Hello all! Once again it’s been a lot longer than I would have liked. A lot of other things have come up, and in general I’ve been occupied. Beyond that I haven’t really felt the urge to write about anything in particular either, but that has changed with this coming anime season.

Slightly before the season began I actually started the manga for Bloom Into You and was very quickly absorbed into the world and the story. To me personally, the characters are quite well defined. Of course for the sake of writing there are some traits that are exaggerated, but I find them to be quite believable. As a direct result, when the characters take action or make decisions, it feels natural and the situations that come about all feel very organic. To make quite the understatement, I was very excited for the anime adaptation. If you’ll allow me, I was very excited to see it bloom into motion.

On the day of writing, the first episode has aired and I must say that I’m quite impressed. The adaptation was handled very faithfully. There were a couple of shortcuts taken, but overall the decisions made sense. Of course, due to the the general differences in the mediums, there were some differences in how certain scenes were portrayed and I’m here to share what stood out to me. This covers the first episode, and I’ll be careful not to spoil anything beyond the first episode in case you’re exclusively following the anime. At the time of writing, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll continue this into future episodes, I think it will mostly depend on whether or not something stands out enough for me to want to highlight it.

Well, enough of the preamble, let’s get going! I’m going to be discussing the first episode, so if you haven’t seen it and want to see it before reading my perspective, please make sure you do so.

Note that as we go along, I’ll be providing some screenshots. If you hover your mouse over them, there will at times be captions. For the anime screenshots, I’ll have the timestamps if you want to view the scene I’m talking about for yourself, and for some of the manga screenshots, I’ll include a little extra information.

The first difference that stood out to me came relatively early on. Yuu’s opening monologue was very accurate, however, when Yuu’s friends Akari and Koyomi talk to her, we’re suddenly thrust into her perspective.

At around 1:06

As you can see in the manga, though she’s facing more or less the same direction as the reader’s perspective in the frame, she’s still in it. The manga ultimately keeps the reader’s perspective as a 3rd person observer, but the anime tries to get us to share her perspective. I have mixed feelings about this, but personally am more fond of the manga’s approach to this scene. If they give us any future scenes from this kind of perspective, it’ll be interesting to examine if there was a concrete intention behind it.

Around 5:20

This difference is pretty self explanatory, but it’s still interesting. The actual content of their conversation isn’t necessarily something of particular importance, but it does give us a better understanding of the current state. The texts are about how things are going now that they’ve started highschool, and there’s a clear exchange back and forth. This leads me to believe that they’re sending messages on a relatively frequent basis, and even though Yuu has yet to give an answer, that didn’t necessarily make things awkward between them. It helps set the tone and gives us a little more information about the guy. Of course it’s up to the viewer how to interpret the messages given, but from my perspective it seems to be a rather lighthearted exchange.

On the other hand, the manga leaves things wide open, just giving us message shaped blocks. Considering how much the topic had been on her mind, it could have been a very reasonable conclusion that the guy was pestering her and the replies shown were asking for more time. Or well, a variety of other potential interpretations as well.

Notably both the anime and the manga give us a little more insight to the dynamic of their relationship as well as the guy’s personality later on, but at this point the floor is wide open and I think the anime adding just a bit of flavor text here helped ground the situation.

Around 9:23

This isn’t really a specific point but rather a broad observation, and these frames happened to be in sight as I was thinking about it. But well, if you compare the shots, Touko looks a lot more evidently happy in the shot from the anime. On the other hand, in the manga while she looks confident and her lips are curved slightly upward… overall the impression I get here is largely different. She seems calm, collected, and given context from future events that I can’t discuss in detail in this post, perhaps even calculated.

Next, we come up to the following scene where Yuu gets a moment to talk to Touko alone. She begins describing her experience when someone confessed to her, but states that she just wasn’t able to understand what made feelings “special”.

At around 15:08

This scene I feel is played up in the anime. If you’re a manga reader, the way Touko’s eyes light up and sparkle here and how she asks the question are very telling. In both this serves as a hint for things to come, but it is definitely given stronger emphasis in the anime. In the manga, Touko actually just continues listening. Yes, she gets a pretty wide panel to draw attention to the moment, but having a vocal response of surprise was really the biggest tip.

In the anime, from this moment on, Touko has a lot of watery or sparkly-eyed moments that definitely give us deeper perspective into how she’s feeling. Perhaps because manga isn’t able to emulate the eyes as well, she seems a lot more stoic. Well, at least until…

At around 18:02 Yuu’s right leg is forward to balance after being pulled in Yuu pulls her right leg back now to try to make distance

She pulls Yuu in for an embrace! They actually adapted this specific scene very faithfully, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s a lot easier to keep track of what’s going on in the anime. I feel that for the manga unless you’re really keeping track of the position of their legs and how the perspective is being shown, you don’t necessarily notice Yuu trying to make a little bit of distance.

Later on, we come into the scene where Touko asks Yuu to be her main aide during the student council president election.

At around 23:31

Just before this, Maki and Sayaka are talking about the election as well and Sayaka expresses her expectation that she is going to be Touko’s main aide. Once Touko asks Yuu to do that role instead, we pan to this frame showing surprised reactions. As you can by my shots, in the manga Sayaka is actually framed alone for this. Perhaps as part of that, having an entire box dedicated solely to her surprised expression, I personally feel that the delivery in the manga has a bit more weight.

In the middle of the last two scenes, a couple of events were re-ordered and condensed. There were a couple other shortcuts taken earlier on in the episode but this has probably been the most significant abbreviation so far. I certainly don’t mind it, I believe the anime is confirmed for 13 episodes, so they do need to be time conscious. It will certainly be interesting to see what other things they shortcut in the episodes to come.

Well, that concludes my comparisons for episode 1. I’m often told that I overthink things, and perhaps a lot of this is really a result of that more than anything else, but I hope that at least some of you have enjoyed reading my observations and comparisons!

Like I said, I’m not sure I’ll continue doing this into future episodes. I think it will mostly depend on whether or not something stands out to me. Did you enjoy this post? Would you like to see future comparisons as episodes are released? Might you have any suggestions for ways to improve the format? Please leave comments here or reach out to me in other ways.

Thanks for reading, until next time!