So, before launching into the review, it’s worth noting that the site has been updated. The “About” page now contains actual content, there’s a brand new “Novels” page for advertising my current and future novels, an “Index” page that collects reviewed shows by letter grade, and a “Contact” page ready for all the hate mail folks will probably want to send me because it’s time to look into AnoHana and I’m going to come out and say… I didn’t care for it.
Before I get to dissecting the show and how I feel it went wrong, a brief explanation of what the show is like without getting as judgmental as I want on it. We follow our main character, Jintan, a depressed loser who’s just about ready to give up on school, when on a summer day he starts seeing the ghost of a little girl, Menma. They were friends years and years ago when they were both tiny children, but Menma died in an accident and their whole circle of friends broke up. Ghost Menma has a wish she would like granted. She doesn’t know what it actually is, but she has a suspicion that getting the band back together might be able to help. The rub is, only Jintan can see or hear Menma, not anyone else at all.
What follows are a few attempts to discern and grant Menma’s wish, mostly pushed forward by Jintan on his former friends, who are all suffering and broken in their own ways. They have to come together to both discern what Menma could want and to make it happen, while addressing their own issues (and there are a LOT of them).
This is not, in and of itself, a bad setup. In fact, I dare say that there are some great shows that have, at least, similar layouts. So where does AnoHana go wrong?
For the first point, Menma. Specifically, Menma as a ghost – the supernatural element of the show, which kicks off all its action, is handled fantastically poorly, and it didn’t have to be. From very early on in the show, we as the audience know Menma has a real presence. We get scenes with her when Jintan isn’t around, which wouldn’t make sense if she were a hallucination, and we see her manipulating objects. And, OK, if you want a ghost in your show that’s quite alright, but the problem emerges with how the characters interface with the supernatural element. Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, a lackluster and lazy Harem show, had a ghost who couldn’t be seen or heard by normal characters but who could manipulate objects – just like Menma. Did it take Yuuna even a minute to have someone do the smarty-pants thing and have its titular character use her object-manipulating capabilities to manipulate a pen and paper and write down what she wanted to communicate? The characters in AnoHana eventually come to the same solution where Menma can prove that she exists to all her friends and communicate with them directly… after about nine bloody episodes of pointless poor communication. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that needed to be saved for a climactic reveal, rather it seems like the kind of thing that should have been in early steps.
This is a lot like Another, where both supernatural abilities and basic logic are discarded in favor of what makes the plot move forward the way the writers want it to move forward. Except Another is a horror anime, and that kind of “too stupid to live” behavior, while still not good writing, is kind of tolerated in the viewer-show contract of the genre. “You want to see more gory ghosty death? Then please kindly ignore the exploit that would allow the problem to be solved early.” AnoHana is a character drama. It needs the characters to feel intense emotions (which they could do whether or not Menma was confirmed), talk about their feelings (which they could do whether or not Menma was confirmed), work through hard times (which they could do whether or not Menma was confirmed), and face the traumas they’ve been coping with badly in their lives (which they might be able to do BETTER with Menma’s ghost present to them). The only purpose keeping her an enigma to the other friends serves is promoting a few particular kinds of drama, not drama in general, namely having Jintan’s friends assume he’s insane and move the topic away from the ghost the show felt the need to include. And if Yuuna is too little for you to go on, remember that it was also fairly quickly hit on when the same problem emerged in Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, which is a smart and emotionally effective show that knows what it’s doing.
And, imaginary fan of AnoHana in the audience patiently raising their hand to object to this particular problem, the show does give something of an “explanation” as to why the writing solution only materialized for a sudden late-game twist to the characters that wasn’t at all a twist to the audience. Menma can write, but she only seems able to write in the diary she owned when she was alive because… the pen doesn’t work for her elsewhere. It’s not like we ever saw her try, but that’s what we’re told.
First of all, the pen doesn’t work? But let’s assume for a minute that this isn’t a lame excuse, and really would be a problem. One of the first things we see Menma do on her own is bake some bread. I mean, badly, but she does it. As someone who has baked (and eaten) no few breads in his life, I can say that an ingredient known as flour is typically involved. Flour has this interesting trait where, as a fine powder, it tends to coat surfaces, and can be wiped around in various ways. If Menma can move flour around with her hands, then what’s to stop her from taking the finger of one of those hands and, on a cutting board coated thickly with flour, moving some of that flour to form characters in the space vacated? Where’s your non-working pen on that one? For that matter, she could probably scratch her words into the dirt with a stick (or her finger if the stick doesn’t work). In fact, she uses a fairly similar method at the end of the show, so it is proved that this could have worked before the reveal.
