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A UNIQUE SLICE OF LIFE

It's a quiet story that takes place in a modest Japanese household around the middle of the 20th Century (deduced from the stuff in the manga). It's very gentle and delicately drawn, and in it a sensitive book-loving girl approaches the end of middle or high school (probably the latter), and is soon to transition to work. As the big change begins to loom, she is reading a translated 19th Century novel. She reads it everywhere, at home, at school, and on the way between, and finds it captivating.

All around the girl as she reads, ordinary life plays out, and the ... depiction of all of her family and friends is masterful: memorable ordinary people created each with a few quick strokes. The girl has a HUGE imagination and it shows.

Not much, you say? Well, it was for me. I first read it around 2014 and just recently found myself longing to read it again in 2020. I wasn't disappointed.

I read the manga about 5 years ago and found it delightful in the beginning and deeply moving later. I was glad to see the many details of the traditional life of ordinary Japanese people in the period leading up to and encompassing WWII, and I loved little Suzu and her artistic development and sensibility.

The art is memorably sweet and evocative of the fragility of young girlhood, and the main character is one of the most lovable I've experienced in manga simply because she is so honest, simple, and unaffected. The manga's depiction of the way of life of ordinary Japanese people in the period ... prior to WWII is fascinating. Ditto is the growing sense that the manga conveys, as it develops, that Japan, at the stage of industrial development it had reached then, had "bitten off more than it could chew" in entering a war with the USA. All this is depicted simply by the contrast between the people's simple manner of living pre-war, and the deep privation they had to endure to support their faltering war machine in the end.

Be prepared for heartbreak in the last third of the story.

I liked the manga better.

I read the manga about 5 years ago and found it heartbreaking. I was glad to see the traditional life of ordinary Japanese people in the period leading up to and encompassing WWII, and I loved little Suzu and her artistic development and sensibility. I recommend the manga most highly.

The anime retains most of those virtues in its introductory portion, but much truncated and disjointed, so that there is little time to get to know Suzu, in actuality one of the most lovable and humble characters in manga and anime. But I couldn't tell that in the anime version, maybe ... because the anime-makers found they just had "too much story" to tell in the time allotted. All we got to see of her development was bits and pieces, which means there was no time to love her as much as she deserved.

I have to confess that I turned the anime off about a third of the way through, primarily because, since I am old now, I was not quite able to face up to the destruction and misery that I knew was coming. Someone not afflicted with the hypersensitivity of Oldness could probably watch this all the way through, and so get it's full overall impact.

Haibane Renmei is something really unusual in the anime world.

Anime is almost always created with fun for the audience as its prime goal. That's fine. That's it's media niche. But sometimes an unusual creator get to realize a private vision of his in an anime, and something extraordinary results.

This anime is one of those times. And it does nothing less than take on fundamental recurring issues of human life—in this case, how do we deal with the Awful Threesome: shame, guilt, and despair. I couldn't believe all that could have been gotten into a fun genre, but here it really has been.

At the same time, ... the story is told employing engaging characters in a mysterious setting. I loved it all the way!.

It's a jewel!

There are two broad kinds of stories in the world. Fun ones and realistic ones. The second kind is rare in manga because most of it that gets translated is aimed at children and teenagers, and is meant only to amuse. Sometimes, though, someone translates a bit of real seinen, and this is one of those rare cases.

This is the story of a teenage boy coming of age during one steamy summer, and it's fascinating because it demonstrates how innocent Japapese boys are! We all know that, really, due to the fact that most of the boys in manga are completely passive in ... their relations with girls and women. The boy here is that way, but in this story he get the first imtimations that there is more to women than he knows.

This series is great in a unique way.

It's about a shy and quiet girl who likes to draw, and so joins her high school art club, and finds a bunch of friends as a result. That's the whole story. On the surface, that is—but there's a lot more to it really. The true story of this manga is of the feelings that come and go, Sora's and the other characters', as they go through the most sensitive period of their lives.

In other words, this is a slice of life manga of the most sweet and delicate kind. Only manga, and no other form of ... cartooning I've discovered, seems capable of such gentleness of touch, and every time I find one of these loving little stories I get happy.

THE most touching anime I've ever seen. I first discovered it almost a decade ago, and recently re-encountered it on YouTube. It's power comes essentially from the contrast between the lil robot's fragility, known from the beginning, and her clearly parental feeling for the male character. (Note the generic name given for these robots in the anime sub.)

The terrible fact that we and all our loved ones are going to die makes all of us humans, even the young who are the main watchers of anime, carry a hidden wellspring of sorrow at that fact of inevitable loss, whether past, of our parents, or future ... of our later loved ones. This wellspring in expertly tapped in this short anime. And so is the love that we all have a capacity to feel.

This is an entry in the "cute girls doing cute things" category, but deviates from that category in several ways that make it special. First, they're really little girls, not yet in school I think. Second, they have a really neat fantasy that the share: They're protectors of the town, specifically of Ueno Park and environs. Put these two factors together and you get the rare "kids say the darnedist things" result.

It's a great result. At first I though this would just be a CGDCT standard, but pretty soon instead of just lying back and watching the cuteness, after a couple of episodes I was ... grinning like a fool. The girls are lovable and the most fun thing about them is, they are serious about their duty as protectors of the town, and they have no clue how funny that often makes them talk and behave.

Takes your mind right off your troubles!

I read a lot of Japanese manga and watch some anime, but the trouble with most of the anime is that it falls into various familiar formulae designed to appeal to teenagers and young adults. Since I'm an old adult, not much of the anime appeals to me. However this is one very big exception!

If you happen to be interested in astronomy I think you'll find it very moving. Ditto if you often read post-apocalyptic stories in any form, and also if you've been doing any thinking about how life will be when robots routinely move among us.

It's a little jewel, and I still ... am having feelings from it the day after watching it.

I revived my MyAnimeList account just to write this review after just having finished the manga, because I think some manga lovers will skip it through misunderstanding of what it is, and as a result will miss a great story.

This is not a standard manga, whose purpose is to provide fun light reading, mainly for kids and teenagers. It's more like a long serious novel, whose purpose is to move adults emotionally—in this case by telling the story of how several characters grow into adulthood. That's a big job, and I imagine Toume Kei took it on in part because she knew her drawing skills ... were strong enough to depict characters realistically and hold readers' interest in them. The fact that the manga continued to run in Japan from 1997 through 2015 suggests that she achieved her goal in that respect.

The story can essentially be summed up by saying that it's about a love quadrangle. There are two young men and two young women, just starting out in life after school, and we follow them as they try to discover who will marry who and what each will do as a career. Not easy for them, and more so for us at the beginning, because none of them seem to know much about the opposite sex, and of course we don't know anything about them.

Lots goes on, and eventually who will be with who is decided, and in the process of reaching that outcome the characters learn lots about the opposite sex, themselves, and each other, and we the readers take a long, suspenseful roller coaster ride. The story is that simple.

But the characters are the opposite. They are complex and determined people and as such they are very interesting and often mysterious. Why is she doing that? Why is he that dense? Etc. It's a lot like real life, where you can never get the real lowdown on the people you know and care about. And that's the essence of the greatness of this story. It uses manga to tell a completely realistic story and tell it well.

In short, this is a highly realistic depiction of serious young Japanese people as they pass through the most crucial early stage of their lives, and as such it's a very absorbing read.