Let's start off by acknowledging the similarities that Ano Natsu de Matteru has with Onegai Teacher. The basic premises is the same, you have a pretty humanoid female alien from outer space crash onto Earth for no logical apparent reason and joins the educational system to further along their reason. In the case of Onegai Teacher, Mizuho became a teacher ( which made sense with what she wanted to accomplish as her mission) and Ichika became just a regular student ( for no logical reason, I might add).
Those humanoid aliens both make contact with a geeky boy on Earth and they fall in love...in one case, this was done great, and in the other, not so great.
I loved Onegai Teacher, it is one of my favorite shows of the genre and it left an impression on my heart, it is a possibility that through watching Ano Natsu I was reminiscing about the joy and enjoyment I had when watching Onegai Teacher. To put it simply, I think Ano Natsu was inferior to Onegai Teacher in almost every way and category, but I watched it all for the sake of the connection that it had with Onegai Teacher.
With that put aside, let's start dissecting these categories a bit more.
Story:
The story isn't anything special, there is absolutely no significant plot twist or real surprises. By watching the first episode, you can predict all of the major events in this show. However, I understand that the purpose of this show isn't to tell a great story, but rather to draw the audience's emotions out.
If this is the case, then yes, Ano Natsu was able to draw out most of the emotions that it intended...not to its fullest extend, but you could feel the emotions of these characters and this is not an easy feat to do.
Art:
The art was one of the best aspects about Ano Natsu de Matteru, you can tell from the first episode that they weren't careless with the animation. Everything was fluid, the views and sceneries were top notch and gave you a good visual experience to say the least.
No problem in this part.
Sound:
To me, what separates the great shows from a masterpiece is the ability to move the emotions of a watcher at will. The sound of the show, or the background music, has a significant influence in the ability of a show to move its users. If used incorrectly, the bgm can actually hurt a scene that would have been phenomenal otherwises.
Usually an anime with great bgm is one that is very memorable, meaning that after a show for a while, you can still hum your favorite tune of it, and maybe even remember a scene with that bgm in it. If you can do that, after a few days, week, or even years then that show had supremely powerful bgm music. To this day, I still remember the bgm of True Tears where the main char found out that his lover could be related to him by blood, and then sees her walk past him...I still have that tune in my head, and it has been almost five years since I've last seen True Tears.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with Ano Natsu de Matteru, none of the bgm really made that much of a difference. This is not to say that the sound was bad or didn't convey emotions well for the show, it is just to say that, off the top of my head, nothing memorable came out of the background music.
Character:
Kirisihima Kaito:
Kaito is the main character, and to put it bluntly, I disliked him throughout the show. He is as clueless as any mc that you will see, he is extremely predictable and is inconsiderate of other people's feeling. He is a selfish MC, and not matter how much his supporting character want to praise him and commend his "caring" quality, I havent' been able to find these heroics that they claim that he has. I swear you would think that he is Touma ( from Index) with all the damn praise that his peers give Kaito.
Don't get me wrong, he is not the worst MC that I have seen ( the mc from Suzuka takes the cake for that) or even the nutcase of a mc like the one from school days, no, Kaito is not intolerable but he also doesn't bring any real substance to the story. It is hard to emphasize with him.
On the other hand, the mc from Onegai Teacher, Kei, felt very real and was fleshed out really well. Kei was complex, and though I didn't agree with all of his actions, his train of thought was bearable at worst, and understandable at best.
Overall, I give Kaito a 3/10 as a character.
Takatsuki Ichika:
I wasn't a fan of her character design, and though I had to get over it during the course of the anime, I still really don't like her design. I don't mind the glasses but there was something about her that always bugged me for some reason, I just can't pinpoint that it is.
I found Ichika to be extremely indecisive, to the point that it angered me to see her open her mouth. She was, alot of the time, oblivious to other people's emotion and her own situation in the matter, she would think a certain way..get corrected by her friends...pretend to understand that they were talking about..and later on go back through her previous train of thought. This was extremely annoying, I feel like she didn't progress much as a character, since even in the last episode, she still had doubts about her relationship to her Earthly friends.
Even with this annoying traits, I still sometimes found myself cheering for her and wanting her to be happy, her personality was cute, but probably would have been more effective personally if I enjoyed her character design. That's just personal preference however, I really like Mizuho's design from OT.
Kanna:
Kanna................oh Kanna, she was doomed from the very start, wasn't she?
I really like Kanna. She's the stronger character of the show in my opinion, and she embodies the growth that I wish I would have seen from other characters in Ano Natsu. I enjoyed watching her interactions and seeing her on the episodes, even though she may have lost the war ( before it was even waged, I might add) oh boy was I still rooting for her.
You can really tell by the end of the show how much she matued. IT's very hard to not feel at least partially bad fo rher because of how strong, loving and caring of a character she is. She has a good heart, and would make a great lover. If I could, I would go out with her...damn you, stupid laws of physics and computer science...She made a significant percentage of the episodes bearable for me. Her character design made her to be plain looking, but too me her plain lookingness (?) was beautiful. Sometime less is more.
Definitely better than her OT counterpart.
The rest of the characters were pretty generic with nothing really standing out, except for a few minute things, but I won't get to it in this review.
Enjoyment:
I enjoyed the show, no doubt, but as I have expressed earlier, it is possible that a large portion of my enjoyment for this show is just because of the similarites that this had with Onegai Teacher, not because of any particular thing that Ano Natsu has done.
Overall:
This anime is an inferior version of Onegai Teacher, and if you haven't watched Onegai Teacher, then I recommend that you watch OT before watching this pathetic attempt to recreate it. This isn't bad, I'm not saying that at all, but is is lacking in almost every characteristic compared to OT.
There are a lot of mini cliffhanger in Ano Natsu that make you wonder and click to the next episode, and though you do know how it's going to end, you still want to see how it plays out. Maybe time will help this, but as of right now, it is only good enough..but not great.
