This a good, low key, sweet show. I enjoyed it quite a bit, not for it’s action or intensity, but for it’s genuine, quiet, awkward sweetness.
It follows the budding relationship Kotaro and Akane, two students in their final year of junior high school. Kotaro is a bookish aspiring author and Akane is an accomplished runner in her track and field club. Despite running in different circles, they develop a friendship and eventually start dating.
The show really plays on the awkwardness and embarrassment of a first love as well as what it is to be at a very self conscious age. The supporting characters are also nicely included and the messiness of relationships and misunderstanding get a nice treatment as well.
The animation was enjoyable for me and I liked the OP.
I’d like to include the OP….I just couldn’t find it. 😦
Attention Parents: This is a sweet show. There is no fan service, curing, or violence to speak of. Will younger kids be entertained??? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a slow paced, quiet show.
I really like the show. Give it a watch if you like a sweeter, quiet style of show….the ending made me tear up…I’m such a softie.
I was a fan of animation throughout a lot of my life and in the 90s I did watch a very scant amount of anime but never got into it because it was always at the rental store and was super hit or miss. So I got discouraged throwing money at titles I didn’t like and gave up.
Fast forward 15 or so years. I now have children. They are starting to get into anime themselves. Dragonball, Naruto and the like. I still didn’t watch it with them.
It wasn’t until I got a Kindle Fire that I had more own little way to watch shows for myself (after years of watching what the kids watched). I was browsing through my Amazon Prime video app that I came across Clannad.
I thought: “Why not?”
It caught my attention.
But it was strange. It was slowly paced. The storytelling was different to what I was used to. It grabbed me in a quiet controlled way. It made me cry.
I started to watch it with my boys. By the time we finished Clannad- After Story we were all sobbing emotional wrecks. It is something I shared with my boys and something I continue to share with them to this day: anime.
Clannad was my gateway into becoming an anime fan and holds a special place in my heart. I have watched, and enjoyed, both the subbed and dubbed versions. Have met a few of the English voice actors for the show and last year got to see a panel by Key (the animation studio responsible for the VN and show).
I recently just purchased the Visual Novel on Steam: more feels, more fun.
I usually re-watch it once a year.
Still to this day I still get a bit emotional listening to the music from the show.
From Wikipedia: Seinen manga (青年漫画?) is manga marketed to a male audience aged roughly 17 on into their 40s. In Japanese, the word seinenmeans “young man” or “young men.”
Hanayamata and Girls und Panzer are both of the seinien genre. They are both, as the title of the post implies, shows about cute girls doing cute things.
Hanayamata follows Naru Sekiya who feels average and doesn’t feel like she has much going for her until she meets a new transfer student from America (Hana N. Fountainstand) and they start a Yosakoi dance club at school. The show then follows them as they, practice, recruit members, and get ready for the big Yosakoi competition.
There is nothing inherently bad about the show. It’s cute. The story is what you’d expect and the characters are fairly standard, but not bad. Despite it not being all that remarkable I enjoyed the show.
Attention Parents: There is nothing objectionable in this show.
I like the OP:
Girls und Panzer is a show that depicts tank warfare as a sport for high school girls. Referred to as “sensha-dō” aka “the way of the tank” is a popular martial art where teams of high school girls operate and fight with WWII era tanks. They live and go to school on Academy Ships which are large carriers that support an entire community.
The story follows Miho Nishizumi. A girl from a prominent “tankery”
family who has just transferred to a new school that doesn’t have a “tankery” program any longer. Tankery, needless to say, is revived and Miho is roped into taking tankery as an elective course. They then do the predictable things: get tanks, get members, train, and compete until the final big event.
It is a fun show. It is tanks fights with cute girls. The supporting teams are what made the show fun for me.
The volleyball team
The history club team
The video gamers team
The Student council team
The supporting team are a laugh and give the show some extra character. Is the show innovative or outstanding? No, it’s fun. Just mindless fun.
Attention Parents: There is nothing objectionable.
And there is dancing…
So what makes this Seinen? I guess it is the market it appeals to: young men. Both of these shows follow teen girls which I guess is what the appeal is. The shows themselves are not overtly sexual, but the art that fans make after the fact are more so:
It may not be the show that one finds objectionable, but the fan’s reaction to the show. Then again, this is the internet. If someone can think it they will. This applies to these shows as well.
Watch the shows. They’re cute and fun. Just don’t search Google images about the shows you enjoy.
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