows, and my favorite so far is Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai for the bit of magical realism it adds to the mix. And I always appreciate a series where, after watching all 13 episodes and the 90-minute movie, the very last scene forces me to reevaluate pretty much everything that happened previously. It's some very nice storytelling.
Mike
5652111
Are you limited to things you can watch on Netflix? Either way, I can suggest some very good high school romances, and if Netflix doesn’t have them, then skip them, I guess. I do like that kind (of any genre for that matter) that changes the context at the end.
For movies, A Silent Voice, A Whisker Away, Belle, The Garden of Words, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Whisper of the Heart, Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, Your Name, and 5 Centimeters Per Second (with Weathering With You another that gets lots of kudos but I haven’t seen yet).
For series, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, Iroduku: The World in Colors, Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea, O Maidens in Your Savage Season (if you don’t mind it bawdy and squicky about inappropriate relationships), and Your Lie in April.
5652148
I watched:
Anohana and largely enjoyed it. It's nice to see folks can still come up with fairly original takes on ghost stories after all these millennia.
A very silly series I stumbled over on Netflix is Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun. It manages to be both a Japanese high school romance story and a parody of Japanese high romance stories at the same time. A whole lot of fun.
The only non-Netflix series I've tracked down is Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Country. When I watched it on Funimation, it was free and didn't have commercials, but now that Crunchyroll has taken over Funimation, things seems to be changing...
Mike
5652177
CR has been even more liberal than Funimation about making things free to watch, so maybe just wait for the dust to clear and see where things lie. There are sites out there where you can watch it all anyway...
5652177
Also, note that a significant number of the things I recommended (including Toradora!) were partially or completely by writer Mari Okada. She doesn't exclusively do high school romances, but it's a common genre for her, and she reliably does them well. It's worth looking up what else she's done that might appeal to you.
5652274
Thanks!
I actually tracked down the next series by the writer of the original Toradora novels, a woman named Yuyuko Takemiya. Golden Time, the series is called, but the anime's opening moments turned me off--a giant coincidence followed by a giant infodump--so I didn't even make it through the first episode...
Mike
5652299
This is one reason I usually give a series 3-4 episodes before I decide to drop it. Pilots are often rough and feel rushed to get you up to speed. Then they settle in after that. Like you said with the opener of Little Witch Academia, but I really liked that series, and I think you’d be rewarded if you kept with it. That one is aimed at a somewhat younger audience, so a lot of the twists were predictable, but one still caught me by surprise, and it was overall a sweet story.
5652331
It's one of my:
Many problems. I have a hard time sitting down and watching stuff--even a hard time sitting down and reading stuff--because my brain starts poking at me, reminding me that I've got my own projects I could be working on. But I'll give Little Witch another go--if it's still available. I went back a week or so ago to try Golden Time again, and Crunchyroll had removed it from its service...
Mike
5652604
CR's been weird like that lately. My son watched S1 of Demon Slayer there, then went back later to see if they had the movie, and S1 was gone. Not moved behind the paywall, just gone.