true tears

Information of Anime

Shinichiro Nakagami is lacking something.  His father took in his close friend's daughter Hiromi Yuasa after her parents died.  Although it has been years that she has been living with the Nakagami family, she seems to distance herself from others.  Shinichiro tries to ease her, but can't seem to approach or talk to her naturally.  He thinks about how to open up & let her tears flow.  A student from school named Noe Isurugi curses Shinichiro when he looked at her at the top of a tree from below.  Although she is cheerful & positive, she too has tears sealed inside her.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Shinichiro isn't the only one with problems as the two other girls that he knows are having the same thing.  Both of them can't shed their true tears as they locked them inside.  Although he tries to help them get their tears out, he can't get his own out.

As the show progress, we see how Shinichiro is becoming a center piece of a love war.  He has feelings for Hiromi, but her attention is towards Noe's brother Jun.  Akio Ando, a girl that Shinichiro helped Miyokichi Nobuse hooked up with, is developing feelings for Shinichiro too.  However, things change a bit when Jun learns about Shinichiro from Noe based on the amount of conversations that are related to him.  Jun goes to Shinichiro's house & requests him to go out with his sister.  Shinichiro gives him an unusual idea about making an exchange on the deal where Jun should go out with Hiromi.  Surprised, Jun accepts as Shinichiro realized that he screwed up.

Because of Shinichiro's action, Hiromi gets cold on him.  Jun immediately takes action on his end of the deal by asking Hiromi on a date right away while Shinichiro takes Noe to leave him alone for a while.  Noe doesn't take Jun about this.  At the same time, Akio starts to get tired of Nobuse as he starts to think that Akio has feelings for Shinichiro after he was told about the shopping incident that the two went on without Nobuse knowing.  Nobuse starts to see this, but doesn't want to hear it.  Back to the Hiromi & Shinichiro case, Hiromi learns about Shinichiro is suppose to go out with Noe.  Aside from this secret, Shinichiro starts to learn why his mother is treating Hiromi badly.  From Hiromi, he discovers that she may be his half sister as they may have the same father from different mothers.  For the first time, Hiromi starts to shed her tears as she "screwed up" in tell him.

Learning that Hiromi could be his sibling, Shinichiro tries hard not to accept it.  However, his feelings start to turn towards to Noe as he thinks that she is in love with him.  The answer comes when he confesses to her.  When Shinichiro tells Akio that he's going out with Noe, Akio starts to confess to him.

Although Akio gets turned down by Shinichiro, he still has problems talking with Hiromi since she started going out with Jun.  Shinichiro spends more time with Noe as he starts tell her about the progress of his picture book.  However, this would change a bit when Hiromi decides to leave the Nakagami house for Shinichiro's mother's sake & gets into an motorbike accident with Jun.

The bike accident would lead Hiromi to get in better terms with Shinichiro's mother as she stops saying a lot of negative things to her.  It also turns out that the half-sibling story was a lie created by his mother.  As Shinichiro is getting closer to Hiromi again & getting on better terms with her, she wants to break up with Jun.  However, he refuses because he doesn't want to.  Hiromi thinks the reason is breaching the agreement that he & Shinichiro made.  After some thought, she decides to move out to be away from Shinichiro after living with him for some long because she wanted to be be with him all this time.  But she didn't get to know him well.  Realizing his feelings, Shinichiro decides to chase after her & wants to do things properly.  However, he still isn't able to.

After Hiromi moves out, she decides to break it up with Jun who still refuses.  During this time, Akio gets back with Nobuse to start things over.  Also, Shinichiro manages to finish his picture book which has a bad ending surprisingly.  Noe meanwhile feels down as she feels that Shinichiro's heart has Hiromi & starts to think that that Shinichiro's love for her isn't there anymore.  Hiromi goes a far as telling her at the festival that she's now Shinichiro's girlfriend & how she should leave them alone.  Another thing that hits Noes is how she never considered Jun's feelings & how selfish she was.  During this time, Shinichiro realizes how he should do things properly as he thinks back about his picture book & how it was Noe that he was drawing for all this time.   He goes to look for her & leave Hiromi, he see Noe jumping off a tall tree in an attempt to fly.

Noe suffers only a bone fracture & things start to get close to the ending.  Jun finally breaks up with Hiromi & admits that he never loved her.  Hiromi confesses to Shinichiro about her love to him & tells him that she'll wait for his answer.  To settle things, he finally goes to Noe to let her see his finished picture book.  She initially didn't want to see it, but decides to later when the book is torn away with the last page missing.  Shinichiro tells her that hi loves Hiromi, but it was Noe that helped him draw his book

The show ends with Shinichiro telling Hiromi to go out with him.  During the credit roll, we see the characters moving on & Noe finally shedding tears in front of the school's chicken coop.

My Personal Review

A lot of people seems to be jumping into the true tears show for some reason.  Because of this & the need to be popular, I jumped in.  Ok, I lied about the being popular part.  Just for the record, this true tears anime show isn't based on the PC ero-game True Tears.  The characters are totally different & the title name is written differently.

Animation

The character designs look fairly nice.  In fact, I think the female characters are done nicely. The eyes are drawn nicely in shape & size with the faces.  As for fashion, a bit plain.  It's got some style, but not my thing personally.  When it got to the manga drawings parts, it was very nice & had the actual manga appearance.

The backgrounds are pretty detailed in terms of the use of colours.  The toning & shading is very well done & the details are almost like brush art.  The scenes with the manga ones, they are even more better looking.  However, the colours on the characters aren't too great.  The hair colours are one tone & makes the show look almost like it came from the 90s.

In terms of the animation movement, it's quite flowing & natural.  It's fairly smooth & the speed movement is natural.  It doesn't seem slow nor fast.  The show does use some 3D characters for the minor background ones & the movements give it away.  You can see how unnatural they move as it seems too smooth.

Sound       

The sound effects are mainly on the realistic.  They are play clearly & on cue.

The seiyuus here aren't too bad.  Although they don't have a major punch, they do provide some life & feeling of the characters.  I don't have a favourite voice in this show.

The music is mainly soft ballad & orchestra-style.  They are pretty good & set the moods quite well.  The volume level is pretty stable as it doesn't overpower the voices.

Story

Basically, characters getting over their problems & trying to shed tears.  The situations they are in are quite real & can be based on real life situations.  In other words, they are realistic.  We have Shinichiro trying to find his own future, Hiromi still grieving over the loss of her parents, & Noe that has forgotten how to cry.  We also see some interest vibes as well such as how Noe can't cry & how Shinichiro's mother doesn't accept Hiromi.  A lot of these get resolved nicely over time.

One problem I did had in following the show was Shinichiro.  He seems to shift around from Hiromi & Noe slowly.  Although he understands his problems & tries to resolve them, it was hard to follow a bit.  So hard, that I didn't know who he would end up with at the end.  Although he does reference himself a lot with his picture book which is a good form of storytelling here, he kind of switches around a little bit too much.

Overall Conclusion

true tears is a pretty nice show that seems to focus on character development.  Although not heavy on jokes, it's like a bit heartwarming at the same time.  If you are looking for character development & a light-hearted story, put this on your watch list.

true tears receives a seven out of ten.  The story is written nicely & used the real life drama element well.  The pace is decent & the show is filled with drama.  However, the decisions that Shinichiro makes tends to swing the plot a bit & can create some confusion on what he wants to do.  Although a good thing in terms of driving the story, it can be a turn off for some.

Last updated on May 6, 2008