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

Jun 13, 2024

MangaBalanga

Recommended

Tsuki ga Kirei is a highly recommended romantic Anime about a developing relationship between two junior high-school kids. The plot concentrates on school, hobbies and daily life events of Mizuno and Azumi. This simple narrative makes easy for the audience to relate to the main characters as many viewers may find joy by watching this love affair through own experience.

The author carefully develops the story and aims to outline the impact of family & peer pressure on teenagers. There is just enough drama since both main characters need to make difficult decisions about their future, while experiencing strong emotions including uncertainty with frivolous plans, ... fear, anger and feeling jealous. The story is open and allows to make own judgements, ask questions and draw own opinions about behavior of each character and their families, which makes watching this Anime interesting and it allows the viewer to remain engaged until the final scenes. The ending of this serial is superb, given that animation studio created a "Titanic-style" scenes which last deep in memory and also leaves the viewer to decide on the fate of Mizuno and Azumi.

Although the graphics could be a little bit improved, but it does not disturb the overall watching experience since it is the psychology of teenagers being put as the main theme of the serial.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jun 30, 2024

Udonmerah1806

Mixed Feelings

Maybe those who like harem anime are not suitable for this anime because this anime is a very relaxed anime, but for those who like slice of life, I highly recommend this anime because the meaning is very deep for those who watch it, it is rare for slice of life romance anime to bring anime as relaxed and real as this, usually romance anime makes excessive romance but this anime is delivered just right without overdoing it. not too flat the plot but not too much. from the sound effect it is very heartfelt but what I regret is that this anime is too ... sweaty suddenly I immediately got married. that's all I criticize thanks.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Sep 24, 2023

RESOLVING_POWER

Not Recommended

Well-written

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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