Anime Review: Sasayaku You ni Koi wo Utau

There’s nothing like a 6-month break until you can watch the final two episodes of a series from two seasons ago but that is exactly what we received with Whisper Me a Love Song (Sasayaku You ni Koi wo Utau). Thankfully, I have an eidetic memory and didn’t have to re-watch the first ten episodes to remember what happened; however, the passage of time was definitely a factor in the motivation to finish the show. After willing myself to bring it to a completed status, did the wait justify the means and did the show produce a quality tale?

Let’s jam!

The Story

It’s the first day of high school for Kino and her childhood friend Miki. When they arrive, Miki says that her sister plays bass in a band and that the band is performing after the opening ceremony. When they watch it, Kino falls in love with the lead singer, Yori, at first sight! After school, as luck would have it, Kino runs into her by the shoe cubbies and decides to confess by telling her that she fell in love with her. Yori, who has never fallen in love with her love nor knows what it feels like to be in love, was taken aback by that confession. Something stirred inside of her and she found Kino way too adorable to ignore! She, too, has fallen in love at first sight.

Miki thinks the same thing so she asks her sister to give her the details on Yoni, which she then relays to Kino. She even tells Kino that Yori loves to sing by herself up on the roof so, what does a girl deeply in love do? She goes and visits her. After some encouragement from her fellow band members, Yori works up the courage to tell Kino on the roof that she fell in love at first sight, too!

Then, the most magical thing in the world happens.

Kino says “YOU FELL IN LOVE WITH SINGING, TOO!? WE’RE LOVE-AT-FIRST-SIGHT BUDDIES!!”

It was the misunderstanding of the century and you could practically feel Yori’s heart rip in half at that very moment; however, she will not be denied! When Kino says that she wants to come up to the roof and hear her sing every day, Yori says it’s fine but she’s going to make Kino fall for her harder than she has already! Now, a story begins where Yori is in love romantically with Kino but Kino thinks it’s just a mutual admiration for singing!

The Characters

Himari Kino

Kimo is just a happy-go-lucky girl who is a bit on the… erm… simplistic side. She’s not an idiot, per se, but she does tend to take things at face value and believes in the power of rainbows and happiness. She also doesn’t have a clue what love is about and thinks of love differently… like the love for a fine Cuban cigar or that favorite slice of pizza. Watching her go through this journey to understand romantic love for the first time in her life is wonderful, albeit, comical because of the pure naivety of her actions. One thing is for certain, Yori did give her something to think about; however, there are other factors at play where she can’t spend all of her thinking dwelling on what love means and some of those factors help shape her as a character, too.

She is a classic example of indirect development where she not only realizes things on her own but the things the other characters go through also serve as a guide for her to follow. All while others are dealing with their problems, she shows her pure heart by trying to help others out as much as she can, even if sometimes that comes back to bite her in the rear. In short, wholesome doesn’t begin to describe Kino as a character and I think she’s a bit too innocent to a fault at first but she settles into the role a bit more as the show progresses.

Yori Asanagi

Opposite of Kino we have Yori. She is aware of what romantic love is but never experienced it before in her life… not even once… that is until the big misunderstanding when Kino tells her that she loves her. It is a bit hard to believe that even someone as inexperienced in love as Yori would fall so hard so quickly over one little line from a person she had never met before in her entire life but that is the base we get to work with here. While the premise to set up the story was a bit far-fetched, it does paint Yori in a bit of a negative light in the sense that if Kino is kind of dumb through naivety then Yori is just plain dumb period. There’s not reading the temperature of the room then there’s using a broken thermometer and getting a false reading. Yori is the latter but doesn’t have the sense to question the false reading… if that makes sense.

Despite the weird setup to propel our character to their fated moment, Yori as a character is full of insecurities as well. She’s always questioning things and wondering if she’s making the correct decisions; however, it’s not to a huge extent because she’s also very proactive. She’s determined to make Kino fall in love with her so she takes her out on dates, talks with her, and even sets up times where they can be together up on the roof all so Kino can hear Yori sing. She’s putting in a ton of effort in hopes that she will get a favorable ROI. This makes her a bit more grounded of a character because even if she was a bit too dense to not question a complete stranger’s confession, she’s smart enough to know that there is still hope and that determination to make it happen is quite impressive.

Aki Mizuguchi

Aki is just Miki’s sister… at first… and then she steals the spotlight away from the main characters by having a dramatic encounter with a former friend that is way more interesting than Yori and Kino’s love story, although we have another dramatic moment between Aki and Kino before we even get there!

Turns out that Aki had a crush on Yori this entire time but she could never bring herself to confess her feelings for her. When she sees Kino enter Yori’s life and sees how Yori views her, she gets quite defensive and protective before realizing she was reading the situation incorrectly and she had overstepped her boundaries; however, thanks to Kino’s power of positivity, things get smoothed out and we move on to Aki and Shiho’s past with being former bandmates and possibly something more than just that!

