We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day

Anime right? Twenty years ago we all thought it was all adolescent power fantasies with teenage boys flying mecha power suits and heroines in stripperific costumes before we realised that we got them confused with superhero comics. Back then I was lucky in that the local videostore my parents had gotten a subscription to when we’d finally gotten a vcr ten years after everybody else (having had a black and white telly until long into the eighties and only the very very basic cable package) had one or two anime/manga enthusiasts working there and they managed to get all the classics. Akira, Legend of the Overfiend, Fist of the Northstar, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Macross, all courtesy of Manga UK and all of a certain consistency. Not bad series or movies by any means, but only a very small part of a much more diverse selection Japan had to offer, tailored to the tastes of western nerds and not too strange.

These days, even if the official supply is still somewhat limited, the internet and various not quite legal solutions can get the dedicated anime fan everything they want. Now myself I’ve never been a hardcover anime or manga fan, being fairly conservative in my tastes, depending on the recommendations of others for cool new series. Which is how I discovered things like FLCL or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but not the anime series I’ve just started to watch: Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai or AnoHana for short, which means “we still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day” and which is somewhat different from most series I watch because it has gotten reactions like this

I accidently ran across some fan art for the series when googling something else, read the inevitable Wikipedia writeup and hunted down the episodes on the strength of it.

The story is simple: a group of childhood friends, young children, drift slowly apart as they grow into teenagers. One of them, Menta, never grew up however as she died in an accident on that day they found the flower. Now the guy who had been the closest to her, Jinta, is haunted by her memory, not to mention her ghost, who wants him to fulfill her wish she had asked him about the day she died. He needs to bring back the group to do so and move her spirit on, but this isn’t easy as they each have gone their own ways. How much do you have in common with the kids you played with when you were eight now that you no longer see them anymore and you’re in high school?

It’s a very adult in the proper sense of the word, low key, emotional and gut wrenching story about dealing with loss and memory. Any wonder it appeals to me right now?