The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You.

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Mizuha's 17th birthday is the pits. Her parents totally forgot, and the sempai she likes isn't interested in her. But when her longtime childhood friend asks her out, Mizuha has to sort out what this change in relationship could mean. And her feelings may not be the only ones changing.

Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You is based on the manga by Haruka Mitsui. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

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Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You will begin streaming on Crunchyroll on January 9. Anime News Network received press screeners and was allowed to publish our impressions early.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

This is one of these shows where I know I'm not the target audience. While I like romance anime, harem stories—especially reverse harem stories—rarely work well for me. It's the shotgun approach to storytelling: if we throw out enough attractive people with different looks and personalities, at least one will hit its mark and capture the viewer. And far be it for me to “yuck” another person's “yum,” but in my eyes, there is very little going on here story-wise, judging by this first episode.

We have an oblivious girl surrounded by five guys who like her. While this episode focuses on her relationship with just one of the guys, it's little more than a series of clichés, one after another. We get classics like the kabedon, reaching over the short girl to help her reach something she can't, and wiping food off her lips with a finger and then licking it—just to name a few. I kept waiting for something original that would make this one stand out from the pack in terms of story or characters but didn't find it.

That said, there is at least one thing novel about this series: the setting—or more specifically the time period in which the story is set. COVID is a universal experience to the kids who lived through it. It hit them in a different way than it hit those of us that were adults at the time. A big part of what's happening in the background of this first episode is our high school heroes having to deal with how the impending quarantine is upsetting their lives—taking away some of the key life moments we used to take for granted.

Honestly, this is something the series could hang its hat on. An anime about romance during this time period is something I honestly haven't seen before. We'll just have to see going forward how much of the story is an endless parade of romance clichés and how much it is about the pandemic upsetting their youth.

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James Beckett
Rating:

How Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You begins had me convinced that this show just had to be some spoof or satire of romance anime. Here we have our main character, Mizuho, who is an adorkable young student and aspiring artist who can be easily identified as the heroine of a romance cartoon by her giant (but still low-key fashionable) glasses. Then we meet her four childhood friends, Kizuki, Shin, Airu, and Shugo, who are all ridiculously tall, hot, and perpetually posing supermodel-looking himbos. They each get a unique hairstyle and exactly one personality trait to differentiate them. Mizuho goes out of her way to repeatedly explain that she sees every single one of these boys as a purely platonic childhood friend and nothing more.

They're all basically her little brothers, silly! Who knows why her dad would find it just a little off-putting when the one guy who seems allergic to wearing a shirt has a habit of collapsing on the floor with his daughter in unplanned sleepovers?

This, by the way, is everything we get in just the first minute or two of the story proper, right after the adult Mizuho sets the stage by reflecting on how she, too, once had a “sparkling adolescence.” I don't know which is funner: The fact that Mizuho apparently thinks that pretty much every girl in Japan lived in a self-insert Zoolander fanfiction as a kid, or that Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You wants us to take all of this incredibly seriously. I do want to make it clear that I'm not exactly complaining when I detail how staggeringly ridiculous the core premise of this show is because almost every coming-of-age romance churned out by the anime and manga industry is built on a baseline foundation of absurdity. The whole point is to capture the heightened emotions of young love through the sparkly and rose-colored tint of nostalgia and to make everyone as preternaturally attractive as possible while doing it. I won't hold a grudge against Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You for simply trying to play the game that every other show of its ilk is competing in, since it at least seems to be making a halfway decent effort.

Now, it's not like this toon is going to blow any minds with its art or animation, and it might be a bit too silly for folks looking for a show grounded in any genuinely lived experiences or human truths. Still, it's got entertainment value enough to kill a half-hour for anyone curious enough to check it out, and I imagine it will be loads more appealing to folks who are already primed to gobble up this sort of genre junk food. I prefer my “sparkling adolescence” anime to have a bit more bite to them, or at least a modicum of self-awareness, but you could do far worse than Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You when it comes satisfying that craving for cheesy love stories.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
It was only a matter of time before we started to see the pandemic romanticized in fiction. Five years seems perhaps a little premature (although the manga this series is based on came out several years ago), but it was such an upheaval that seeing it pop up in genre fiction was inevitable. And in the case of Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You, it primarily seems to serve as a way to subvert an old romance cliché – Kizuki was planning to confess his love to childhood friend Mizuho when he met a swim team milestone (and she was planning to confess to an older student in a similar stunt), but the pandemic has canceled all major swim meets. This Kizuki decides to take matters into his own hands and tell Mizuho his feelings right now…which she never saw coming.

