Gotta sneak that fanservice in somehow.
Kimi no Iru Machi, it seems, isn’t a series that is very adaptable. Though I couldn’t be bothered to get through more than 5 minutes of the OVA that was released last year, I doubt I missed much with the general consensus being that it was wasn’t worth the effort. Now, the series finally has a full-fledged TV anime. Unfortunately, I can’t say I enjoyed its premiere episode any more than I did that of the OVA. Though the anime has more going on in terms of action, the characters are lackluster and the drama is inconsequential and without foundation.
The episode focuses on Haruto Kirishima who has moved from the countryside to Toyko in order to meet up again with a girl (Eba Yuzuki) he presumably fell in love with when she visited his town sometime in the relatively recent past, or so I’m guessing. He moves in with his sister and immediately has a run in with the girl living next door (Asuka Mishiima) who, after almost beating his face in with a baseball bat, becomes one of his first friends (there’s some other guy too, but who cares about him?) and is, by the end, a likely love interest. The issue of the girl he came to Tokyo looking for is largely ignored until the end when Haruto runs into her sister and lots of heavy hinting about both the current state of their relationship as well as why he came to see her now takes place.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t find much to like to with the episode. For a premiere episode, I found it frustrating that so little was explained in terms of Haruto and Eba; I learned more about their relationship from the synopsis, and Eba herself hardly had a presence. I’m assuming that we’ll eventually be filled in regarding what happened, but it would have been nice to be given a glimpse beyond some idyllic bike ride in the countryside. The lack of background knowledge ended up also negatively affecting a large chunk of the drama in the episode. How can I be moved or feel anything, for that matter, about relationships and people I don’t know about? This is probably best highlighted by the ending scene where Haruto accidentally runs into Eba’s sister and they have a vague conversation about Haruto’s decision to move to Tokyo. Judging from the facial expressions, I think I was supposed to feel apprehension, or at least curiosity of some sort, but I only felt a mild sense boredom.
Kimi no Iru Machi‘s drama also lacked a compelling atmosphere, despite its best efforts to establish one. The animation employed a lot of darker colors that was supposed to give the show a sort of dreary feel. The problem with this is that, as a romantic drama, the effectiveness of its drama largely depends on the cast. Unfortunately, the cast here is as compelling as the story. Haruto struck me as both ingenuine and obnoxious, especially in his teasing of Asuka which mainly consisted of a lot of yelling, most of which Asuka returned. Despite a potentially interesting complex about her dialect, Asuka turned out to be equally unsympathetic mainly because her issues were dealt with too quickly and briefly for me to care about any of them. Because I couldn’t care less about these two, all the drama surrounding them lost its effectiveness which is unfortunate due to the large effort the episode obviously made to establish a “dramatic” air that was ultimately both overbearing and unnecessary.
Although I had expected the animation to be the saving grace of the show since I liked what I had seen of it beforehand, that quickly turned out to not be the case. I personally think the character designs are quite pretty to look at, but the problem with them is that they don’t really work here. They often became a bit distorted in distance shots and often moved a bit awkwardly.
In the end, Kimi no Iru Machi isn’t a show I would want to watch more of. Though fans of the manga may like the show, it’s not for me.