So ends the gushing praise
Down to brass tacks from the start here. There’s a wealth of wordiness on this blog about True Tears, most of it just glowing with rainbow love for perhaps the best romantic anime I’ve ever seen. You heard me.
Story and Characters
Shinichiro is a high school kid — quiet artist type, but not the lame harem star type. He’s pretty smart, he’s sensitive, but prone to daydreams, usually about Hiromi. She’s a girl he’s known since childhood who lodges in his house. He’s perfectly content to pine after her with no results, but his world is thrown off balance when he meets Noe, a cute girl and the school’s resident weird kid.
And that’s it. There are details, sure: There’s Noe’s cold-ass brother Jun, who enters into a deal to date Hiromi if Shinichiro will take Noe out, but who only longs after his own sister. There’s Shinichiro’s mother, who hates Hiromi for some unknown reason — perhaps because she’s the product of her husband’s affair? But there’s not a lot of complexity, leaving plenty of room for character development.
And that’s really what True Tears is about. The characters don’t wander blindly through lame anime machinations that keep them from progressing in their lives and relationships. They change, learn, and go through… human stuff. The realism and complexity of their actions is mostly unequaled in the medium, and lets me forgive the tendency toward melodrama and the occasional less-plausible moment.
Animation
Executed with style and astounding attention to detail by (I think relative newcomers) PA Works, the animation is another area where the bar is raised. Kyoto Animation could probably pull off the complex and very subtle emotions in Hiromi’s face, but none of their characters have the depth to even possess those emotions in the first place. Noses are a little flat and chins tend toward dangerous awl-like points, but character designs are overall very appealing.
Music
The OP is a mirror of the show itself: nothing you really haven’t heard before, but very strong in its execution. I loved it. Incidental music is very restrained, even minimal, serving only to accent the gauzy, dreamlike pacing and mood of the show.
Dangers of Watching
- More than a few references to siscon
- The subject of the internet’s heated Noe-vs-Hiromi war, which will seem silly to you if you pay the slightest bit of attention to the plot
- Melodramatic tendencies that can (very occasionally) get out of hand
- Boring to write about because there’s not much to rip on
Benefits of Watching
- Great look and an atmospheric mood
- Fantastic, nuanced voice acting
- Dedication to realism and emotional complexity
Bottom Line
There are a few crazy plot twists, but overall True Tears relies on the strength of its characters. All of them are believable and sympathetic to a degree. Viewers seemed to really get caught up on the “which girl will he pick” angle, but to me the show never played like that. In spite of being inspired by a visual novel, it didn’t take that plot route (the characters and story are all original to the anime). Instead it told a cohesive story in an atmospheric, moody, and beautiful way. The people behind this should be proud, and I am 100% looking forward to what comes next. True Tears deserves to go down as one of dramatic anime’s finest series.
I blogged most of the series, so here’s the series info page for more in-depth character stuff.
And here’s the category page for True Tears, featuring this post and all the episodic blog posts, with big screencaps. Might find some spoilers in these, so tread lightly.
