Hello.

I know. I know.

I haven’t been reviewing many animes recently…and there’s a perfectly good reason behind it.

School and life has just been getting in the way between all this and I haven’t even been able to catch up on any anime goodness, much less review anything.

The good news is Spring Break is coming up soon in a couple of days time and I am free to catch up on everything, which of course includes watching anime because honestly, I am so deprived of it.

Seriously, no joke. While I was doing without anime, I wasn’t able to focus on all the drama in the series and I started focusing more on my life, which made me just over-analyze everything that was going on in my life. It’s made me realise that focusing on the drama in my life is very taxing and now I know why I occupy myself with the make-believe drama that you find in animes. Much less stressful but just as entertaining.

I’m getting off task here, today this post will be focusing on the anime adaption of the manga: Ao Haru Ride [アオハライド]

This anime is still fairly recent, considering that it only finished airing yesterday (22/09/2014).

I’ve been able to complete over these past 12 weeks. Since they only released one episode every week, it’s been pretty easy to be able to fit it in while studying and such. Also, it was really amazing to finally see the characters ‘come to life’. The voice, the colour…it was beautiful. As a fan of the manga from the very beginning, waiting for the chapters to come out one by one, it was breath-taking and heart-stopping.

There will also be a drama adaption coming out soon too, so look out for that if you’re a fan.

Synopsis

Ao Haru Ride is basically an anime centered around young love.
The main girl, Yoshioka Futaba, a middle-schooler is depicted as the typical young shoujo school girl. Misunderstood by the girls and extremely adored by the boys. She’s cute, pretty and oozing ‘femininity’ from every possible angle! Of course, she attracts all the boys with all her physical looks and feminine personality. As an outcome of this, the girls in the school don’t particularly like her very much, in short, they pretend to be her friend while they trash her behind her back. (Like what most teenage girls without a life do.) However, Yoshioka Futaba does not attract the boys on purpose! She actually does not like boys, in general, at all, maybe even to the point of being slightly scared and repulsed by them…except for one guy. Tanaka Kou (Later known as ‘Mabuchi’)

Kou is different from the other guys, he’s gentle, small and maybe even slightly feminine. (It may be because of the fact that he’s slightly feminine that Futaba doesn’t really mind him.) Kou, much like the other guys, starts developing a little crush (I’m not sure if I could refer to it as ‘little’, let’s just say that he liked her so much to the point that he would write her name all over his notebook and even go back just to circle it over and over again.) on Futaba, just that his ‘like’ for her was much more pure-hearted and innocent.

After a while, after a couple more encounters and some light sniffing action (You’ll understand later..), they both decided that they had a mutual ‘like’ going on between them and Kou asked Futaba out. Thought after some stuff, Kou found out that Futaba ‘hated’ guys so he bailed out on their date and stood her up. Also due to some family issues he left and went to a different middle school.

Fast forward a couple of years later and they’re in high school now.

Both of them have changed slightly, Futaba is now no longer feminine and she acts like a complete slob (I’m not sure if I feel very comfortable referring to her as a slob, since I’m always like that and I certainly do not do it on purpose…or maybe I am a slob..) just so that her ‘friends’ don’t leave her and hate her because she doesn’t attract guys anymore. Kou’s moved back too and they meet once again, now that they’re going to the same high school. However, he’s changed too, he’s no longer ‘nice’ or ‘gentle’ and that slight hint of ‘femininity’ is completely gone, he’s actually quite silent and mean now. So life carries on after that … do they still have feelings for each other, do they even remember each other?

You’ll have to find out for yourselves.

Anyway, watching this manga come to life in an anime has been a dream come true for me, I had always thought that it would make a great anime but much like many great mangas, they never get produced as an anime and it really is such a shame. It was quite surprising learning that it would be turned into an anime. However, though it was not a surprise that they ended the series at 13 episodes, though it is quite a shame, I would’ve loved to see it at least reach 25 or 26 episodes.

As for whether there will be a second season, it doesn’t look like it’ll be very promising, which makes sense since they’re probably much more focused on producing the drama version of this series than continuing the anime version right now.
I highly recommend this series if you’re looking for a manga from the shoujo genre but you’re tired of all the cliche storylines. I’m not going to falsely imply that this series is the best and that it’s completely out-of-this-world so much so that it would knock your socks off. I am going to say, however, that it doesn’t really follow to the normal ones in the sense that it jumps from the past to the present and it shows how much people can change over time. It also shows the true meaning of friendship and how incredible it is when people can work so hard for another person just out of pure love.

I thoroughly enjoyed the anime version and I just hope that the manga releases more chapters soon.