Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai.

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: AnoHana, We Still Don't Know the Name of the Flower We Saw That Day.

Japanese: あの日見た花の名前を僕達はまだ知らない。

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Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 11

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Apr 15, 2011 to Jun 24, 2011

Premiered: Spring 2011

Broadcast: Fridays at 01:15 (JST)

Producers: Aniplex, Dentsu, Fuji TV, Fujipacific Music

Licensors: NIS America, Inc., Aniplex of America

Studios: A-1 Pictures

Source: Original

Genres: Drama, Supernatural

Duration: 22 min. per ep.

Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older

Statistics

Score: 8.31¹ (scored by 963,297 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #238²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #64

Members: 1,572,359

Favorites: 32,373

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8.31

Ranked #238Popularity #64Members 1,572,359

Spring 2011TVA-1 Pictures

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Synopsis

Jinta Yadomi is peacefully living as a recluse, spending his days away from school and playing video games at home instead. One hot summer day, his childhood friend, Meiko "Menma" Honma, appears and pesters him to grant a forgotten wish. He pays her no mind, which annoys her, but he doesn't really care. After all, Menma already died years ago.

At first, Jinta thinks that he is merely hallucinating due to the summer heat, but he is later on convinced that what he sees truly is the ghost of Menma. Jinta and his group of childhood friends grew apart after her untimely death, but they are drawn together once more as they try to lay Menma's spirit to rest. Re-living their pain and guilt, will they be able to find the strength to help not only Menma move on—but themselves as well?

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai. reunites the lead production staff of the 2008 anime series Toradora! It was first teased in December 2010 as a joint production of Aniplex, Fuji Television, and animation studio A-1 Pictures under the title AnoHana Project. The series is set in the city of Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture.

The first Blu-ray volume, which went on sale on June 29, 2011, sold more than 31,000 copies in the first week of release. At the time, that first week sales figure was the third highest for a first volume Blu-ray release of a television anime, after Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica (2011) and K-On! (2009). AnoHana received a Jury Selection award in the Animation division of the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival.

A visual novel adaptation for the PlayStation Portable, which diverges from the story of the anime and contains an original ending, was developed by Guyzware and published by 5pb. on August 30, 2012. AnoHana was also adapted into a special live-action television drama, which aired on Fuji Television on September 21, 2015.

Episode Videos

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai., Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai.
Sequel:	Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai. Movie
Other:	Meiji x Kokosake & anohana Receipt Oubo Campaign
Side story:	Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai.: Menma e no Tegami
Alternative setting:	Sora no Aosa wo Shiru Hito yo

Ohara, Sayaka
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Saitou, Shunsuke

Producer

Nagai, Tatsuyuki

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Aketagawa, Jin

Sound Director

Itou, Tomohiko

Episode Director, Storyboard

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Opening Theme

	"Circle Game (サークルゲーム)" by Galileo Galilei (eps 1-10)
	1: "Aoi Shiori (青い栞)" by Galileo Galilei (eps 1-10)

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Ending Theme

	1: "Dear Love" by Remedios (eps 1)
	1: "secret base ~Kimi ga Kureta Mono~ (10 years after ver.) (secret base 〜君がくれたもの〜（10 years after Ver.）" by Meiko Honma (Ai Kayano), Naruko Anjou (Haruka Tomatsu), Chiriko Tsurumi (Saori Hayami) (eps 1-10)
	2: "Aoi Shiori (青い栞)" by Galileo Galilei (eps 11)

Reviews

Jun 24, 2011

Archaeon

Recommended

Dealing with the death of a friend or loved one isn't easy, no matter how old you are, and everyone comes to terms with their loss in different ways. Adults can drink themselves into a stupor in an effort to dull the pain, take off on a journey of self discovery, bury themselves in their work, or find some other coping mechanism. Unfortunately the same isn't true for children, and all too often they are unable to truly deal with the emotional turmoil that occurs.

