To the Forest of Firefly Lights
This short 45min anime movie was sweet. I had wanted to watch it for quite some time but kept putting it off. Mostly because how I found it was in the form of a gif but the gif also showed me how it ended too so I guess it lost the pull for me to get around to it since I already knew how things would go.
In spite of that I thought it looked sweet so wanted to watch it some day and here we are. Did it live up to what I thought I would get?… no sadly. What I wanted from this film was to make me cry. I wanted to be drawn into the characters and story and then have a good old cry. This might have fallen flat for me because I knew how things went, but I think that even if I had gone in blind I don’t think it did enough for me to be invested enough to cry. I have seen so many comments though of people who love this movie and many have said they did feel emotional about it. Which is great, I’m glad it reaches people in that way. For me though I simply enjoyed a lovely story with a simple plot about a girl who meets a young man in the woods that wears a mask and their time spent together. So I still enjoyed it, just not to the depth I wanted to.
The story starts with Hotaru explaining through flashbacks about how she met a young guy called Gin in the forest one summer. She explains that she has been going to her uncles place over summer to spend time in the country. One time she gets lost in the forest and Gin leads her home, and their friendship goes from there. Gin tells Hotaru that he can’t touch her or he will disappear because of the curse placed on him as a baby. Despite this hurdle they still hangout over the summer time and we watch as their friendship slowly grows to something more.
I found that this anime was very sweet but not very deep. Which is fine. I just wished there was more interaction between Gin and the other spirits who live in the forest since they all seemed to love him so much. They simply pop up from time to time voicing their concern about the friendship between Gin and Hotaru and then leave again. I would have liked to have seen how Gin lives, how he survived, what he does when Hotaru isn’t around, all of that kind of stuff. despite not really knowing anything about him though I quite liked him and thought him way more interesting that Hotaru.
So if you want a sweet little friendship/love story then give this one a go. Don’t expect anything meaty though. The scenery is beautiful though and really adds to the tone of the film with its softness.
Enjoy
I have a kind of love hate relationship with Umaru. I dislike that she is so mean to her brother even though he does so much for her. But of course without this quality we don’t have the show so its an essential piece of her.
Her brother, Taihei, is a hard worker and tries his best to keep the household functioning whilst Umaru does her best to make things hard for him so he caves and she can get what she wants. He would be a fully functioning person and would do well in the world without Umaru around. But, his world would be colourless and boring without her in it I think. Despite her antics he cares about her and I think that’s sweet. My biggest gripe with him though would be that he lets Umaru walk all over him and I wish that he would just put his foot down and get some backbone. Other than that he does ok with life haha.
My favourite character,and probably most people’s as well, was Konata Izumi. She is a gaming, anime and manga loving Otaku and throughout the show she references various anime including Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragonball Z, Pokemon, Sgt Frog, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (both characters are actually voiced by the same voice actress). She is an easy-going girl who hates to study, often copying her friends notes for tests. Despite being on the lazy side she is good at athletics but will not join any of the athletic teams because it would interfere with watching her favourite anime. She plays online games right up until she has to study and will cram for exams by pulling all-nighters. Even though she can come across as being a selfish individual she really does care for her friends.
Kagami Hiiragi is Konata’s opposite in some ways. She is a hard worker and studies well to get good grades. She gets annoyed at Konata quite a lot when she will cram for tests and still get good marks or when she will talk about her lazy habits, gaming, or anime interests. Having said that though Kagami likes gaming too. She likes to eat snacks but then complains she needs to lose weight, and she likes to read light novels. Guess she just has a way better work ethic and is good at time management. She can seem intolerant of others and talk to them in a quite matter-of-fact way but she genuinely does care for her friends and joins in with their antics all the time.
Tsukasa Hiiragi is a clutz and an airhead. She is very sweet, cute, innocent, quiet, friendly, and is also Kagami’s twin sister. She doesn’t understand complicated conversations so doesn’t really follow a lot of what’s going on but she tries her best. She doesn’t retain information very well so isn’t that great at homework or academically gifted at all and she will often ask for help with homework from her sister. She finds it hard to get up at a set time, doesn’t have a great sense of humor, hates conflict, and is quite shy too. However, she excels at home skills unlike Kagami, and tries her best in what ever she does. I find her very cute and relatable in some ways as well.
Miyuki Takara is an intelligent girl and is known for being a walking encyclopedia with whom you can ask anything and she will know the answer. She has terrible eyesight and has a fear of putting things in her eyes. Miyuki is clumsy, she will often walk into things or fall over. She is forgetful, for example she will heat up a drink and put it down only to have it go cold so she will have to heat it up again, repeating this over and over. She hates dentists but seems to need to go quite often because of her naturally bad teeth. She is a very well-mannered, smart, pretty girl and often gets asked to help her friends out with their homework.
At the end of an episode is a show called the Lucky Channel. A short two minute segment where the child idol Akira and her assistant Minoru discuss the episode and the characters in the main show. Mostly though, the show becomes a shambles as the two end up arguing. Akira puts on a front of being a cute young girl but in reality as soon as she feels threatened or annoyed she reveals her trueself to be a horrible mean-spirited person and in no way wants Minoru taking any of the spotlight from herself. A line from her Wiki entry described her perfectly as being a “deep voiced, violent, chain-smoking, selfish-cynic of a burnt-out entertainer on the brink of becoming a has-been.”, wow, they really nailed her in one sentence. I think she is meant to represent how Japanese idols feel who’s popularity is always threatened by the next cute thing coming along.
paperkatana 