Tsuki ga Kirei

With a new school year comes a new crowd of classmates, and for their final year of junior high, aspiring writer Kotarou Azumi and track team member Akane Mizuno end up in the same class. Though initially complete strangers, a few chance encounters stir an innocent desire within their hearts. A yearning gaze, a fluttering heart—the hallmarks of young love slip into their lives as fate brings their paths to a cross.

However, though love is patient and love is kind, Kotarou and Akane discover it is not always straightforward. Despite the comfort they find in each other's company, heartache and anxiety come hand in hand with pursuing the feelings in their hearts. With the uncertainty of how the other truly feels as well as the competing affections of those around them, the road ahead is unclear. Even so, under the shining light of a beautiful full moon, Kotarou gathers his courage to ask Akane a single question, one that forever changes their quiet relationship.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Mizuno, Akane Main

Kohara, Konomi Japanese

Azumi, Kotarou Main

Chiba, Shouya Japanese

Nishio, Chinatsu Main

Murakawa, Rie Japanese

Hira, Takumi Main

Tamaru, Atsushi Japanese

Yamashina, Roman Supporting

Fudemura, Eishin Japanese

Imazu, Miu Supporting

Chisuga, Haruka Japanese

Tachibana, Daisuke Supporting

Iwanaka, Mutsuki Japanese

Mizuno, Ayane Supporting

Maekawa, Ryouko Japanese

Takizawa, Aoi Supporting

Shiraishi, Haruka Japanese

Azumi, Junko Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Maeda, Toshihiro Producer

Kamei, Hiroshi Producer

Okamura, Takema Producer

Reviews

Nov 27, 2024

Snaiy

Recommended

Hmmmm, how should I put this, this anime feels like it was done by a passionate and talented, but ultimately amateur And unpolished team and writer. As a preface, I dont know anything about the studio and the original manga/ln if it has one, so if you want a real smart review including those factors, I have to let you down. I can only speak about the anime itself.

The story is quite simple, with some minor twists that rather make the plotline artifically longer than add real value, but some of them actually are pretty nice plot points about coming of age/romance/coming of age romance. ... I personally liked the story, but I can understand if someone would find it too slow or too forced at points. I both liked the ending and hated it. Without spoiling, lets just say, you should watch the end credits of the last episode. Sometimes we cant get what we want in life, or have to compromise. This was a good plot point of the anime, including that even when those happen, we can make the most out of it (Dont worry, minor spoiler, but they stay together at the end, your heart wont be broken).
But as I said before, the story can feel pretty forced with minor drama, which only makes it longer, not more meaningful. Which is in turn an interesting choice, because a good 2-3 more episodes after the last ones could have been easily fit in and would have made it way better, instead of the drama.
I think this is one of those rare shows that actually starts out weak and gets stronger until the end.

The characters are a pretty mixed bunch, more like they vary wildly in portrayal troughout the show, which is a feat in itself, as the anime is only 12 episodes long.
We are dropped in the middle of everything (not the romance itself), and there are many characters, who are portrayed inconsistenly (as mentioned above) so establishing the relationships between the charactera are pretty hard. It does not help, that all characters' faces look the same with different hair and body (more on this later in the art section).
The MC and FMC are at least have a life of their own (which a lot of romance anime seems to forget) and they are pretty okay characters for a romance anime. Especially at the end, they are great characters. At the beginning however they can be pretty annoying. I think the writers wanted to portray the confusion of first love and feeling lust for the first time, but insted got confused of what could the confusion be like, and that confusionception made the characters just flat out annoying. Like my girl (FMC) somehow puts negative effort into the relationship in the first few episodes, while being portrayed as someone in love. Instead of an awkward first love it feels like an asshole and a half (maybe Charlie Sheen wrote the first half of the script, but he forgot the comedy part). She also starts the minor drama, or more like it starts because of something she either did or did not do, and has the audacity to act righteous and offended most of the time at the beginning. Like dude, shut yo b*itch ass up you did that. Luckily after the first few episodes the MCs get better as their relationship progresses (and then the side characters get reeeeeal annoying, but you will see it for yourself, I dont want to spoil it).

The sound is, well..... an interesting one. Remember that I wrote the whole things looks (and also sounds) like a real amateur work? It can be heard on the soundtrack as well. The OP and ED are the standard emotional and beautiful, albeit not groundbreaking songs, I liked them, they are pretty much a vibe, a romantic vibe. The BGM is also oretty good songs on the same principle as the OP and ED, but for some reason, instead of the soundtrack making olace for the scene and supporting it, the soundtrack gets blasted at full volume during some emotional scenes, which completely overshadows the scens and makes them worse, instead of elevating them, like literally I had to constantly adjust the volume. There are also some weird sound choices for everyday sounds, like cars honking sounding weird, shoes sounding weird in some scenes, but you really have to listen to notice those.

