Given: Uragawa no Sonzai

First of all i would like to say that im a huge given fan and this ova got me disappointed. I also need to say that I may have some mistakes since english is not my first language. ...

First of all the ova starts showing us how uenoyama and mafuyu have been as a couple and how they are still getting used to each other, which is something good. It continues with their development.

Then we get to another issue of the ova, mafuyu's new lyrics to the song, it reuses the same process we saw when he was writing his first lyrics. Although this time things are shown rushed.

After that, comes the live presentation of the new song. Here they compete against shizu's and hiiragi's band. In the main show they were never shwon further as a band and we never got to see their potential. This was the worse part of the ova, we never get to see the presentation of neither given band nor hiiragi's and shizu's band.

after all this we find out that hiiragi's band won the live presentation without us getting any further information about their band or their song.

this ova rushes the whole thing and makes the live presentation and the new song look like they are no big deal, by doing that it throws away everything that happen earlier in the ova.

the only reason I am giving it a 7 is because we get to see mafuyu's and uenoyama's deveopment that was missed in the movie.

When the Given Movie was released, I lamented that the producers made to decision to cut quite a bit from the manga to fit the movie into an hour. In doing so they made the decision to concentrate on the secondary couple which left manga protagonists Mafuyu and especially Ritsuka with very little to do. Ritsuka in particular was hardly more than a cameo. The OVA redresses that completely, concentrating on the manga chapters missing from the movie and turning them into a dense mini movie that comes in at just over 20 minutes. It’s an absolute must for Given fans. Once again, superb ... voice work from Shogo Yano and Yuuma Uchida. Solid if unspectacular animation but ultimately it is more of what made the series so successful, good storytelling and great characters.

I was afraid that they were not going to animate Uenoyama being jealous after the movie was released but this was more perfect than I could imagine. Doing the movie seperate showed us a clear image of the story between Akihiko-Haruki-Ugetsu and this OVA made sure we also felt how the song made UeMa feel.

I love how Mafuyu wrote it after being inspired by Ugetsu and also his OWN loss. It was just...PERFECTION.

I ALSO LOVED HOW THEY REDREW ALREADY DRAWN SCENES FROM THE MOVIE!!!

fave cute scenes:
- mafuyu kisses uenoyama first
- mafuyu in yukata

... fave emotional moments:
- the classroom scene
- the clock scene
- mafuyu singing yorugaakeru acapella and the scenes they show during it

fave funny moments:
- UENOYAMA GAY PANIC (YUKATA AND THE CLOCK SCENE AND BASICALLY EVERYTIME HE SEES MAFUYU)
- UENOYAMA YELLING "I DISAPPROVE!!!!" WHILE AKIHIKO IS KNEELING AHAHAHAHAHA

OVERALL. UENOYAMA BEST BOYFRIEND. PERIOD.