Even if that wasn’t the case, there’s a wonderful invention known as an Ouija Board, a tool where a ghost is supposed to make its presence known by moving an object to indicate pre-written letters – no pen required. And yeah, no one is shown to own a Ouija board, but Japan has this game/urban legend called Kokkuri, which is basically ad-hoc Ouija; the one who wishes to communicate writes down their own letters and the indicator is a coin, tools that absolutely anyone with a pulse in this show would have at hand to communicate with Menma.
Both of these ideas, in addition to standard writing, came to me while watching the show. It also occurred to me (though it didn’t pan out this way) that Menma might have been too little to be properly literate, but even then she could draw pictures (including in flour or dirt) or respond to any Kokkuri-like rig with clear “yes” and “no” options to at least get something out and make her presence known. You might even say that there was an embarrassment of options that Menma and her friends could have used to communicate properly from the start, and they insultingly use none of them.
There would have been a lot of ways to fix this element of the show. For one, what would happen if you could prove to your closest friends (who she WANTS to talk to. She’s a little kid and can always be selective and not want to involve outsiders to stop this spiraling out of control if you’re concerned about that) that the friend you all have massive hang-ups about the death of is back as a ghost? In my mind, that leads to a lot of dramatic possibilities, having the other characters able to speak to Menma properly before they’ve largely resolved their issues. Some of them might not take the supernatural truth well! That could be interesting to see, and it would make the story much more cohesive rather than compartmentalizing Jintan’s struggle with the supernatural away from the struggle with life such as it is. And, hello, you have another whole character this way! Someone else we can explore and who the other characters can bounce off of, with a very unique situation to make her interactions with others and understanding of the universe fundamentally different from those of the living.
Another method would be this – what if, until the blatantly floating diary appears to the characters who can’t see Menma, we the audience were allowed to suspect that she might not actually exist as more than Jintan’s hallucination? Take out the scenes of Ghost Menma by herself or obviously doing things. There’s a scene early where, after Menma has baked some terrible egg-shell containing bread, Jintan offers it to his friends as proof she exists. They don’t take it as proof, of course, because Jintan very well could have made the bread himself, but the audience knows he didn’t because we see Menma making it without him. If we only ever saw Menma when she was with Jintan and not doing things that couldn’t be explained naturally, we the audience would question him at that scene. Is there really a ghost who’s not a very good baker? Did Jintan do it himself? If he did do it himself, did he do it deliberately, or in some sort of fugue state? He could even verbally present compelling evidence as to why he wouldn’t have made bread like that personally, like maybe he’s actually decent in the kitchen, leading the audience to maybe believing because we wouldn’t want to think he’d go so far as to deliberately attempt to deceive his friends (the way Yukiatsu kind of does), but the door would still be open to other interpretations. Even the exact same scene, with a different setup, could not only bust the problems with the ghost handling, but also be a stronger dramatic scene for it.
And when Menma finally does levitate and write in her own diary? Okay, some of the complaints I made would still be sustained, but they would only come up after the problem was solved – “Wait, couldn’t something have been done?” is a much more survivable question than “Why aren’t they doing something obvious?”. And the scene itself would be better. It’s framed as a huge moment, and for the characters, it is. It’s downright earth-shattering. Ghosts are real, Menma is one, she wants to talk, and you were all jerks to Jintan when he tried to tell you that. But the audience doesn’t feel a lot of that weight in the version we got because the reaction is not “Oh my god” but “freaking finally!”. If that was the first proof positive that we the audience got, and the show up to that point had been shot and edited to leave it plausible or even likely that no ghost existed, it would be a massive, game-changing moment like it wants to be.
You could go even farther with that technique if you wanted to. Hell, you could probably run the whole show without EVER confirming to the audience that Menma actually exists. Or, if you prefer, not confirming it until like the last two minutes to give the story closure. The climax, currently predicated on the other friends finally being brought into the know, would be very different… but maybe it could even be stronger for it. If the band had to get back together, not because they had proof of ghost but because the deep bonds between the characters caused them to want to understand each other better and support one another through a trying time, wouldn’t that say something more powerful? If Anaru and the others didn’t have proof, and had to decide to have faith in Jintan because he’s their friend and even if he has cracked they want to be there for him? If the rifts that had come between the group had to heal naturally and without provably genuine interference from the other side? I’ll get to the ending as it stands, but there would be at least something gained by doing it the unreliable narrator way. And the issues with communicating with spirits would vanish into the Aether because, hey, maybe there was no spirit that could or wanted to communicate in the first place.
