Yesterday wo Utatte

Life is complicated, especially when it comes to love. Who do we have feelings for, are they enough for a close and familiar relationship or is it more of a friendly nature? This anime focuses on these aspects and presents them in everyday situations that can also be imagined in real life. Yesterday wo Utatte was one of the most hyped series for the Spring season in 2020, so let's take a closer look at it: STORY: Friendzone or more? Many of us have already gotten into this situation. If the feeling of love is only one-sided, even friendship is in danger. Our protagonist Rikuo is also affectedby this and experiences how difficult and uncomfortable it can be. Initially without big goals and dreams, he continues to develop with the help of his friends. He really loves his old college female friend Shinako but she had a sad past and lost the person she loves the most. She isn't sure about her future...in the meantime we also get to know Haru, our energetic and happy girl. She loves Rikuo and is willing to do everything for him. Also Haru had a hard past where she dropped out of school even. But in the end it doesn't matter how hard or uncomfortable the past was, whether old love reappears, the most important question is how the future looks like. Where do I get the motivation to change my life? Our protagonists must also ask themselves all these important questions. CHARACTERS: The characters play an enormously important role for love relationships, they are the absolute main aspect. Without being able to understand their thoughts and actions, this anime would not have succeeded. The nice thing is that you can put yourself in the role of the characters. We can understand their joy and their pain very well. We experience how they develop, set new goals and all of that step by step. Love relationships are complicated, but every person wants to love and be loved. ART: The environment gives you a very idyllic, but also realistic feeling. Every single scene was presented as it could be in real life: from the houses, buildings to the decoration in the rooms, everything was very well thought out. The expressions and emotions of the character also come out well. Not even the smallest detail has been forgotten. SOUND: Nowadays we experience not many animes that do not have an OP. "Yesterday wo Utatte" is one of the few exceptions. After a short opening scene where we normally expect the opening song, it is left out. In the beginning maybe a little unusual, but suitable for this anime. During the episode everything was well thought and even the smallest detail are presented perfectly: We hear quiet engine noises during a dialogue in the background, we can hear their emotions from the characters' voices, even the pouring of water sounds like in reality. Perfect ED songs complete the whole thing. The lyric of these are suitable for the feelings and also the music is tuned accordingly. ENJOYMENT: After the first episode, this anime got my full attention. The everyday situation, a complicated love affair, all of this captivates the viewer. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Where does the journey of our characters go, who gets together with whom ... the anime answers all these questions a little more with each episode. One or the other will probably ask herself/himself what she/he would have done in such a situation. BUT!!! Without spoilering anything, it can be said that 12 Episodes is definitely not enough to cover the whole plot. A rushed ending can give you a very unsatisfying feeling. All in all, I recommend everyone to give this anime a try, even if you might not like such genres in general. With all its good aspects, "Yesterday wo Utatte" will surely get your attention.