Although that's in itself a cliché, it makes sense here. Mizuho and Kizuki are part of a close-knit friend group consisting of the two of them, three other boys, and at least a lone girl. Mizuho has never once considered her male friends in a romantic light. There are already hints that at least two of the others – Shugo and Shin – may also have crushes on her, but no one has ever threatened the fragile balance of the group with something like feelings. Kizuki's confession – and the kiss he steals – stand to make things very awkward for at least Mizuho, if not the entire group. If Shugo and Shin aren't saying anything, it's because they don't want to do that themselves and I can't think they'll be thrilled with Kizuki's actions.

Neither, I daresay, is Mizuho. Her position as the only girl seems to be something that never came up for her; these boys are her friends before they're anything else. She has a crush, and it never occurred to her to have one on any of them. She's focused on her manga aspirations and maintaining her friendships, and the pandemic (just beginning in this episode) is upsetting her plans, but not necessarily her life, if that makes sense. No one knows what's coming (except us, having already lived it), and all she can see is how this not what she planned on. There's a sense from the flash-forward at the beginning of the episode that she's too close to any of it to see clearly, and that juxtaposition is one of the strongest elements of this story. It's not “youth is wasted on the young,” but “you don't know what you've got till it's gone.”

The bigger issue is that this isn't amazing visually. The manga is simple in its art style, but very clean and clear. The anime definitely loses some of that, and there's a sort of soft glow that starts out looking nice but gets grating rather quickly. There are also some definite problems with perspective - one scene of Kizuki in the pool is very awkward - and Mizuho has calves that stretch on for miles when she's at the chalkboard. The animation is serviceable, though not spectacular, and overall, I do feel like the art lost something in its transition. The voices I'm more sold on, although they're also nothing amazing. Honestly, the most engaging thing here is the story. Will Mizuho appreciate any of her seventeenth year? It feels like it may be worth watching to find out.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

For the past decade or so, the trend has been for shoujo anime to get adapted for TV as dramas instead of being animated. For this reason alone, I find Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You to be valuable, as an anime based on a shoujo manga with no fantasy elements whatsoever. It especially comes across as a prime candidate for a live-action adaptation because it feels like it would be right at home among WB/CW network teenage dramas like Everwood, One Tree Hill, or The OC. You know, in the early seasons before they ran out of ideas and turned to unhinged twists like a dog eating a donor heart.

I just wish the anime adaptation were, you know, better. It comes to us via Typhoon Graphics, the studio behind Dahlia in Bloom, with direction by Junichi Yamamoto, whose rather ignominious resume includes disasters such as Haigakura and More Than a Married Couple, But Not Lovers. The result is rather unpleasant to look at, with overblown colors and lighting that uses lens flare constantly in daylight scenes. The photographic backgrounds never mesh with the characters, especially with color gradient filters slapped over them that would make GoHands blush. There's a few dynamically storyboarded scenes among the awkward framing, but very little actual, you know, animation, as characters tend to flap their mouths in static poses. If you've watched a shoujo anime from the last ten years before, it's about what you'd expect.

The big question of the day is whether or not the writing can make up for the visuals' lack. The first thing that struck me was how naturalistic the dialogue was in the group conversations. It only takes a few exchanges to get a feel for Mizuho and her friends' dynamic, full of good-natured ribbing and the sense of ease that comes from a group of people who have been close for a long time. More intense scenes tend to be overwrought, bringing the soapy sensibility of the aforementioned network dramas. It's a nice balance, even if I rolled my eyes at the manga editor insisting Mizuho must be experiencing a sparkling adolescence. High school is miserable for a lot of people! How out of touch can you get? There's also the little matter of the “infectious disease,” an obvious Covid analog that keeps getting mentioned but seems to have very little impact on their daily life, since they still have school, go to cafes, attend meetings with their faces uncovered, and so on.

Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You may be another case where a lack of resources and skill flatten out the original rather than enhancing it. If nothing else, I just may pick up the manga.