2014, 12 episodes:
AniDB,
also known as Blue Spring Ride.
Contemporary school story adapted from shōjo manga. Futaba reinvents
herself as she enters high school, only to find that her middle-school
crush Kou has also reinvented _him_self.
This is a straight shōjo (marketed to girls) romance, with no
supernatural powers or other strangeness, in the mould of Sukitte ii
na yo or Tonari no Kaibutsu from 2012, but without the forced
extremes of characterisation that those two had. Everybody's got their
problems, but nobody's defined solely by them. Futaba in particular is
not just a young girl in love, she's a young girl trying to work out
what sort of person she wants to be, even when the answer might annoy
the boy she's fallen for.
In fact it's the characterisation that's the real draw here,
particularly of the two leads but also of the various members of the
secondary cast. The animation, character designs, backgrounds and
music are all fairly forgettable, though not unpleasant. The story
cuts off fairly sharply, and I hope there's a second season that deals
with the rest of the manga's story and the complications therein; a
minor character's introduced towards the end here who's entirely
pointless unless the story is continued.
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