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.