Now it may seem a bit odd to talk about death, grief, and learning to deal with the loss of someone ...

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Jun 27, 2011

Radzeer

Mixed Feelings

What do you do, when you suddenly see a ghost of a person that you were close to? Most people would think it's just their imagination or the effect of stress. But what if your mind doesn't play tricks on you and you really encounter a ghost from the past? AnoHana plays with this idea. The story starts out on a usual day for the shut-in Jinta, who suddenly sees the ghost of his childhood friend Menma. Menma tells Jinta she has a wish that she wants to be granted by him. And from here on, Jinta's unusual summer starts.

Story:
The story itself centers around the ... six members of the Super Peace Busters, which was seemingly disbanded after the death of one their members. At first you'd expect that the story revolves around Menma and her wish but the truth is, the story tries to center around the members' lives and the way they were affected by the death of their friend and the show does a sloppy job with that. Of course true friends wouldn't leave each other in times of need. So why were the Super Peace Busters disbanded? Obviously there are more reasons behind that than the death of their friend.
I personally thought that story would be a coming-of-age story, where the characters deal with the problems of becoming adults and finally dealing with the death of their beloved friend. And boy was I wrong. Instead, the show turned out to be a love story pretty soon and the romance became the major driving force of the entire show. The mystery behind Menma's wish didn't unfold until the last episode and tension has been lifted so suddenly, at first I didn't know how it happened. The story itself moved forward pretty slowly, until the last 3 episodes, where the pace suddenly changed and everything was wrapped rather quickly up in one final episode. Not to mention many questions were left open and many were left unexplained.
The first 4 or 5 episodes were very promising, but after them, the plot went down the drain pretty soon and was dragged out for too long. I think the story could have been told in roughly 6 episodes, and then we could have been spared of all those unnecessary scenes that were dealing with the love polygon between the characters. It's a pity that they wasted 11 episodes on a story that was worth roughly 6 episodes.
The reason why AnoHana became popular is the romance and the fact that you could ship many characters together. Most of the characters rethink their relations to the others and since the cast is half male half female, it is inevitable that some of them play with the thought of starting a relationship with someone other from the Super Peace busters.
The plot wasn't really planned out from the start and it seemed the writer didn't know what to do with the 11 episodes he or she got, the pacing of the story made this obvious. This problem affects most of the original anime shows and AnoHana wasn't an exception either.

Art:
One of the major strong-points of the show. The animation is consistent, the backgrounds are well drawn. This is no wonder, since the anime was originally meant to attract tourists to Chichibu city and I think that AnoHana managed to capture the beauty of the region pretty well and reached its goal with this.

Sound:
The background music fits in the show perfectly, it was very well done. The opening and ending songs are very catchy and perhaps they are the best of the season.

Characters:
There are 6 main characters in the story. The creators could have used 6 episodes to explore their backgrounds and the nature of their problems, but the show wasn't able to do this either. I would have really liked if we could have gotten more info about Chiriko and Poppo too, since they were as important as the other four. The characters aren't any special and there is little to no character development throughout the story. Not to mention everyone is emotionally so unstable, that they can break into crying every now and then. This became very annoying especially in the last two episodes. The conflicts between them feel over-exaggerated most of the time and everyone runs in circles until the very last episode. But the execution of the last episode was so terrible, I can even tell the exact moment when all the problems are suddenly solved. The character interactions are melodramatic and take everything to the extreme. As I was telling earlier I was expecting a coming-of-age show, so I thought maybe the characters were going to discuss their problems and try to find a solution to them, but all the cast was doing was crying and complaining about their issues throughout the story and they didn't even care about the things the others were saying. Without analyzing characters I must say, that they weren't original, the show just managed to re-use some common and popular character archetypes. They are rather easy to forget.