The art. Dayumm.
Now this is where the anime really bled out in a puddle. I dont want to drag this out, if you watch the anime you will see the glarinfly obvious things, lets just name a few:
-Shading being a white stripe on the characters' head most of the time
-Weird moving animation (when one of your main characters is a oretty good track athlete, having weird moving animations is a real scene killer)
- Physically hurting CGI and 3D animation, usually when there are a lot of characters in the background. It is like the wii characters, but even more distorted. The best is when we have a member of fhe main cast in the foreground animated normally, and we have these weird CGI wii characters going on about their wretched days in the background. After a while I found it funny and amusing, but really did not help the anime.
- Characters just existing for 10 seconds without moving/talking/doing anything. And not in normal still shots, but in the middle of the conversation. It really kills the momentum of conversations and sometimes emotional scenes, which makes the characters sometime look even more bland and annoying than they initially looked like.

So all in all, this is a passionately, but low budget made, pretty okay story about a coming of age romance. It wont make your head spin, but it is fun and wholesome, with some annoying forced drama moments.
To be fair, I rather see a good story, with shit animation, than a shit story with godly animation. The story here was not THAT good, but it was pretty fun, and I do not regret watching this. It wont be my favourite, but it will be a hidden, niche comfort anime of mine. Worth a watch, but probably wont go around buying merch for it.
Have a nice day

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Oct 22, 2024

loafing_loafer

Mixed Feelings

Despite of everyone raving about this anime, please hear me out.

This show is not interesting in the slightest. Its a pain from start to finish. Its not bad and the story is grounded and fresh, but its miserably executed.

But before i get into the review i have to point out the single worst thing i simply couldn't bear. The damn MC's voice acter sighs and breathes into the microphone all the time and it hella SUCKS!!!. He has no lines.. these gasps are the only thing you hear outta his mouth.

Coming back to the topic. The animation is just so damn poor and emotions ... aren't depicted at all on anyone's faces. They are painfully mild and bland. Teens should flare up at the slightest of happenings. I don't expect over the top anime blushings but damn.. they can't even wear a smile.

The guy MC's friends are the lamest people alive and utter losers. This is cuz they have only have one way of interaction. They headlock the dude, laugh and then fade out of the scene. In 12 episodes they have no other dailogue or interaction except this. Its a marvel how the director could give so little shit about them. Akanes friends seemed fine. I don't exactly know how middle school girls go about their stuff but i have no complaints. There was this one outta pocket girl who is a complete ass but I'd rather not spoil anything.

So little happens in all of this anime they should have gone with an hour and thirty minute movie isntead. It took me around a month to finish it with the only motivation being i shouldn't drop series' midway, i always do that. But lawd i wish i had.

Lastly i would broach the subject of the worst person in humanity. The MC. He's what true rock bottom looks like. He can't do anything right and is a bumbling moron. Most of us are, but he is unapologetic about his shortcomings and thinks himself perfect and doesn't do anything to improve. Everyone should be themeselves while making an effort to better themselves, the results aren't always promising but that's life. He doesn't do anything about it. He just lives on. He cannot give a shit cuz he thinks he's perfect. How he pulled akane is beyond me. The dude is the Brian (from family guy) of anime. He writes bullshit and acts smug just cuz he does write. Publishers and editors in the anime agree he is a shit writer but that doesn't faze him. His ego is on another level. I already discussed his best feature.. the breathing.. so watch out for that.

Tbh the anime isn't that bad. Its better than most out there. Its different and fresh cuz its really real. But these icks really threw me off and to top it off, the pacing was dead slow. I couldn't bring myself to watch this. Thou i did technically finish it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Sep 24, 2023

RESOLVING_POWER

Not Recommended

Funny

I watched Tsuki ga Kirei, also known as The Moon is Beautiful or NyQuil PM. Here are my thoughts:

I tried. I swear I tried. I tried my very best to like this show. I dropped it TWICE – once shortly after it aired, and once again when I gave it a second chance around 2019. I picked it up a third time in 2022 in a desperate effort to see what the hype was all about, yet still I was disappointed, although did finish it. I did my very best to like this show, and watched it in a variety of states of mind only ... to be met by unwavering disappointment.

For those unaware, this is a pure romance show focused on characters in late Japanese middle school (around 14 years in age I think).

The male lead and his female love interest are both ridiculously boring characters. They both have the personality of a three-day-old bowl of gruel. They have terrible chemistry and their interactions are mindnumbingly boring. I never felt the slightest spark of romance between them, or any emotion at all for that matter (besides boredom and frustration). Their entire relationship feels unnatural and artificial.

The dialogue is painfully boring and tedious, way WAY beyond the point of endearing shyness. This is not the cute reluctant youthful romance I was lead to expect. The two leads are absurdly deadpan – their affect is so flat I thought they were on enough antipsychotics to put a schizophrenic elephant into a coma (and if that doesn't work they should just broadcast this anime in the beast's habitat – this show is so forgettable it could invalidate prior studies on elephant memory). Furthermore, a huge portion of their interaction takes place via phone messages, which maybe is a blessing in disguise because the character animation is so bad. Which leads me to my next point...

