Clannad: After Story

Tomoya Okazaki and Nagisa Furukawa have graduated from high school, and together, they experience the emotional rollercoaster of growing up. Unable to decide on a course for his future, Tomoya learns the value of a strong work ethic and discovers the strength of Nagisa's support. Through the couple's dedication and unity of purpose, they push forward to confront their personal problems, deepen their old relationships, and create new bonds.

Time also moves on in the Illusionary World. As the plains grow cold with the approach of winter, the Illusionary Girl and the Garbage Doll are presented with a difficult situation that reveals the World's true purpose.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Okazaki, Tomoya Main

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Furukawa, Nagisa Main

Nakahara, Mai Japanese

Okazaki, Ushio Main

Koorogi, Satomi Japanese

Sakagami, Tomoyo Supporting

Kuwashima, Houko Japanese

Fujibayashi, Kyou Supporting

Hirohashi, Ryou Japanese

Ibuki, Fuuko Supporting

Nonaka, Ai Japanese

Furukawa, Akio Supporting

Okiayu, Ryoutarou Japanese

Ichinose, Kotomi Supporting

Noto, Mamiko Japanese

Sunohara, Youhei Supporting

Sakaguchi, Daisuke Japanese

Furukawa, Sanae Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Hatta, Youko Producer

Nakamura, Shinichi Producer

Tafu, Naohiro Producer

Nakayama, Yoshihisa Producer

Reviews

Dec 1, 2025

twomisme

Recommended

For me:
Clannad is one of the most heartbreaking, emotionally powerful anime I've ever watched. And I say that even though I hated it when I finished watching it. Made by KyoAni, this anime spends literally 30 episodes SEEMING like it does nothing, but its actually setting up the gut-wrenching twist at the end. Clannad's journey for me has been a wild one - I initially gave it around ~8.2 and while most animes tend to drop in hindsight, Clannad has only increased for me as I experienced more life experiences.

Visuals/Animations: 9/10
Considering its a relatively old anime, its character design is relatively old fashioned. That being ... said, for a 2008 anime it is still quite advanced for its time. KyoAni's polish on visuals is incredible - the subtle human expressions that are KyoAni's trademark.

Music: 10/10
Absolutely stunning music. Especially dango daikazoku, which might seem like a cute song at the start but its tied in the story in such a way that it becomes a heartbreaking requiem at the end.

Story: 10/10
I have to admit it. The first season and the first half of after story is boring. It's just ordinary slice of life stuff with occasional supernatural arcs (like Fuuko's arc in SS1). But it sets up one of the most powerfully cathartic endings I've experienced so far. I would say its worth it, even though I wanted to shout at my screen for something to happen for the first 30 episodes.

Characters: 8/10
Some of the characters are somewhat shallow but given that this anime spans many years from childhood to adulthood, it makes sense that they would miss some character-development, especially for supporting characters. However, Tomoya's transformation to finally understanding his father is quite remarkable.


I would recommend this series to a person who appreciates a high-risk, high-reward series, and doesn't mind sitting through many episodes before reaching the climax. However, if you want an action, adrenaline-pumping series this might not be for you. If you finish watching it, don't expect to like it immediately. I didn't either. But after several years, maybe that'll change (like it did with me).

Score: 9.9/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jun 7, 2025

lastnameEver

Mixed Feelings

Funny

Well-written

Guy meets girl, marries girl, is happy for a time, encounters hardship, is met with tragedy, wishes that he never met girl, encounters further tragedy, renounces his wish, which reverses the tragedy, and they all live happily ever after. Not a one-for-one copy of It’s a Wonderful Life, but the same beats are hit. The way Maeda does it is out of whack, because the tragedy that occurs happens in the story’s real world, and so when it is reversed, it reverses what caused the wish. This is why people feel like the ending is cheap and hollow. It doesn’t build on what’s happened before. ... Instead, it overwrites it with a new reality, that’s happier, and less meaningful.

Tomoya is arguably the most interesting person in Clannad’s story, giving the story a harder edge with his delinquency and his troubles with his father, so to see him here as this kind of goofy kid in the middle stages of the story and a punching bag in the latter half is disappointing, the story loses that dimension which gave it a bit of depth. Nagisa’s the same, she’s sweet and kind and kind and sweet and that’s all she really is. Same with Ushio, but with Ushio, Maeda is able to achieve a union between the way Tomoya feels towards her and the way the viewer feels. Her introduction is the starting point of a good stretch of episodes where the show is good.