Overall:
This show makes a perfect job on summoning emotions from the viewers and fills the holes of the plot with the tears of the viewer. It started out as a promising drama but failed to live up to its high expectations. But this might be a good start if you're unfamiliar to dramas, because AnoHana heavily relies on the sympathy that you feel towards the characters and takes you on an emotional rollercoaster and sucks you in to the story easily. If you had experiences with dramas before, I suggest you skip the show, because it’s forgettable and has many flaws that might disturb you and the rushed ending basically ruins the tension that has been building up since the beginning. Overall I say that AnoHana is a mediocre show, that had potential, but failed to exploit it, but despite this it became very popular. If you like shipping in general and crying over love stories, AnoHana is the anime for you.

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Mar 29, 2015

Tantony1992

Not Recommended

In this review I will defend the claim that "Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai" is an absolutely terrible show. It is well known that this show get's a lot of positive attention. At the time of this write-up, it is currently ranked 42nd on the site overall (or, if the site had good programmers, 39th since Gintama 2015, Unlimited Bladeworks season 2, and One Punch Man are above it and have not even aired any episodes), with a weighted score of 8.70. It is often discussed in forums as being a tear jerker. Indeed, there ... were points where I simply couldn't stop the tears of laughter from flowing down my face. This is a spoiler-filled review.

Ano Hana begins with a boy (Jinta) hanging around a house. There is an immature, white-haired girl pestering him. It turns out that she is the ghost of a girl who died in an accident ten years ago. Her name is Menma, and she has come back to earth to fulfill her wish, just as soon as they find out what it was that she was wishing for. His father's non-reaction to Menma's antics, and a visit from Jinta's friend (Naruko Anjou) suggests that only he can see her, but that she can physically affect things. In other words, the only element of her non-corporeality is that she is invisible and cannot project her voice. She is in no other way a non-corporeal entity, and is LITERALLY just a normal human, except not visible to anybody but Jinta. She can pick things up, and she can eat things, and when she jumps on Naruko her weight is felt.

Menma is portrayed as a very sweet, wonderful little girl. Ignoring nitpicky aspects about how annoying she is, let us examine the larger picture. She is haunting a childhood friend until he spends copious amounts of energy fulfilling her unknown wish. To me, this negates any "cuteness" she may possess and makes her a menacing turd.

The above was merely a subjective issue I had with the show. Now, let's get to the biggest objective issue that I have already alluded to earlier: the fact that Jinta can prove his assertions to everybody, literally, by handing Menma any object whatsoever and pointing out the levitating object. In fact, you could show that it's Menma, and not some other supernatural entity, by draping anything over her body that would reveal the shape of her body. You could even splatter her with mud or paint and you could basically be able to see her just walking around. This is a huge issue because he doesn't do this for the vast majority of the show, and the vast majority of the melodrama can be traced to this plot point.

The plot point starts off as a background thing that could more or less be rationalized away in the first few episodes. Perhaps she cannot do physical things unless Jinta is around, but that's not true because of the scene where she jumps on Naruko and her weight is felt. Perhaps she is limited in some other way. Maybe the things that she touches and cooks are also only visible to Jinta.

As the show transitions into it's middle section, these rationalizations become more and more difficult to contrive. It would be one thing if this didn't affect the character interaction very much, but nearly every tension and grievance can be traced back to the fact that Jinta cannot muster up the 2nd grade level brainpower required to prove Menma's existence. The entire time, I was assuming there was some technicality, but situation after situation confirmed that Menma can just move stuff around at will, as she demonstrates by opening a door (and everybody in the room noticing), knocking stuff off of tables, other people feeling her weight when she jumps on them, and her moving a light and then everybody remarking how the wind couldn't have possibly done it. There is even a sequence where Menma tries to communicate with people and is actually able to place phone calls (but her voice messages aren't there since only Jinta can hear her voice). Meanwhile, the old friend group has a long stick up their collective asses about whether Jinta is just outright lying, and large amounts of time are devoted to melodrama derived from this.

There are several times where Menma is in the room with Jinta, reminiscing with somebody else about the wish situation. Hey... hey idiot... just hand her a thing... hand her literally anything... hey... you can remove all doubt by picking up those chopsticks over there, and then saying "hold this"... you can immediately resolve half of the plot... right now.

