What Anohana Teaches You About Grief And Childhood Trauma

gamerant.com:

When looking for a show to fill the void left by something like Clannad, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day would make a lot of people's recommendations lists. And Anohana's writer, Mari Okada, is one of those writers able to take things that everyone universally understands, but many aren't able to articulate quite as coherently so that understanding gets across to an audience.

Both adolescence and grief and trauma are concepts that, given their complexity and the feelings they can engender, can be difficult to explore in a writing headspace. But in the anime and manga she writes, and even at times directs, Okada is someone who can strike that balance between how difficult growing up can be in almost any society, from the weight of expectations to having to learn to handle more complex, possibly even daunting emotions, to this freeing sense of new possibilities for the future opening up if the one growing up is brave enough to seize them.

Anime That Are Emotional Roller Coasters

The story of Anohana, as aforementioned, centers around a group of teenagers who are haunted by the ghost of their childhood friend. Well, metaphorically speaking. Only one of them, Jintan, can actually see her ghost, and the rest of their friends, who have all grow apart from both him and each other for the most part, think he's crazy at best, and at worst deliberately trying to jab at and reopen old wounds, while they're all just trying to do their best in their own ways to keep moving forward with this thing called growing up, while at the same time having unresolved feelings about each other, made worse by their now being old enough to better understand those feelings as far as being a teenager is concerned.

Menma, meanwhile, can't understand