I went into it knowing that it was an essentially automatically cheesy fake romance between two people who initially hate each other, and that it was a Shaft, which meant lots of oddly unpopulated geometric abstract liminal spaces and insipid conversations pretending to be profound, and even that the already cheesy set-up went the extra cheese mile by making the fake romance a mechanism to prevent a rival gang family war. And even prepared as I was, it overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief. Mostly it was the ensemble scenes of groups of scarfaced gangsters all simultaneously cheering on this make-believe high school romance, as if it was the single most important thing in the universe, but in the end it was that one guy with scary shiny glasses who decided that the actual most important thing in the universe was proving that the romance was a fake. It’s anime, so I have a very low bar for suspension of disbelief, and this one couldn’t even manage to meet that. Now that said, I can’t imagine that they’ll go 20 episodes with gangsters constantly popping up like Broadway choruses to squee with delight over the fake romance of two high-schoolers while scary shiny glasses stands off to the side and fumes, so I might give it another shot sometime, since the three main characters were actually relatively appealing. We’ll see…

It’s a sort of contrived drama (certainly not coincidentally) in the spirit of Drifting Classroom, but aside from a few broad strokes and basic concepts, it’s very much its own thing. The thing that’s drifting in this case is the scheduled-to-be-demolished apartment building in which the two main characters, currently estranged from each other, grew up happily together, and it’s literally drifting - floating - out to sea, trapping those two and a handful of their mutual friends. And to reach back a bit, that’s certainly an even less believable scenario than Nisekoi, but they handled it well enough that my suspension of disbelief was never even challenged. It was quite good all in all - it’s a difficult but ultimately rewarding watch. The only real issue I had with it was a personal one - the male lead was the Japanese character archetype I hate the most - the angry coward. He was one of those prideful assholes who’s desperately insecure and self-doubting and unhappy, and tries to make up for it by scowling and being angry essentially full time, and they’re just like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. But it was fairly obvious he was on a redemption arc, so I stuck with it, and eventually he pulled his head out of his ass. And it was all worth it in the long run.

It’s about a depressed and very down-on-his-luck musician when ends up adopting a sweetly naive but barely functional and unrepairable robot he finds abandoned on a scrap heap. It could’ve easily tipped over into being devastatingly sad, since it’s made clear from early on that she really is unrepairable, so the ending is pretty much preordained, but it still managed to mix in enough hope and joy that it worked out to charmingly bittersweet and even a bit optimistic in the end. I liked it.

It was pretty poor all in all, but not because there was anything specific wrong with it. It was more as if someone took dozens of separate ingredients for a decent anime and mixed them all together and ended up with… dozens of separate ingredients for a decent anime arbitrarily mixed together. Taken by themselves, the characters were at least okay, the set-up was potentially interesting and the way the story unfolded was potentially satisfying. But nothing fit with anything else. It almost felt like it was done by a committee - as if one team built a framework and designated a bunch of slots in the framework for different characters and different story events while a different team designed a bunch of characters and events to spec, then a third team just wedged the characters and events they were given into the corresponding slots and called it good. And for all I know, that might be pretty much exactly how it did happen. In any event, it was pretty bad, though in an oddly interesting way.

The characters are terrific (and, as they constantly remind us, cute) and the dialogue is bizarre and intriguing and stupidly funny, so it works as a sort of surreal SOL CGDCT iyashikei comedy - sort of a cross between Nichijou, K-On and Food Court de Mata Ashita - and I love it.

At no point in that entire movie could I predict what was going to happen next, and I finally just gave up and let it wash over me. It seems like it should’ve ended up feeling arbitrary, since it all unfolded so unpredictably, but somehow it all made sense. Sort of. I think. In any event, I enjoyed it. And odd though it was, I loved the art style.

I intended to just watch the whole series, but it’s one of those series - more than anything else, it reminded me of the Kara no Kyoukai movie series, which is to say each of the six 45 minute episodes is an independent story from some point along the shared timeline of the main characters, and while there is an overarching plot of sorts, it’s being revealed in bits and pieces along the way rather than playing out straightforwardly. It’s quite good, but the individual episodes are a bit exhausting and the way it’s playing out means that I don’t necessarily have to watch it straight through, and after two episodes, I was ready for a break.

It started off with a childhood friend, then added a fake girlfriend, then a meek chuuni, then finally a particularly cute tsundere. It was mostly pretty standard, but with a couple of oddities. First, the protagonist is probably the most incredibly dense harem protag I’ve ever seen. That was actually okay though. I think the thing that made it okay was that it wasn’t just a gimmick that showed up as necessary to keep the harem intact - he really was just that dense, pretty much full time. The other oddity though was that the fake girlfriend was an entirely foul and loathsome bitch, and that’s not just my opinion - that was the stated reality in-universe. Even the protag thought she was awful. And as it went on, her continued presence in the harem just made less and less sense, particularly after the protag finally figured out what was going on with the other three and the other three figured out that she was a fake. But still, there she was, poisoning everything and everyone around her.

I think the author was trying to make a point about redemption or hidden value or tolerance or something like that, but since the basic arc was that she was utterly loathsome, but the protag was kind to her anyway, and… she continued to be utterly loathsome, there was never any pay-off, so whatever the point was supposed to be, it got lost. More than anything else, it struck me as a failed effort.