The fact that AnoHana can’t manage its ghost is a big deal. By including the supernatural element, rightly or not, it sets itself into a different genre, one that I don’t think the writers really understood the implications of. Dusk Maiden did this right, it knew how to be both a ghost story and a romantic comedy the way it wanted to be, and where the contact between the genres would create something new and interesting. Even if Menma is a less threatening ghost than Casper, AnoHana still decided to take up at least a variety of ghost story, and it totally botches that element by not addressing its ghostly Rules. Because the ghost-related drama is very forced in the show as we got it, it doesn’t support the human drama at all. Menma, as a ghost, takes away from the ability of the show to do living humans well and doesn’t provide anything in return. She badly needed some kind of rewrite in order to help the show rather than standing as a lame and lazy supernatural element crudely substituting for an ability to make real trauma and grief interesting.
So, on to the second problem with AnoHana: Menma. And this time, I don’t mean Menma as a ghost, I mean Menma as a plot device. I will admit at the start that this is a more minor problem than some others with the show, but Menma isn’t actually a great device in AnoHana. So, let’s start with what Menma actually does. Menma, the plot device, is the thing that ties the active group together, for better or worse, and acts as the force that determines their shared fates. That’s the acceptable side of it: our setup involves these characters sharing a lot, but also having some degree of distance, so it’s good to understand the ties that bind them.
Really, there are a couple of sub-problems with the problem of Menma the Plot Device, having to do both with her role and her character. The first sub-problem is simple: Menma is just too dang central. And I know what some of you are probably thinking… with what I just said about needing to know the ties that bind the characters, how can she be too central? The damage Menma’s status does is on a different point. Specifically, it’s about AnoHana’s status as a character drama.
That is to say, most of the interest available in AnoHana is in watching the characters and understanding and relating to their struggles. In order to empathize with the characters as much as possible, they need to feel human, and we want to see our flaws and strengths in the characters. Dramatic and tragic figures work best when they’re at their most human, because you don’t have a more potent external struggle to fall back on.
The problem with Menma’s central status is not that she is important, or even that she is important to everyone, it’s that she has THE (not “a”, “the”) core role in the lives of everyone she touched. All of their issues tie back to Menma’s life and especially her death, and not just by playing six degrees of separation, but very directly. This might have been able to fly if they lost their dear friend something like a year ago, even something like three years ago. But, while I don’t remember any exact dates being given, we see that the group of friends were really little kids when Menma died. Grade school, for sure, and probably pretty early in grade school at that. I know anime is great at tripping people up with games of “Guess the age” but I’d finger them as being something like eight back when it all happened, and I wouldn’t go any higher. In the present tense, the characters are still high-school age, technically, but kind of in the “mini adult” role – able to do things on their own, including working full time for a legit paycheck. I’d estimate that they’re somewhere in the 16-18 bracket, and possibly on the higher end of that since no one bats an eye at Jintan or Poppo doing night shift road work. That means the interval is more like a decade or, however you slice it, it’s been as long or longer since Menma died than the characters had lived up until that point. And, I’m sorry show, but people change in that kind of time, both the absolute and the relative gap. I’m not saying that a tragic event in early childhood couldn’t still have lingering effects on these kids, but it wouldn’t look like AnoHana, where it’s all of them and still raw and all-consuming.
For a while into this show, for instance, I really liked the character of Poppo. He’s clearly not following a nice and normal life path, but the one he is on seems to be working out for him. He does odd jobs, and when he saves up the money he gets to travel the bloody world. It’s weird, and he is still a drop-out from school, but it seems to work for him. He’s crude and dirty-minded, but also positive and accepting, being the only one of the friends who seems to support Jintan because he wants to be friends. And you know what, he was fine like that. It was still clear that Menma meant a lot to him, and her death directly and indirectly (through breaking the band up) would have hit him. It even might – MIGHT, mind you, a smart work could leave it to implication – be true that something in the alienation of all his friends going their separate ways led by one thing and another to the rootless life-style that leaves him crashing in their old clubhouse sometimes. Because he was a character who seemed to have coped (past tense) and who wasn’t quite as outright damaged, he seemed like he’d provide a good balance in the cast. He still wants to help grant Menma’s wish, he still wants to see all his old friends bury their various hatchets and become friends again, there wasn’t a need to force the issue any farther. It was a good setup.
