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Old 2011-06-03, 04:13   Link #50
Pellissier
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Italy
What an episode. I could swear I've seen some full series with less content and less emotional involvement than this one episode alone.

Everything was so intense, heartbreaking... and piling up, minute after minute. Highlights, the Anaru-Jintan scene, which strengthened my earlier impression that this might be Tomatsu Haruka's career high. Then the last scene, everyone's going against Jintan, Menma comes to the rescue, and then they drop us with the ending credits.

A powerful anime is able to communicate with various means, not only implying direct communication. Jintan's father didn't say much, so did Menma's brother. Yet we could perceive so much about them. We didn't even see nor heard Menma's father, yet we could infer he's not the bad guy they wanted us to believe, he probably just acted out of consideration for his wife, or for his daughter's memory.

The part about Menma's mother was very sad, because not only she's broken in the sense that she hasn't gotten over Menma's loss, but she's broken to the point of damaging the lives of who's close to her. Menma's brother basically never had a mother and is even ashamed that he has one who behaves like this.

Finally, always in theme of communicating through different means, this episode had very little background musics, just some light and mellow arrangements to accompany a few touching scene, but otherwise it was a totally silent episode. It was a great touch, consistently adding to the whole. Silence is the epitome of death and mourning, after all. But despite its silence, this episode was deafening.
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