Animation Company: ZEXCS
Website: http://www.starchild.co.jp/special/sukinayo/
Genre: Romance, School, Shoujo
Summary: Tachibana Mei has spent her 16 years keeping herself isolated from people. One day, she accidentally kicks the most popular guy in school, Kurosawa Yamato who quickly becomes interested in her.
Story & Plot: 5/10
The story is pretty straightforward. The base of it is about love, trust and friendships. Mei goes from keeping herself isolated from people to putting herself into the crowd and have a group of friends and a boyfriend. Of course as per usual there’s always going to be a bitch doing the cockblocking, the “mandatory” trend of misunderstandings taking place and then the gooey fluffy romance. The story itself doesn’t particularly shine, and is relatively okay if you were able to put up with the misunderstanding/jealous bitch routine.
Characters & Development: 5/10
Of all characters Tachibana Mei is someone who a lot of us can easily relate to. She is a very soft-spoken character, who will only raise her voice when she feels she need to- and in the beginning started off with a mindset that would prefer being alone than together with someone. As for the rest of the cast, well what can I say? Not much. Yamato had a conflict of his own, but for a little too long he acted pretty stupid (in particular actually believing the BS he was being fed by Megumi regarding Mei), naive and eventually became quite annoying. And frankly, our two main characters and their stupid miscommunications and the occasional lack of trust in each other quickly grew tiresome to watch. When I look at the cast, my favorites are Kai and Aiko, because they are the only ones who actually use their heads and proven to be awesome.
Animation Quality: 8/10
The animation was for most part pretty close to being flawless from start to finish. It wasn’t anything spectacular had anything that stood out to be different from others, but it was nice and simple.
OST: 8/10
There’s a lot of classical tracks- specifically piano pieces. Honestly I found that it reminded me a lot of the OST from Pride and Prejudice, but it might just be me. Both the OP/ED and not to mention the insert songs were very nice too. In particular I found the OP song (Friendship ~for Say ‘I Love You by Ritsuko Okazaki) very refreshing since it’s very rare for Animes to have such a soft lullaby-like opening song.
Overall: 5/10
Sukitte Iinayo’s anime adaption was a sweet fluffy story about love and friendship. However I can’t say whether the manga is as fluffy as the anime delivered it to be since as I have mentioned a few times already: To most if not all the fans who are familiar with the manga, this was considered as a ‘failed adaption’. So much like Kamisama Hajimemashita there are two sides of a coin here. The manga fans and the new audience. To the new audience like myself (since it’s been far too long ago since I’ve last read it to remember anything) the anime was considerably ‘good’- if not, at least decent in comparison to the other shoujos that came out this season. Of course this all varies on our own tastes.
Recommendation: For people who enjoy fluffy love stories with the usual misunderstanding trend.