The show, of course, decided to force the issue. Poppo travels specifically because he had the trauma of seeing Menma’s drowned body in the stream, but despite wandering the world to escape from that experience – as old as it is – he keeps finding himself drawn inexorably back to the clubhouse where it all began to dwell at the center of his spider web of guilt and regret. And writing it out like that I realize that’s the most ghostly thing in the whole show; the unavoidable pull to the heart of old loss and tragedy is the kind of thing that plays well in a work like, say, Silent Hill. The problem (or one of the problems, there are a few) is that AnoHana isn’t Silent Hill. It doesn’t want to be Silent Hill, it doesn’t approach Silent Hill, it isn’t a dang thing like Silent Hill in the least. And what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander; a story like AnoHana can’t use character building and storytelling techniques that worked in Silent Hill and expect them to work just as well outside of it.
Even with that said, I’d accept it if it were just one of the main characters, but they all have their problems tying back to that one day in their past. Anaru has image issues, where she’s being pressured into a slutty “bad girl” persona? Clearly her need for external validation and insecurity about her own appearance and desirability comes from that one day where her crush Jintan yelled at, regretted he yelled at, and then lost his crush Menma. Jintan himself clearly hit the “giving up” state where he’s ceased attending school and become a NEET because of the long-simmering guilt and grief over Menma’s death and his possible part in it. I mean, he also has a mom who died from Backstory-itis, but clearly that doesn’t rate, it’s all down to the cute little girlfriend from third grade. Maybe Chiriko doesn’t exactly, but that’s because she’s got Yukiatsu on her plate, and Yukiatsu is the screwed-in-the-head cocktail of Menma where he saves artifacts from her life, buys things for her, and cross-dresses as her in some sick way to be with the girl he loved again even if only in the mirror or some such like that and… just a reminder here, this is apparently the result of a grade-school love that wasn’t even reciprocated, and was violently terminated more than half this guy’s life ago. He’s not… well. None of these people are well, and the ways they are unwell in are overwhelmingly Menma-and-Menma’s-death centered given the intervening years. (Aside here, I’m not going to go all into “If I could magically rewrite this” land, but I will say that I would probably keep Yukiatsu as the most uniquely deranged response. Show gets a point for how creatively messed up the dude is.)
Everything feels too raw and too direct. There’s a major theme in the show, debating whether everything has changed with the characters or nothing. The show tries to present a very down-to-earth feel with real people and real problems. The ghost doesn’t actually ruin that; “Magical Realism” is a thing in literature for a reason. What does ruin it is the fact that these characters haven’t been allowed to change in the way so many important formative years would change them, and the reason if any is weak. The issue of Menma should be something that digs down to old wounds for these characters, where it’s hard to trace the root of their problems and maybe we find that the issue wasn’t with the first step but with how easy it was to keep growing down the wrong path once set to it. They should be scarred, not injured. Instead, it’s all about Menma, allowing her to be the center of the show’s universe and the unrealistic silver bullet for the life problems the characters have.
I want to contrast this with one of my all-time favorite franchises, the Kagerou Project. I’m not going to go into too much overkill depth straight away because I intend to look into KagePro in greater depth in the future (here), but there’s a similar setup that illustrates how you do this kind of material well. In KagePro there’s a character, Ayano Tateyama, who is fairly important to a lot of the other characters. There are her adopted siblings, her friends at school, and her sour maybe-boyfriend. She was very dear to a large segment of the cast, at least as large as the AnoHana cast in total, and like Menma, she died tragically in the past, leaving a wake of grief behind her.
When we catch up with them two or three years after her death, some of those characters are still hurting. The boy she liked, Shintaro Kisaragi, has withdrawn from society to become a NEET (much like Jintan) and most of the rest of her friends and family are living very different lives now that she’s gone. However, unlike the cast of AnoHana, the cast of KagePro has more things on their plate. Shintaro is absolutely the worse hit, and it’s fairly clear eventually that her death played a big part in his downward spiral. But then, Shintaro was an asocial loner with very few other friends of any note outside Ayano, and unlike Jintan he started his spiral right away… and after the time that’s passed, is kind of coming out of it. He’s still sour and kind of prefers his shut-in life, but when he’s accosted by plot and friends he rises to meet them, and even at his most miserable he’s not moping about Ayano anymore, not directly and emphatically.
