Well in this show, this is what happens - a child who wishes to grow up becomes an adult, and an adult who wishes she could change turns back into a child. And initially, it's a really charming show that works well. Both of these characters - Karada, the girl turned adult, and Shouko, the woman turned child - seem to be happy enough, until they learn that the man in both of their lives, the older brother of Karada and ex-boyfriend to Shouko, Hiro, has something to do with the other. Cue the inciting incident - Shouko turns out to not be so mature of an adult and, despite knowing Karada hates being seen as a child more than anything, hurts her out of spite, which leads to her storming off and both of them getting transformed by the wish stone they happen to meet in front of. It happened because both of them are flawed as people which has to do with their own past trauma, and it seems that the next step is them helping each other out!
Shouko, still spiteful but seeing Karada in an adult body for the lost child she is, invites her to her own place, aware that she has nowhere else to go, and does her best to be as rational about the situation as possible. She takes on the role of an adult guiding a child. Things may not go back to normal, after all. Karada, on the other hand, shows Shouko housekeeping skills like cooking that she lacked for one reason or another, and soon, their life takes on a bit more normality again. They go and buy stuff like furniture, clothes and such for their life. Attention to detail, like Shoukos glasses no longer fitting her child face and her getting new ones, reveal that this initial bit was thought through by the author - and then the show kinda stops being fun.
You see, initially setting itself up as a show of two lost girls helping each other through their trauma by way of a shared supernatural experience, it very quickly involves more characters and while they are all likable, some feel like the time spent on them could have been better invested in the development of the main characters. Starting with Hiro, the brother who was unwittingly at the center of the inciting incident without realizing, who is an unbelievably boring third main character. He left his girlfriend in order to take care of his sister after her parents died, but he has very little personality to go along with it. He is more or less just pushed into situations by everyone else. And that would be okay, seeing how this is clearly a story about Shouko and Karada, except he gets a lot of screentime and doesn't really do a whole lot. He extends his disbelief enough to support the two girls in his life, and that's it. Sure, he sacrificed his ambitions in life to take care of a child in need because he felt it was the right thing to do, but that honestly seems more like a way to drive the plot forward by creating conflict instead of it really having to do with him. And then... the story just loses its focus.
Whereas Shouko immediately caught on to the fact that the little girl her ex-boyfriend never told her about during their relationship was the reason fir their breakup, Karada only realizes much later and it comes as a shock to her. Her guilt of knowing her brother left his girlfriend to take care of her eats her up and makes her run away. And while some scenes are really well-handled, like Karada slowly learning about functioning as an adult, what is needed to get a job, an apartment, in the end she just wanders into a really friendly pension who just take her as is and that was that. A friend from her school looks for her for several episodes which ends up with them falling in love, and that's that. All the while Shouko's trauma is addressed very briefly (like her remembering that she was too shy to join other children for playing together) and it starts to feel more like an accident that she got transformed rather than an honest-to-god wish she had from the bottom of her heart due to her past. Sure, it leads to the reveal that Karada's brother was literally her everything in life, her first friend, her best friend and that's why she felt so possessive over him, acting in a way very befitting of an immature adult with lacking socialization, but it's all basically just thrown into the show in 5 minutes of dialogue at the very end rather than waving it into the story to go with the narrative. Same goes for the final moment, during which, after accepting their past and settling into their new lives, the characters are turned back to how they were without any of them having anything of meaning to say about the whole thing. It just felt very rushed and seeing that the manga was still ongoing when the anime concluded, I believe that is where the problem lies; the anime team struggling to connect the initial setup of the manga into an anime that was still supposed to have a definite ending rather than ending openly, inconclusively.
However, despite all that incohesion upon further inspection, the show manages to overall be charming and soothing. It's fun to see these two girls slowly befriending and living with each other. The summer imagery is beautifully paced, giving the scenery and every mood room to breathe, and I could feel it to my core (in part due to the fact that I was watching this show during the height of summer 2022). I think it's a show worth watching. It just unfortunately doesn't follow through on its initial thematic throughline and more so just turns into a summer romance kind of deal. But then, don't we all have at least one childhood summer in fond memory?