Yesterday wo Utatte is an anime that had great potential, but unfortunately wasted it. When I saw its premise, I immediately felt a strong sense of connection to it. It's been more than a year since I graduated from college, and the show reflects the uncertainty I've felt about the future recently. Not everyone will find their success story immediately once they set foot on the real world. Feeling like you're in limbo during the time between graduation and employment is normal. Perhaps, these are just assurances to comfort me as I’ve been stuck in one place for a while now. Watching the first fewepisodes made me reflect if I made any real progress in life as an adult. It made me root for Rikuo's character, hoping things get better for him eventually. The show could've been an emotionally compelling coming-of-age story about overcoming obstacles that adult life brings. Instead, it ended up being a complicated romance story with mixed results. Even if the show didn't end up going for the coming-of-age route, I became invested in the romance. Rikuo finds himself stuck between two women that showed interest in him. One of them is Haru, who is the eccentric yet cheerful type that has a massive crush on Rikuo. The other one is Shinako who Rikuo has a crush on ever since they were classmates back in college. To make things more complicated, we also have Rou who's in love with Shinako even though they are childhood friends. The show does a decent job initially in exploring each character's backstory and making the audience understand their train of thought. I honestly didn't care who will end up with who as long as enough time is given to flesh out their characters. The show's focus on romance was starting to get the justification it deserved until it got ruined with one logistical decision that led to its downfall. As the show progressed around the halfway mark, it started to have a noticeable drop in quality with each episode. They no longer have the same impact as the earlier episodes. It felt like a long period had passed between episodes, and the show's continuity suffered because of that. I soon discovered that a lot of content from the manga were skipped over, and most of them are considered crucial to the story's progression. New episodes would have developments that startled me and made me wonder if I wasn't paying enough attention to the previous episode. The characters' actions started to make less sense, and I still tried to connect the dots despite that. It's almost like Doga Kobo was in a rush to conclude the whole thing, which is a disappointing move that even the extras that are supposed to fill in the gaps couldn't remedy. I can't help but feel that this anime could've been way better as I reached the final episode. It started extremely well, began to lose focus, and ended up with a conclusion that didn't feel earned. The main characters didn't get the proper exploration that they deserved. Every major decision they make doesn't feel justified later because the show starts to make less effort to help us understand what made them reach that decision. They all feel like the same flawed person they were at the start. They deserve to be more than that because they feel like real people. At least, their interactions made it feel that way, whether it's those moments of awkward silence or sudden outbursts of emotion. If there's anything that I got from watching this show, it made me want to read its manga. I want to know what the story would be like untarnished by the limits of an adaptation. I want to learn more about the characters and understand them better. I want to forget the bitter aftertaste this anime gave me after pinning such high hopes on it.

Spoilers for the story’s end in the last paragraph - because everyone deserves to know what a vomit-inducing ending it is. “What if we took Welcome to the N.H.K. and bastardized it into pure wish-fulfillment? We’ll earn millions!” The isekai LN title of this series would be “I’m the most dull, unremarkable, and devoid of appeal ‘literally me’ MC in existence, yet I’m inexplicably beta-orbited by an underaged manic pixie dream girl and an inexplicably single 9/10 woman in her prime.” In case you don’t like isekai LN titles and prefer comparisons to the previously seen shows, NHK ni Youkoso! is a perfect one. Imagine NHK. But insteadof a mentally ill shut-in, Sato is just a nondescript part-timer schmuck. And instead of the troubled characters with deep backgrounds, Misaki and Senpai are just wish-fulfillment waifus. And instead of the bizarre, eccentric and cringy story arcs - nothing happens. In other words, imagine NHK but entirely devoid of depth, fun, or identity. Yesterday wo Utatte is an insanely frustrating show to watch because it’s not awful consistently. Despite being full of the massive red flags that scream “this is garbage, drop it without finishing a single episode,” it occasionally manages to have a genuinely poignant moment of drama that would be great in a better show not ruined by its awful premise and awful characters. No, “occasionally” isn’t the right word - that’s literally how every episode is structured. They follow the pattern of the first 15 minutes of nothing that leaves you all the time in the world to ponder how terrible this series is and what are you even doing with your life, followed by the 5 minutes of decent drama. Yeah, here is a wise saying: if you mix 5 barrels of wine with 15 barrels of mud you’ll get “don’t fucking watch this show, it’s bad.” Since the characters are the main issue, I’ll elaborate on those: Rikuo is what happens when you make your characters out of the TVTropes quotes. Here: “A soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence. If only someone could come along and open his heart to the great, wondrous adventure of life.” Haru is by far the worst thing about the entire show. You know how some characters, say, Haruhi get called a Manic Pixie Dream Girl just for being quirky and female? Not the case. She fits the definition of MPDG to a “t” - an assertive eccentric girl with wild hair and a pet raven that has no goals, agenda or purpose beyond attaching herself to the male protagonist. That’s unironically her entire character - her life is empty so she pursues the MC just to have some meaning in it (which doesn’t explain why she pursues this particular wet noodle). She’s so awful, the moments where she is being emotionally hurt are by far the most enjoyable moments in the show for me (and there is no shortage of those since Rikuo treats her like furniture). Also, she’s 18 y. o. because this is anime and you can’t have anime without a JK (the MC is 25 y. o.). Shinako is the protagonist’s former classmate who kinda liked him in the past and now they’ve met again by chance. I wasn’t joking about the whole NHK comparison. And the comparison makes the biggest problem with her glaringly obvious - there is a snowball's chance in hell a woman like this wouldn’t be married or swarmed by dozens of potential suitors at this point of her life. That’s just not how it works. Senpai in NHK was married despite being an absolute mess - because that one is a well written story. Shinako here is not because this one is not. I mean, she has a half-decent story reason for staying single - but that doesn’t explain why every single male acquaintance doesn’t try to ask her out or why she spends all of her free time beta-orbiting a boring fucking nobody. Rou is basically a male clone of Haru in a sense that they’re both teens unhealthily beta-orbiting a much older person that treats them like a piece of furniture. Outside of that his personality is that he has a safety pin for an earring. There is also that one flirty shoulder-length-middle-parted-blond-hair-with-a-hairband guy that I swear I’ve seen in 50 shows before, even though I can’t recall his name in any of them. He’s not relevant or anything, I just want to point out a trite cliche. That’s really all there is to it - the main characters all kinda make sense in a vacuum. What doesn’t make sense is why these 9-10/10 women would be throwing themselves onto this 4/10 man and how fucking dumb the show thinks I am if it expects me to not question this masturbatory fantasy of a premise? Literally just replace the MC of the story with Satou Tatsuhiro (i.e. a loser that is at least distinct enough to tell him apart from a potato sack) and this will instantly become a barely watchable poor man’s NHK, instead of an unwatchable morally hazardous shlock. And now, the ending: So, yeah, the manic pixie dream girl “wins” - after the MC first dates the actual woman for a while and then breaks up with her and decides, “Guess I’ll go for the back-up now, it’s not like that tool has anything to do besides waiting until I whistle.” They meet, kiss and the series treats it like a happy end. But not before actually lampshading what a piece of shit the MC is for doing that. Hey, author-san, just because you acknowledge a thing is horrible doesn’t mean you get a free pass to do that exact thing and frame it like a happy end. Go fuck yourself. 2/10 for “degeneracy.”