Ayano’s siblings, meanwhile, have become the Mekakushi Dan. They’ve left their family home and have a hideout in the city, mostly because they’re trying to unravel the mystery of the superpowers they (and a few others) possess. Some of them have some lingering thought of Ayano in their daily lives – Kido has some big shoes to fill as the new big sister of the group, Kano has to deal with knowing the truth about the last days of her life and the circumstances of her death, and they are all neck deep in a supernatural mystery of which Ayano remains a part… but they can also foil terrorists, visit amusement parks, and otherwise live their lives.
And there are several characters in the story that didn’t even know Ayano. Shintaro’s sister, Momo Kisaragi, the younger cast members Hibiya and Hiyori, the enigmatic Konoha… none of them have Ayano-related issues. She’s still absolutely at the heart of the story, functioning as one of the big ties that binds the characters together, but neither the universe nor the other characters revolve around her. They’ve suffered, they’re hurting, but in a few years, their wounds have largely become scars, and they’ve found the strength to move forward (… or at least generalize their sour disposition. Thanks, Shintaro) and live with their grief the way the AnoHana characters should have done in the vastly longer time they’d had.
Because Ayano isn’t the all-consuming issue the way Menma is, the KagePro characters are allowed to interface with their grief in more human ways, and beyond that they’re able to spread their wings and be more rounded characters. Since Shintaro, Kido, Kano, Seto, Marie, and Ene have lives, interests, problems, hopes, and dreams that don’t tie back to Ayano, I know better who they are as people, and could tell you a good deal about them without mentioning Ayano. The AnoHana characters are rendered, for the most part, paper-thin shells over a core of Menma. They can have the illusion of dimensionality, but if you try to look at them from another angle the illusion falls apart. Yukiatsu, Jintan, and post-reveal Poppo are all about Menma, and Chiriko kind of gets screwed on screen time, so really it’s just Anaru who I feel like I could define in non-Menma terms. And really, that’s in large part due to the fact that she’s given one big, glaring attribute in her impressionable nature.
This brings us to the second major sub-problem of Menma as a plot device: Menma the character. She’s not really well written, in that she’s pretty much just too good. Again, I know this sounds like a weird complaint at first, but I know where I’m going with it. Again, it has to do with how we empathize and what we find realistic (whether it’s truly “realistic” or not). In this case, the issue does have to do with the fact that Menma is an active character… and given the “perfect” treatment that only a dead character should be generally be given. And yes, she did die, but she’s a ghost in this one and I will firmly hold that when it comes to character writing “Undead” gets held to the standards of “Alive” rather than “Dead”.
I’m going to go a little beyond the pale here and recall a scene from The Matrix, where Smith is talking about the first attempts to simulate a universe for humans. They (allegedly) tried to code a perfect paradise, but humans rejected that experience as unreal, a dream from which they continually tried to wake up. That at least checks out as far as I’m concerned. Perfection isn’t an idea we can really see and it’s one of the few cases where it’s better to rely on telling rather than showing. In Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven”, Lenore can kind of be assumed to be the perfect unparalleled woman… but we never see Lenore, we only know that she’s the lost figure for whom the narrator pines. Because she’s written as the Holy Grail, not a legit character, we don’t need to know who she was as a person, if she was funny or demure or what have you. Menma, however, is not Lost Lenore, she has lines and wants things and does stuff, and that means she needs to be held to the standards of a character.
It’s a big problem that Menma doesn’t really have any characteristics other than being generically nice and kind. Ayano Tateyama was also nice and kind, but she was much more rounded. She had insecurities, bad days, and deep desires. She could be hurt or get mad. Menma… not so much. In the one flashback we really see to the kids as little kids (more on that later), Jintan says some pretty mean things to Menma when put on the spot about liking her – which, okay, really little boy, that’s kind of legit – and her response is to… smile this kinda dopey cute smile. Supposedly, this lets people know she was hurt, but it’s hard as the audience to parse it because we only have that one data point, and it’s not a terribly obvious reaction. As such, it’s hard to really feel too much about her as a person. Any death is tragic and the untimely death of a child typically especially so, but there’s little to make Menma distinct from any other kid, for us to know why her death in particular had such a ruinous effect and why everyone found her so dear. A flawed, if still overall good, kid would be something we would feel for more, because it would be something we know. She needed to be more than just saintly.
