Anyway, I’m Falling in Love with You – Episode 1

What’s it about? Nishino Mizuho is having a horrible birthday. Her dad forgot, summer fireworks are cancelled, and her crush turned her confession down flat. The cap on it all is when her childhood friend, Hazawa Kizuki, says he wants to be her boyfriend. She’s never thought of him that way, but now…?

If you poked your nose over into the Honey Lemon Soda premiere and thought, “this is nice, but I need my high school romance shoujo to have at least ten times this much melodrama,” then I have excellent news for you. In all seriousness, it is nice to have a season with two very solid looking shoujo adaptations to offer people, even if I wish genres besides contemporary high school romance could get a bit more love (shout-out to the beautiful job on A Sign of Affection, whose watercolor look this series is definitely echoing).

Mizuho is a rather understated protagonist, but it’d be a mistake to call her flat or a self-insert. She’s geared to give off an “average teen” vibe, and while I might’ve rolled my eyes at the token “wow, you look so much cuter not wearing your glasses!” beat, I found myself warm to her. Having a more low-key protagonist helps ground things when this is…well, a melodrama. Much talk is had about “sparkling adolescence,” and that means we’re placing a microscope on all of the impossibly big feelings that come with being a teenager. And while I don’t think it’ll be for everyone, I can see how this became a solidly popular series.

At first, Mizuho’s constant instance that Kizuki’s confession must’ve been a joke feels a bit contrived, but after enough scenes of watching her guy friends bag on her for not being a Real Girl, I started to get it. Even if Kizuki is a total golden retriever who starts being vocally complimentary almost immediately, it’s hard to switch those tracks. We at home know the inevitability of the conventions at play here, but from a character prospective Mizuho is living the worst kind of double-edged sword. She’s friends with the most popular hot dudes in school and they’ve probably been making low-grade shitty comments to her at least since puberty. Probably she’s had to deal with being looked at as a threat by other girls, too, though thankfully the script really doesn’t play into that much. And the big dramatic ending hook? Absolutely nails the “just one more” popcorn-munching vibe of a good soap opera.

My biggest disappointment is the fact that this is a story that explicitly takes place in 2020 and acknowledges COVID…kind of. There’s an unnamed “mysterious illness” that’s caused public events and school sports meets to be canceled, leading to a lot of character frustration about missing out on much-lauded high school experiences before graduation. Which is interesting, in a sense–the manga itself started running in late 2020, and I don’t doubt that nebulous frustration was something that a lot of readers could channel. Maybe it would’ve felt too real and suffocating to include all the details of daily pandemic life when this is mainly an escapist romance. I applaud the manga for being willing to grapple with the concept at all–it’s certainly the first anime I’ve seen do so–but it feels like a missed opportunity, and also a bit jarring to still see a bunch of students clustered together at a fence in July. I guess it doesn’t make for much of a sexy teen soap if everyone is terrified to breathe near each other.

It does feel like a little bit of a miracle that this production looks as polished as it does, given that both the director and one of the series composers last worked together on the unfinished, indefinitely postponed hot mess that was HAIGAKURA. It really shows to go you, in case one ever forgets about the degree of collaboration involved in making animation. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t be counting my chickens so quickly, as studio Typhoon Graphics’ resume is just a string of joseimuke done dirty over the past year. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope that Anyways ends up breaking that streak.

While I wouldn’t put this title at the top of your watchlist, I think it’s got the makings of a solid middle-of-the-road romance title. It might even end up developing some interesting thoughts about the pressure put on having a magical high school experience, if it ends up remembering to use its framing device of adult Mizuho more frequently. But honestly? Even if it just sticks to the high school romance, that “middle of the road” is still leagues above every single example of isekai churn that’s premiered so far this season. Go show it a little love.