I lost my dad when I was 15 to prostate cancer. Growing up without a father during some of the most important times in a boy’s life is hard. Whereas most people would turn to their fathers for advice and help with relationships, life, decisions, etc. I instead turned to anime/light novels/manga. One of the mangas that has been the most influential in my life and development since my father’s passing was Yesterday wo Utatte. A tale about unrequited love, the struggles of adulthood, the pain of loss and learning to accept the way things are. Needless to say, when I heard that the animewas in production I was ecstatic. DG have always been a favourite studio of mine due to their success in the CGDCT department, but they’ve also made more serious shows that taught me life lessons like Plastic Memories. YwU is another impressive entry into their already solid line up with stunning visuals, life like animation and masterful direction that makes you forget you’re watching anime and feels very real. In fact, speaking of removing the anime-y feel, the series has no OP which I believe was a great touch and enhances the experience. The story is a relatable one. We’ve all had crushes in uni/hs and wondered how things would go if we reconnected with them. We’ve all had unrequited love, we’ve all done things that go against our best interest, and we’ve all felt lost in life. These are very human things. We are by nature, irrational. YwU does an amazing job of capturing the complexities of human emotions and crafting an engaging narrative. The seiyuu castings for all of the characters are perfect as well. For me, seiyuus are quite important. They can make or break my experience with a show and in this case, they made it. The older I get, the more I struggle to deal with the traditional high pitched squealish anime voices and much prefer the deeper, more realistic tones which this show features. To avoid rambling(I could go on and on about how much I love this), suffice to say YwU was, in my opinion, anime of the season. While it takes some rather large shifts from the manga, the story remains every bit as emotional, educational and thought provoking. For me, a masterpiece. Yesterday wo Utatte gets 10 crows out of 10.

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