The visuals of this anime are poor. The character CGI is awful, and I'm usually willing to overlook this. Seriously, those scenes of the school campus with the CGI-animated students were so poorly done. Besides the rare background frame, this show has poor visual production quality. Also worth mentioning is that I did not like the character designs – those sameface characters with the beady eyes were consistently unpleasant to look at. This is compounded by the bland school outfits and totally boring colour palette. Even outside of the CGI scenes, the character animation is crude and often off-model. Like, I can excuse poor animation if the show makes an effort at some kind of art style, but this show has neither! The colour palette and character designs are ugly and the animation quality is messy. I will concede that there were sometimes nice background frames (the ep.8 festival date is a good example), but that certainly does not excuse the appalling character animation. A lot of the visuals in this look like they took a real-life photo, passed it through an anime-style visual filter, and then added some hideous CGI-animated characters. The visual contrast between the characters and their environment is often quite stark. Even in scenes that take place on the street, the CGI-animated cars look like they belong in a console game released in 2002. Infrequently the focus of a frame is well targeted to create a nice cinematic effect – unsurprisingly these moments don't have any characters in the shot. Also I would be remiss if I did not mention that the ridiculous amount of phone messages in this show resulted in some consistently boring and tedious screenplay. Seriously, when phone screencaps are a central focus of the ED sequence, you can't deny something has seriously gone wrong with this so-called 'romance' anime (and that's not even mentioning the unfunny 'comedy' skits they add after the ED).

The commercial success of this anime is a total mystery to me, but clearly the return on investment must have been great since the animation budget was planned in Zimbabwean dollars (perhaps the elephants really were running the show, with autocratic rule too).

As I already alluded, the voice acting for the two leads is totally catatonic, and because they dominate the screentime and script, the rest of the cast is largely irrelevant. Regardless, none of the supporting cast VAs impressed me. As for music, I remember there being at least one okay insert vocal song, but otherwise the OST seemed fairly unremarkable.

Storywise, the sources of conflict are quite cliche. It was a pretty generic school romance in this regard too. There was nothing in the writing that I found praiseworthy, and the story overall feels formulaic.

Later in the series, competing potential love interests are introduced for both the male and female MC. Ordinarily, I would not enjoy this, but the two leads have such awful chemistry that I actually enjoyed (relatively) the presence of these other potential suitors. Seriously, both the alternative love interests had better chemistry with their respective targets. I think in both cases this was largely due to the pairing of an outgoing extroverted character with a shy soft-spoken romantic target. This is in stark contrast to the original couple, who are both quite introverted and reserved (and boring!). On a similar train of thought, I gotta say that I liked the amusement park episode way more than the others, perhaps mainly for the reasons just outlined. Or maybe because everyone in that episode communicates in-person instead of relying on those awful tedious text messages. In any case, episode 7 when they go to the amusement park, that was probably my favourite episode of the entire series (which isn't saying much).

It's worth noting there is little comedy in this, which is certainly not something I can say about other romance shows. Regardless of all my criticisms, I will always praise the absence of inappropriate comedic relief, particularly here because it's so common in romance shows like this. Similarly, I appreciated how wholesome and pure this show was. There was pretty much zero sexualization at all or so-called 'fanservice'. This anime was consistently innocent and sweet, regardless of all its flaws; it consistently had a 'puppy love' feeling to it. I think this is one of the main reasons it was so well received, but that also illustrates the scale of unmet demand for this kind of thing – I'm sure a show with the same premise as Tsuki ga Kirei but competently executed could be very successful.


My overall rating: 3/10
Tsuki ga Kirei is one of the worst romance shows I have ever seen. I'm mystified by what people see in this show. From my perspective, it brings nothing to the table; I see nothing of artistic worth here. There are some brief romantic moments but they're not nearly enough to compensate for the time invested. The two leads are unbelievably weak characters, and more importantly, they have zero romantic chemistry whatsoever. Additionally, both the screenplay and dialogue are incredibly dull, and the character animation is jarringly dreadful.

What words would I use to describe my Tsuki ga Kirei viewing experience? Exasperating, frustrating, BORING, irritating, unemotional, tedious...

I feel like most of the people praising this anime are just projecting their own memories onto it. Since the show and its characters have zero personality whatsoever, it is certainly a good projection medium (perhaps this is a positive feature for some viewers). I also imagine that this show would be potent self-insert material for some people. Maybe I am the wrong audience for this kind of thing.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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	Poll: Tsuki ga Kirei Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Stark700 - Apr 6, 2017	252 replies	by Kyouma89 »» Nov 9, 2:21 AM
	Poll: Tsuki ga Kirei Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Stark700 - Jun 29, 2017	631 replies	by Weely21 »» Aug 26, 7:23 PM
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