His and Her Circumstances Anime Review at Animetique.com

Anime Review: His and Her Circumstances

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His and Her Circumstances
Publisher: Gainax
Type of Anime: TV
Genre: Romance, Schoolkids, Comedy
Watched Subbed/Dubbed: Dubbed

Overall Rating:

Story:

My Rating:

Imagine an anime that makes a serious attempt at portraying and articulating a high school relationship as it begins and develops. No, this isn't Love Hina or Ranma, so be warned. The striking difference is the level of self awareness in each of the characters. It's like we hear the chatter that goes on in their heads throughout the entire series, and it switches from "her" or Yukino Miyazawa's perspective to "his" or Arima Soujiro's perspective as it follows the two.

Yukino and Arima are numbers 1 and 2 in their class and both strive to be perfect. When the two meet, it first is because of their class competitiveness, but soon it develops into much more. Along the way, we get a dramatic and exaggerated view of the relationship from a fairly realistic perspective. Now, you're probably thinking that I've just contradicted myself there, but the anime has a manga feel to it. When something seems particularly dramatic to a character, the character and/or situation is drawn chibi/distorted and the animation follows a manga like, frame by frame approach. The only other anime that's similar in terms of drawing style that I've seen is FLCL (the story is completely different, however). For example, when Yukino thinks she's done something particularly stupid, we hear her inner dialog about how she is completely stressed that she made a fool of herself, and the animation follows the drama of her inner dialog. The drawing style may resort to black and white pencil drawings or part may be overly exaggerated or the entire scene may be fairly realistic looking.

Once Yukino and Arima become comfortable in their relationship, the story looks out around them to how they interact with others in their environment. This encompasses how different each of their family lives is to how their classmates interact with them. Because this is high school and Arima is so perfect and popular in the eyes of all the school girls, Yukino sometimes finds herself in catty battles where she must effectively deal with her "rivals" or the entire school ignoring her. There is also the issue that because the two spend so much time together, their grades drop and teachers start intervening in their relationship. And of course, there's the physical aspect - how to show affection and how far to go.

Overall, this is quite an interesting anime in terms of portraying how two people meet, start looking outside themselves to accept others into their world view, how they change in the process, and how that relationship blossoms in the face of outside forces. It's well worth watching as a character focused and driven exercise that few anime have taken.

Animation:

My Rating:

I think the animation style of His and Her Circumstance can best be described as a manga that is now an anime. There are scenes that are just stills drawn in exaggerated manga style that progress frame by frame as if you were reading a manga, and then there are the more realistic parts of how the characters interact with one another. The two styles are used to portray how others are scene and how actions are seen in the minds of the characters. If something seems completely crazy, the animation follows in chibi, exaggerated format. If something is particularly serious, the characters may be shown more realistic or even sketched out in line art.

Music:

My Rating:

The theme songs are kind of catchy. I really like the ending theme, although I'm not a huge fan of the opening theme. I do really like the piano music during the dvd menus.

Character Design:

My Rating:

This is definitely where His and Her Circumstances shines. The level of detail and self-awareness that each of the characters possess is striking. It's almost as if the story is presenting people of a much greater age going back and doing high school all over again. There are very few high school students with the ability to recognize not only that they are doing each behavior, but they know themselves well enough to articulate why they are doing it. The characters each can accept responsibility and make their own decisions independently of their environment, which demonstrates maturity far greater than most high school students have. The animation style in each scene represents when a character knows they are doing something ridiculous or embarrassing or stressful and adds to the greater self-awareness of the character. The character normally will then reflect on the situation and try to come up with an appropriate solution to their current problem.

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