henrysama_hw

The premise of the anime is interesting, the animation work is competent, but it fails upon delivering a substancial experience that will make this show stand out from the crowd. The whole high schooler having to deal as a teacher thing can lead to so many possibilities of story telling in a romantic comedy. The anime "The quintessential quintuplets" proves that you can make a harem anime that treat its characters with respect and make wholesome and funny moments that will drive the story forward. Which is not the case with "We never learn". I was having some fun with the anime and the tipical absurd romantic comedy cenarios until I realised that the show had no intention of developing ANY of the characters relations. The results are the same will-they/won't-they cliche jokes over and over again leaving us with only a few and far between touching moments. You can enjoy the simplicity of the story but if you're looking for anything more than a simple story with the same pattern repeating over and over again, you better look for something else.

Using phone fraud, a real life problem, as a hook and showing the main characters having fun doing it were the things that sold me the show. But If the hook was interesting the thing that made me stay was the twisted sense of conduct of the characters. They have a clear reason for not only doing that but beliving what they are doing is the right thing to do, which made the characters more likeable. Watching the show was really enjoyable, most of the characters were well realised and fun to watch, the episodes have a nice leght , it never felt dragging on , or focusing on too many characters. We had some anime like overreactions but (in most cases) it never felt so out of place or distracting, but it can be a problem for some people. My biggest gripe with the show is that it blends comedy and drama but whenever it tries something dark it never manages to embrace the darkness of the moment leaving some scenes that were supposed to be heavy feeling kind of meaningless or having less impact that it should have had.

You can see that there's a cute coming of age story behind this movie about youth, chasing your dreams and enjoying the moment, but the execution made the characters so uninteresting to watch, aside from Rina Takeda's character which is, in my opinion, the bright spot of this movie. The main character is so passive and resigned for the most part of the movie that it's so hard to see him as a likeble or relatable character, and most of the supporting characters and relationships were not developed well, and came out of nowhere.(The proposal twist at the end made my jaw drop from how bad it was). What I can praise this movie for is that sometimes it has such a charming fell to it, the ending photo shot scene was pleasant and even exciting to watch, some locations are really pretty and I had some chuckles. By far, Atsuko Takenaka was the best character, it's nice how the director made us discover some things about her without having to make her scream her feelings, and she had easily the best development. I don't know about the novel but this movie is kind of charming but so dull that it came out as boring.