Outside of that stretch, the rest is dubious. The girl and the robot has got to rank as the single most superfluous narrative of all time. Each time the story transitions to its world, it kills off any and all momentum the main narrative has generated up until that point. They walk and talk and none of it matters. It is the source of the fantasy elements in the story, but the viewer never sees its influence. It exists to give off a pretentious magical, ethereal air, an aesthetic of something profound, for something as hollow as the bones inside the wings of a bird.

And as usual for Maeda, things take too long to get going anywhere. There is an exorbitant amount of time spent with Tomoya at his new job, the first episode takes its entire runtime to reintroduce characters who aren’t even important, and the two story arcs preceding the main story are entirely irrelevant. All this superfluous detail dilutes the quality and impact of what’s actually good.

The theory I have for why people don’t like the ending is that it devalues suffering. I think the point that Maeda is trying to make is that pain and suffering has meaning because a choice is made to believe it has meaning, and that belief is what leads to a change in the real world. So through the belief in something unreal, something real happens. This is what the ending tries to capture, though obviously, the miracles that happen in real life are not as miraculous as Jun Maeda’s success.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Mar 7, 2024

Ryan_the_Bread

Not Recommended

Funny

What is this? Is this anything?

Clannad: After Story is the anime equivalent to watching a YouTube video titled something like “Sad animal videos to make you cry - Part 6”. Is what I’m watching “sad”? In the most basic sense, yes. Does it in any way rely upon a particular connection to the characters/animals involved? No. It relies upon a sense of sympathy/empathy that most people just instinctually have. Clannad: After Story is, to borrow a phrase, all fart and no shit.

To accuse a piece of fiction of being “emotionally manipulative” feels strange; most, if not all, art falls under this umbrella. Of course any ... given movie/show/book/song/whatever is attempting to instill within you a certain emotion. Whether or not it succeeds in that, however, has to do with subtlety, pacing, tactfulness, and a ton of other factors that a writer (and their team) should carefully consider and balance. At no point in my viewing experience did the writing in Clannad (either season) feel carefully considered or balanced in the slightest.

I found Clannad (S1) to be thoroughly uninteresting. It was essentially impossible for me to care about its boring world, one-dimensional characters, and contrived drama. Adding to that, the humor was about as funny as being told that I have terminal cancer and the supernatural elements were so awkwardly implemented that it led to more confusion about the rules of the world than suspended whimsy. Still, I persisted because the light at the end of the tunnel (After Story) was promised by hordes of anime fans to be complete and ethereal salvation. And I swear to God if I keep falling for this shit...

Clannad: After Story is better than Clannad (S1) in the sense that being kicked in the balls is less painful than having all your teeth pulled; both are still thoroughly unpleasant experiences, but at least one doesn’t leave you permanently disfigured. The worst fucking metaphor I’ve ever come up with aside, I will give After Story (AS from here on out) some credit for at least trying to be ABOUT something.

Sure, S1 was about Tomoya and Nagisa starting up the drama club and their relationship, but most of what actually transpired was just a bunch of dumbass kids awkwardly bumbling around. S1 was, essentially, a harem that was too scared to call itself such. AS tries to strengthen its focus and be more mature. Does it succeed? Relative to S1, yes it does. AS is more “mature” than its predecessor. It focuses on more serious subjects and has slightly more of an edge. In the wider world of fiction, however, it’s more like the difference in maturity between a 10 year-old and a 15 year-old. Nobody in their right mind would describe it as “mature” except for in relation to S1.

To illustrate my point, newlyweds Tomoya and Nagisa are shown to be borderline nervous to hold each other’s hands. In their own apartment. In front of nobody. The subject of them having sex is broached more as though they just figured out how to roll a condom onto a banana than that they’re both high school graduates living together alone.

When AS cuts that nonsense out and focuses unabashedly on Tomoya’s struggles with acclimating to his job and adult life in general, it really shines (at least in comparison to what S1 and the first half of AS were doing). As compelling as THAT is though, I’d still never really think to call Tomoya (or any of the other characters) anything close to compelling, interesting, or likable on their own. Or even together, actually.

Tomoya in S1 was almost unbearable for me. His only real character flaw was that he was a “delinquent”. As much as he slacked off academically, though, he still found the time to help a gaggle of girls out with all of their personal issues, offer his services and time selflessly to an insane degree, and act heroically in the face of any and all threats. Outside of Optimus Prime, Captain America, and maybe Goku, the whole “my only flaw is my devotion to others and unfettered heroism” is a super boring and often times annoying archetype to me. Being “too good” is not compelling or relatable 9/10 times. Fortunately, AS does go out of its way to shit all over Tomoya and knock him down a few pegs and, as a result, the situations he finds himself in become more interesting.