And, really, that brings me to the third major core problem with AnoHana… the kids.
AnoHana, in order to work the way it wanted to work, needed to have a delicate touch and a deeply ‘real’ feel to it, and engage in a deep exploration of the group of friends we’re supposed to be coming to understand inside and out. And, to the show’s credit, there are moments when it does work. The scenes with Jintan and Anaru working at their shared part-time job, dealing with their present while the past hangs over them as this unspoken dark cloud of bottled up feelings and deferred dreams, are some very well done scenes. They’re written with intelligence and subtlety and I will credit the voice actors and animators a good deal for their ability to communicate the layers of their interaction with shot framing, body language, and careful performances. I may not know all that much about who Jintan is as a person because so much of it is predicated on Menma, but I at least know how he and Anaru play off each other. Similarly, before his reveal, Poppo is an interesting study. There are clearly ways in which his life is off track, even badly off track, but the fact that he’s still capable of laughing and smiling, and that he seems to have found some path to happiness means he interacts with the others in fun ways. Honestly, if the show was just this broken group of teens trying to get their lives in order, without the need for an actual ghost (whether Jintan hallucinates Menma or something else causes them to start down the path of interacting again), it probably could have been a smart show since the few times we’re really privileged to get the teens on their own, away from concerns of Menma, it’s good.
The problem is that AnoHana isn’t about the teen characters. It’s about the characters in their teen and kid forms, and the differences or lack of differences between them as they were before Menma died and them as they are many years after her death. The statement that everything and everyone has changed or its counterpoint that no one has really changed is repeated a lot in this show. Have the intervening years irrecoverably severed the friends from each other, or have they been stuck in a rut ever since that day? Is their problem one of malignant growth or inappropriate stasis? And in either case, can they overcome their differences and act again as friends? That’s a lot of the drama of the show.
And, unfortunately, we’re missing a really critical piece to determine as an audience what the truth is and feel the weight of it… we never get to know the characters as kids. The only flashback we really see to their youth (not strictly but functionally) is the one to the day of Menma’s death. Since we don’t know what they were, we can’t really know how they’ve changed or stayed the same. Think about the story of It (the Stephen King novel; I can’t speak as much about the newest movie) and how weak it would be if you didn’t actually see the characters as children – all the events stay canon truth, but we aren’t privileged to flashbacks. The story wouldn’t work, because big parts of It are, like AnoHana, predicated on a couple factors: a deep bond, formed between children, which has become strained thanks to those characters drifting apart over a vast gulf of time; those characters coming back together due to supernatural circumstances that require them to work together; and a curious stasis in the lives of the characters, where they find themselves trapped in the same patterns despite what should be vast changes in their lives. In It, we fully understand these factors because we learn about the characters both as children and as adults, letting us see their bonds as they form and as they attempt to recover them, and view with our own eyes the continual recurrence of the patterns in their lives.
Because AnoHana doesn’t allow us to see the characters very much when they were the Super Peace Busters, we don’t have the same understanding of their situation and their motion (or lack thereof). There are a few moments when we feel it a little, but that’s only when there’s something that’s a blindingly obvious failure. There’s a lot more we don’t know… did the characters who do pretty much nothing but fight in the current timeline (Yukiatsu and Jintan; Anaru and Chiriko) get along better as kids, or did they just tolerate each other because mutual friends were mediating the bad blood? If they got along, in what ways did they get along and what unique character traits did they see in each other? Was Anaru really as malleable back then as is claimed? Did Chiriko have emotions? Was Yukiatsu already disturbingly obsessed? We have a vague idea of how the web of crushes worked, with Jintan and Yukiatsu being interested in Menma with one of the other girls being interested in each of those boys, but we don’t know how they interacted as friends. AnoHana, with what it’s trying to do, should leave me wanting to see these kids work out their differences and get back as a group because there was something truly beautiful and valuable about their friendship, not just a funnel of unrequited crushes pointing at Menma. But if we don’t see what was lost, we can’t be with the characters pining for it. Even if she’s unrealistically perfect, we at least get a little about what it was like losing Menma, but we don’t know what it meant to lose the Super Peace Busters. It makes you wonder at times if you really want them to be a group again, because the vitriol is real and you can’t know if it was always like that.