More complete thoughts once I touch upon Shiho…

Shiho Izumi

Shiho was a part of the band with Aki; however, Shiho is a perfectionist to a major fault and when things are heading in a direction that isn’t to her liking, she flies off the handle and leaves the band, damaging her friendship with Aki as well as her reputation at school; however, she doesn’t care because she wants to find a band that can play music an elite level to match her expectations. We end up getting a backstory for her and, while I’ll let you watch it for yourself, I will say that the backstory does Shiho no favors. Most backstories at least have a moving of tragic reason that explains why they turned into a cold-hearted egotistical and self-delusional character but it turns out Shiho was just that the entire time. She’s out to prove a point and it’s the reason why she will only play with the best of the best but instead of feeling sorry for you, you just realize that she’s been a cold-hearted egotistical, and self-delusional person the entire time.

It got to the point where you wanted to see Shiho fail because she deserved every bit of it and then some. Nothing this show could have done after that backstory would have ever made me feel sorry for her. Her backstory wasn’t poorly written… but the reason was poorly conceived. Maybe I’m missing something here and in Japan, situations like that are seen as sentimental and/or sympathetic but if so, it’s completely lost on me.

Circling back to Aki, now we are supposed to believe that there just might be some romantic interest on Shiho’s part for Aki. Because of everything leading up to this revelation, it makes it PAINFULLY hard to root for the two of them to get together. However, because so much focus was placed on her in the second half of the show, her angst and possible relationship completely overshadowed the main characters, and when this series is set up to tell their story you have your supporting character not only hijack it but stand out so much that you’re invested in it more than the main story, that’s a huge problem.

It would be forgivable if all of the characters were treated equally but Miki got barely any screen time as did Mari, Kaori, Momoka, Hajime, Kyou, and anyone else I’m forgetting because every other character was that forgettable.

Art, Animation, and Sound

I’ll do something different here and start with the sound. Normally, I touch upon that last but this is a musical anime and we do get musical performances… or should I say… fractions of musical performances. I guess the budget wasn’t there to animate full insert songs to give us proper concerts but what we did get sounded pretty good and I could see myself buying the album to get the full experience; however, this is also the downfall of the series because even though this is a romance series, it’s supposed to be wrapped around the music and when we’re teased like that, it makes it feel as if the music also took a backseat to everything else. This created a bit of an imbalance so despite enjoying the clips, the desire for more was there and that’s not a good thing.

Animation-wise, the show was average at best. Nothing to truly write home about but the artwork… ouch… in some instances, the art just suffered. There were moments when objects that were hand-drawn and hand-animated stuck out like a sore thumb against still backgrounds. One instance was in the classroom where all of the desks were intricately painted except for the one and only desk that Kino had to interact with… it was very bland, undetailed, and looked cheaply drawn. Also, some of the “wallpaper” patterns splattered all over the background (and even on objects that didn’t need it) looked out of place and quite jarring. It almost looked like it was CLOUDHEARTS’ first anime project, they realized how bad it looked, and slapped a bunch of textures over the backgrounds to mask the blandness of everything.

That above statement wasn’t far off because Sasayaku You ni Koi wo Utau was their FOURTH anime project, the last one they did was The New Gate… an anime that I also had an issue with when it came to art. This isn’t exactly a good start for them huh?

Overall Thoughts

To answer my question in the opening statement… no… this show wasn’t worth waiting 6+ months for its final two episodes… but it doesn’t mean that it was a bad show. There were some flashes of brilliance here in the story and the wholesomeness of Kino and Yori’s story made the show a bit more sugary than it would have been had it been left up to just Aki and Shiho. Their journeys did have some meat to them; however, the imbalances cannot be ignored.

Doing a hard shift to your two supporting characters is typically forgivable in a long-running series (25+ episodes) because long-running shows have these things called character arcs that play into the bigger picture. While a 12 or 13-episode series can have those, usually they are relegated to one or two episodes… not half of the entire series which causes the main story to become derailed and overshadowed which is the case here.

Again… the stories themselves weren’t bad (although I disliked Shiho’s backstory but that’s my personal take and others may have enjoyed it)… the balance versus the number of episodes given for this series is where I have the issue. It was like the anime told two stories in one and if you’re going to do that, it needs to be set up out of the gate. The initial setup led viewers to believe that this was Kino and Yori’s story and while it was and it gets a conclusion in the end, the hard shift isn’t expected and can make viewers feel blindsided by it.

So, what does all of that work out to?

Sasayaku You ni Koi wo Utau works out to be an average romance at best that didn’t capitalize on the potential of being a great romance. Not bad but not award-winning either. Still, it’s something you might find some enjoyment in so check out what it has to offer. You won’t go wrong with it as long as you’re not expecting something peak like The Dangers in My Heart.