The same can not be said for the rest of the characters, who remain thoroughly whelming in every facet. Am I honestly supposed to care about Nagisa? Why? Her personality is just so aggressively nothing. She’s earnest, shy, naïve, and just so moe, but whatever. Outside of S1 stuff related to the drama club, she doesn’t want anything or have any ambition. That’s actually one of my biggest issues with AS as a whole; nobody wants anything aside from stuff they’re given or already have.

What does Tomoya want? To be with Nagisa, of course. Okay, well he already has her, so what else is there? He wants to keep her, obviously. But Nagisa seems almost incapable of independent thought, so I don’t think her leaving him of her own accord is a situation to be fearful of. What does he want outside of the relationship? To just work wherever and be wherever? How interesting. Certainly I wouldn’t fault anybody in real life for being this way, but characters in fiction kind of have an obligation to be interesting to watch. The ones featured in Clannad seldom are. They neither come from the dirt and aspire to normalcy or start at normalcy and aspire to greatness. They start at normalcy and just kind of stay there.

This all comes to a head when a certain *thing* happens. I won’t spoil it, but if you even halfway pay attention to the OP it should be obvious (genuinely, even as someone who went spoiler-free the whole way through, I called it immediately). This *thing* changes the trajectory of Tomoya’s life until it doesn’t but I’ll get to that. Point is, this *thing* could have been easily avoided if these empty-headed idiots heeded even the most basic of warnings they had been given. That’s the impression I got, anyway.

I understand the themes of “the importance of family” and “the value of overcoming adversity and finding something to live for” as trite as they are, but would they not be more impactful if the characters actually, y’know, fought for something? They mostly just roll with the punches in a terribly blasé way. It’s just a series of things happening to them and them reacting in either a supremely uninteresting or insanely saccharine manner.

The *thing* I mentioned eventually gets reversed and, with it, the themes collapse in on themselves spectacularly. It would be one thing if it felt like something we’d been working towards for the duration of the show, and ostensibly there are, like, barely hints that *something* will happen, but it’s not really enough. The *thing* doesn’t get reversed because the characters work towards it, though, it just... happens. It might as well have been a dream. Sure, it dictates how Tomoya approaches life, but it’s not all that different from how he would’ve without the *thing* happening in the first place. There’s no sacrifice and there’s not even any real compromise – things just suck to make you cry and then they don’t because the showrunners wanted to hit a certain tone.

This next metaphor probably only serves to showcase how terminally online I am, but here goes... Y’all know the “Chad” meme? Of course you do, but do you also know the one where it’s the male and female “Chads” and it’s really pushing “traditional living” and stereotypical gender roles? The dude says something like “My only purpose is to provide for my wife and child” and the wife says “And my only purpose is to take care of the house and children while you’re out providing” or whatever? That’s all Tomoya and Nagisa feel like at the end of the day. That’s all it feels like Clannad has to say and it does it with a hilarious amount of earnestness and an equally hilarious lack of self-awareness.

I don’t know, I just cannot fathom how this is the 16th highest rated anime on this site. That’s higher than anything Ghibli, Your Name., Cowboy Bebop, anything Evangelion, Wolf Children, anything Satoshi Kon ever made, etc. It’s astounding.

But it looks nice I guess, and the music’s nice. Whatever. Nagisa and most of the female characters look more like what I’d find under a rock in my yard than any human being, but whatever. Most anime characters look like cats, so why not have them look like praying mantises?

Certainly not the worst show I’ve ever seen, but it’s just utterly unsurprising and unchallenging. Not that something being “challenging” is synonymous with quality, but when the characters are this flat, the drama is this poorly plotted, the story is this obvious (aside from the ridonkulous ending), and the emotions I’m intended to feel are this plain and unsubstantiated... Eh? I’m not a particularly unemotional guy (I’ve cried like a bitch at stuff like Anohana and Wolf Children) so when you’re showing me an “emotional” moment and I’m either laughing my ass off or my face resembles Squidward’s house, you’ve done fucked up.

Scores:
Art (7/10)
Music (6/10)
Characters (3/10)
Story (2/10)
Objective (4/10)
Subjective (4/10)

If nothing else, Clannad is proof that you can accomplish your wildest dreams. If somebody’s still paying Jun Maeda to write garbage, then by golly, the sky’s the limit for us.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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