Change requires a beginning state and an ending state. If you’re missing one of those two points, you can’t do a lot about change or lack of change. You can have those points occur during the narrative or you can see a character’s past as well as their present, but when you just show the present and debate whether anyone’s changed completely or not at all since the poorly viewed past, it rings extremely hollow and deadens investment in the stakes of the show. Because, in the end, the friendship between the living characters is, along with the directions of their lives, what’s really at stake here. And, especially when the characters don’t outwardly want all of that to be resolved, it’s hard for the audience to want it when we don’t know it first hand.
And there we have the three big problems with AnoHana: Menma isn’t handled well as a ghost, she needed to be either more ambiguous or better studied in terms of her supernatural elements. Menma isn’t handled well as a plot device, writing around her was done in an overwhelming fashion when a delicate touch was needed. And we don’t understand where the characters came from in a story that is all about comparing and contrasting where the characters came from with where they are now.
Does anything in this show work?
Well, yes. As I may have stated before, a lot of the scenes with just the teens as troubled teens are pretty good. The characters have real problems, largely without veering into the melodramatic, and the ways in which they’re hurting and badly coping can be interesting. Jintan’s not got much going for him personally, but the way he and Anaru play off one another is really good. You can tell that he feels for her at least as a friend but is troubled by the fact that they don’t really exist in the same circles anymore, while on the other hand Anaru’s love is given a very mature and melancholy treatment, where she’s pretty clearly torn in terms of what she wants versus what she knows is or isn’t probably a good idea, it’s not absurdly intense but it’s not inconstant either. Poppo, I’ve stated before, is pretty great until the show decides that all his issues need to be Menma-related, and the way he lives makes a good contrast to the honor students. Yukiatsu is creatively messed up with his abiding sick obsession with a dead little girl and a lot could be done with him as a study of this deranged mind that has to present an honors student class rep sort of face to the world when people are looking. When he flirts with Anaru late in the story it’s both a little creepy and kind of interesting because you wonder what his real feelings are. Does he want someone to stop him, and if so, what part does he want help stopping? The act or the insanity?
Because the non-Menma-related scenes are fairly sparse, a lot of this is down the performances from the voice actors, which are all really top notch. I wouldn’t be half as interested in the scraps of good characters that show through if it weren’t for the fact that the talented folks who gave them a voice really sold their convictions and feelings in just about every scene. There’s even a lot of screaming and crying in AnoHana, and those are hard things to get right. Hell, the big climax is pretty much all screaming and crying, at the same time as one another, and the voice actors still manage to sell it at the ‘just right’ point where you get an impact and yet it’s not overdone. That takes skill, so credit where it’s due.
But does the show have a leg to stand on when the story of a group of friends overcoming their traumas to get back together and help a little ghost girl mishandles the friendship, the trauma, and the ghost?
In the end, I’ve got a lot of bones to pick with AnoHana, and I certainly would not recommend it… but the good elements do shine through often enough, and the bad elements take long enough to compile, that I think the show does manage to make it through with a C-. I didn’t really care for what we got in AnoHana, but there was a lot of skill displayed at various moments, and it has the ingredients (including in their executions) for any of a number of good shows to be assembled from it. But yeah, when the story would be better if you cut the element that’s both a central character and the starting point for the action… something’s not right here.
And to those of you, and I know you’re out there, who really love AnoHana, who helped get it placed in the top 100 animes by rating on MAL and Haruhi only knows how many other places… I get it. I will never personally agree with you, I think the show is too broken in too many fundamental ways and find it kind of galling that general regard places it head and shoulders above shows like Dusk Maiden of Amnesia and Haibane Renmei that can occupy similar spaces with what I personally feel is vastly superior setup and execution… but I do think I can understand. AnoHana is, in some ways, not the kind of show that the analysis and criticism I do applies to. It wants to tug at the heart strings and make an emotional connection more than it wants to be well-structured or logically satisfying, and that’s something that’s going to be a very personal experience for any viewer. I didn’t get wrapped up in AnoHana. It didn’t bring on the waterworks. But then there are things that get me teary-eyed in Anime that I know plenty of other people wouldn’t feel for in the least, and others where I’m part of the main group that all cried like little babies. Everybody’s different. And especially with the great performances from the voice actors, I can absolutely understand getting wrapped up in it and dragged along for the ride. And clearly it touched more than enough people that if you’re one of them, you’re in good company.
If you haven’t seen AnoHana, my personal advice is to skip it. But if you really love this show, I wouldn’t say you’re wrong for liking it, just that we’re approaching it from very different angles.