Hiroshi Nagahama	...	(Director)
Aki Itami, Shûzô Oshimi	...	(Writer)
Yôko Hikasa	...	(13 episodes, 2013)
Mariya Ise	...	Sawa Nakamura (13 episodes, 2013)
Patrick Mölleken	...	Ken Kojima (13 episodes, 2013)
Shinichiroh Ueda	...	Takao Kasuga (13 episodes, 2013)

Comments: This thing is "Holy Smokes!" good. Great story, great characters, and a closing theme song that gave me goosebumps every time: a couple atonal computer generated voices singing about flowers. The words are spelled out phonetically and it seems to sneak in as part of the story. It's haunting, magnificent work.

Its rotoscope style animation works well for the human story: A Baudelaire reading, socially capable outsider school kid gets blackmailed by a female classmate who saw him steal the gym clothes of the girl he has a crush on--the beauty of the class. This classmate is a total misanthrope and one of the best femme fatales I've seen in a while. She insists he's a pervert and uses her power over him to beat him into admitting it. She makes him wear his crush's gym suit underneath his own clothes when he finally gets a date with her. Meanwhile the kid experiences his crush's fall from an angel who he imagines is perfect (before she goes out with him) to a normal girl who's needy and kind of dumb sometimes. Quality stuff, wonderfully creepy and existential.

If you don't dislike rotoscoping (it's way rotoscoped. I never felt like there were people behind it), this is a must see.


Summary: Takao worships the class beauty, Nanako, from afar. When he is alone in the classroom one day after school, he notices her bag of gym clothes on the floor. He can't resist picking it up. He plans to return it, but the next day, all the girls are commiserating with Nanako that some pervert has stolen her gym clothes. Worse than that, their classmate Sawa quietly lets him know that she saw him take the clothes and will tell Nanako if he doesn't make a contract with her to do whatever she asks of him and then their strange relationship begins.