At this point, you're still holding out hope that the show will ignore it and you have to come up with your own rationalization for it, or that the show will explicate some as yet hidden concrete reason as to why Jinta cannot provide evidence for his claims. Nope. The worst possible thing happens: he finally has her just hold objects to prove his claim. In episode 9. They even try to rationalize it away by using a character to conjecture that Jinta wanted Menma to himself. Then what was the point of his endless pleading for the group to just believe him in the prior episodes? Essentially, the resolution of this simple plot hole takes six of the eleven episodes. I say six because it is not a central plot point in the first two episodes, whereupon it then becomes important, and then isn't resolved until the 9th episode of the show.

Let's get to the second worst aspect of the show: the characters. We have already shown that Jinta and Menma are terrible characters. We also know that the average IQ of the entire friend group hovers around 40 by dint of their inability to devise any experiments demonstrating the existence of a ghost that can be seen and interacted with by one person and can move physical bodies like a normal person. Moving away from the plot hole (which by itself ruins the entire show) the dynamic between the characters in the group (which is called the 'Super Peace Busters' or SPB) is as follows: two of the males are in love with Menma (Jinta and Matsuyuki), one (Hisakawa) is just a chill dude and the only one to suggest that Menma could just hold something, and the two remaining girls are left wondering why two males are still in love with a girl who died when they where about 5 years old. However, this doesn't stop them from wanting to date them.

A prominent theme in the show is the guilt that all of them feel about the circumstances of their group the day that Menma died. Jinta is a broken human because he defensively argued against accusations of a crush and called Menma ugly, just like every 5 year old on the planet. Matsuyuki is still intensely in love with Menma. In fact, he keeps a broom with a white wig in his closet and frequently takes it out to sniff it; and then runs out in the woods in a cross-dressing cosplay of Menma for multiple consecutive nights. The last two sentences were not a hyperbole or a joke. Hisakawa is the best character, the only one who suggests any way of proving Menma is there prior to episode 9, and the only one whose past (actually seeing Menma get carried down the river and drowned) actually warrants the amount of sadness he exhibits (and he is still less sad than the other group members by orders of magnitude). Anjou has a crush on Jinta, and Tsurumi has a crush on the cross-dressing creep.

The plot hole and terrible characters make the melodrama hard to care about, and it's poorly executed anyways. The show doesn't actually show you anything sad. Instead, it has characters cry so that they can beat you over the head with a metaphorical hammer that says "ITS SAD, WE SWEAR! CRY RIGHT NOW!". You can feel the writers using the crying characters because you don't actually feel sad: you have to be told that something is sad. Nearly every scene in the entire show is melodramatic, which means that the characters only speak in lines that are emotional jabs at one another. At virtually no point do we see more than one consecutive minute of logical, level-headed discussion. Nearly every scene of the last three episodes is insufferably overdramatic, and by the end of the series everybody is bawling all the time and screaming out their feelings.

This is my first ever review. Why did I decide to write this review? I chose to write this review for one main reason: it is the most divergent my opinion has ever been from general consensus about the quality of a show. I am in no way the type of person who diverges on opinion for the sake of divergence. In my opinion, if a show is in the top 100 on MAL, it is probably a very enjoyable show. I also believe that shows with higher ratings are generally better than shows with lower ratings. Popular anime is probably popular because it has good elements in it. I was genuinely shocked at the appalling quality of this anime and cannot possibly see why everybody would think that it's even watchable, let alone near perfect or perfect. The only saving grace was the better than average animation, which prevented it from being a 1.

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Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai.

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Honma, Meiko

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Tsurumi, Chiriko

Matsuyuki, Atsumu

Yadomi, Atsushi

Honma, Satoshi

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Yadomi, Touko

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Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai.

Alternative Titles

Information

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Available At

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Synopsis

Background

Episode Videos

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