Shameful Otaku Secret!

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.

About 5 hours of my life I’ll never get back

So, I’m a weak ass who couldn’t manage to finish blogging a couple shows before they ended, but I watched them, and if I didn’t finish blogging it’s probably because I lost all interest in even hating on something. Spice and Wolf disappointed in the end for sure, but having had no expectations for H2O from minute one, I suppose I wasn’t let down.

That said, I did watch it, which reminds me of something a teacher in art school said once: if you go to a restaurant and they serve you a shit sandwich, you don’t have to eat it.

Screengrabs are all from the final episode, just to make things look more exciting.

Plot

Is there a plot? Like a plague of rats, the Visual Novel has descended upon everything, devouring real storytelling in favor of individual mini-arcs devoted to different girls. In H2O, Hirose Takuma is a middle school kid who moves out to the country with his Uncle Dragonball to recover from a bizarre disease that made him blind. If your bets were on “tragic incident in past, repressed” then either you wrote this show or you possess (at least) average intelligence.

Takuma meets a cavalcade of girls, like I’m-Not-Me, Platform Shoes, and Cross-Dress, but enters into a pseudo-relationship with village outcast Hayami, who lives in an abandoned train car in the woods and is inexplicably treated like Gojira with bad breath by the redneck townies.

Gradually the past of the village is discovered, and is of course inextricably linked to Takuma’s own recent but hazy past. And if you’re like me, you don’t care.

Animation

I suppose I’d call it “capable,” but the character designs were not at all appealing to me. The show was produced by ZEXCS, who have only a little work out there, none of which I’m familiar with.

Music

Forgettable incidentals, straight-up unenjoyable OP. I fast forwarded through it every time.

Dangers of Watching

• Fantasy elements I can handle, but those aren’t what kills the believability of the show. That’s handled by horrible characters.
• This show takes to clichés like a fish to water (see what I did there? sigh…)
• I’ll quote myself: there are some sweet moments, but it’s kind of like visiting your dying Uncle Bobo in the clown hospital — a bittersweet ending to a ludicrous experience.
• Animation is pretty crappy.

Benefits of Watching

• The aforementioned sweet moments, of which there are two or three in the series, really can be nice.
• I kind of liked Uncle Dragonball

Bottom Line

Let’s keep it simple, stupid: I pretty much hated this show.