tl:dr could be getting rushed like Angel Beats so maybe read the manga instead. The anime is alright.
Don't sleep on this. You might miss out on a possible gem.
Bit of second episode spoiler, the wife Takae here reincarnates as an elementary school girl in an abusive household to a neurotic mother. As a sucker for such dramas around bullying and bad households, I got interested to read the manga after watching the second episode last week. I ended up finishing it in a day and it hit like a truck(not like the wife though heh). The story is really wholesome but heart crunching sad later on. It has no sus moments as the general title might suggest. The Husband doesn't so much as touch her except in three occasions and that too just handholding and a hug once. There is no melodrama involved and the story ends in a little over 100 chapters.
But this isn't going to be a review of the manga, but rather preliminary review of how the first four episodes went. Although, I will say this is really what anohana should have been. It handles moving on in the most rational and just way but also the most painful. Like many of the characters will not get "closure" because doing so will be unfair to others involved. Last 20 chapters or so were particularly hard.
This is a story(initially) about a man Keisuke and daughter Mai having their lives back in color after the deceased wife Takae comes back from grave, and them travelling around creating moments they didn't get to do previously. The family was very tightknit that on the Takae's demise, Keisuke had became an empty husk of a person similar to Clannad, neglecting his daughter at times; while Mai became introverted and shut-in with remote work. We also have the story of the abusive household where the wife has born into. And we have the man's junior coworkers who have suddenly noticed the drastic shift in the man recently(because of the wife returning).
Ideally the anime should have taken two cours to complete the story but it's skipping quite a bit to probably finish in a single cour season I suspect. Skipping would be the wrong word. As of the fourth episode many bits have been tweaked and altered from the manga in the settings, to reach some later important moments in a non-linear fashion. It has jumped forward and backward a bit. Pacing wise each episode have kind of overall covered and skipped across 8-10 chapters each But it does not feel you are missing things because of the skips(compared to say Unnamed Memory or Bye Bye Earth lol). Third episode does feel a bit fast paced without enough base. The mangaka had originally said he wanted to do some things differently in the manga but was not able to. So the anime might do some of that.
Production wise, this looks to be being handled very good but not without major issues(which I may be asking for a lot). This is the studio that's been doing later seasons of Kingdom and I trust them maintaining the quality consistently. It's nothing flashy(not that it needs to for a story like this), nor are there any bad frames and the likes.
Nice to see Yuuki Aoi of Tanya, Mabel, Maomao fame voicing the wife Takae.
As for issues which might be just me triggered coming from the manga: The side characters feel too happy go lucky generic in the anime when they are quite important to the story. Overall the character design in the anime is lacking, paired with the seiyus also doing kind of a forced commercialized sort of throw and intonation that makes the anime reeek genericness. One very odd thing is Mai's office client who lives outside Tokyo is very dark in the manga but quite lightened in the anime. Idk if this is an Indian/Chinese/Korean fairness obsession thing taking place in Japan lol, but it a bit contributes to the commercialized feel I'm getting off the anime.
Not much else I want to say to be honest. I don't like giving ratings to art, direction, characters in a 3 episode preliminary review but things are looking good. I even think the alterations I talked about before is done well for the time being. I do fear even with the alterations, it might feel too fast paced like Angel Beats.
These genres have gotten less popular with the advent of streaming and the fall of binge-able animes from local storage but I really hope this one gets popular. I get it I shouldn't be too demanding from the adaptation, I know all to well how source readers can be annoying at times. Maybe bit of a recency bias for me, but the manga had genuinely affected my last three weeks. I hope the anime shines regardless.
