Sing “Yesterday” For Me – Anime Review

In a season nearly destroyed by the pandemic still impacting the world, I was really happy that Yesterday was one of the few anime that continued airing without any interruption. That happiness kind of dropped significantly about halfway in.

The show presents itself as a mature love-triangle story about the MC (a guy like in his 30s or something), a woman voiced by Hanakana (same age), and some barely legal teen girl that looks like a crow and has a crow for a pet. MC loved Hanakana in high school and college maybe, honestly I don’t fucking remember, but she was in love (not going out, ever, complete beta bitch) with this other guy who is dead now and who she treats like is a dead husband and who I thought was a dead husband but is just a dead friend she wanted to fuck, and the crow was one of her students (Hanakana became a teacher) who now loves the MC for whatever reason.

It’s pretty stupid sounding and that’s because it’s a pretty stupid show, but somehow the problem isn’t so much the story but the lack of it. Yesterday tends to completely forget it has a plot at all or even main characters about halfway through. The first third-ish or half of the show is pretty focused on the trio and their current situations between one another, developing in fine fashion to be a pretty alright show. Then you hit the halfway mark and suddenly every episode is a throwaway with no purpose or meaning or value to anything featuring a non-character who never existed beforehand and never exists AGAIN in the entire series either. You essentially spend half the show with episodes that spend their entire runtime introducing and then saying goodbye to characters who had nothing interesting to them and no purpose in the story and didn’t impact the love triangle or any of the cast at all and then were tossed out immediately after. It was ridiculous and showed how poorly thought out Yesterday was from the get-go.

Then, for the final 2 episodes, out of nowhere there is an unmentioned time skip you only learn happened because someone mentions that the MC and Hanakana apparently got together off-screen and have been dating off-screen for 3 months. This is a romance-dram, why would you skip the sole purpose of your show with a timeskip? There isn’t even a flashback or anything you just learn oh yeah they’ve been a couple now for months. Did I completely forget or miss something because of how little I cared? It’s VERY possible, but I don’t think so. That aside, they also keep it secret, and all the while Hanakana has continued leading on the kid that wants to fuck her. Oh, right, I forgot, the younger brother of Dead Guy loves her and she wants to fuck him too because he reminds her of Dead Guy. So she’s basically been keeping him on the line on the side while now going out with MC (who she refuses to even kiss, let alone fuck).

Then MC and Hanakana break up for no reason at all and it ends with her hooking up with a kid and MC getting with the crow because his first option didn’t really work out. Again, none of this with ANY sort of development, it just abruptly gets thrown in during the final 8 minutes or so of the last episode.

Yesterday was something I was pretty excited for and the beginnings had a lot of potential, but it ended up a completely retarded mess of episode-after-episode of wasted time and then once they finally addressed the romance it was just a clusterfuck of dumb bullshit and all the important bits being hidden from the viewer’s sight. This wasn’t just lacking in maturity, it was just plain stupid. The director and writers were clearly lost entirely on how to present or tell this story and it shows here more than it usually does even in the worst of shows. I’m amazed it’s bad enough that even MAL is giving it mostly 1s and 2s, usually faux-mature shows get high ratings.

I take it back about the “director and writers” – the director also did the script and screenplay, so it was all really down to the COMPLETE incompetence of Yoshiyuki Fujiwara. Looking over his other credits, the only thing he’s truly done good was Mikakunin and all he did there was direct for the most part; almost all of that show was great due to the original material being great and the art team doing such an incredible job and the seiyuu being fucking fantastic. This man has no business doing anything beyond being an episode-director, Mikakunin was a one time fluke, but Yesterday really showed his actual skill set and level of it.

I gave it a 4/10, and although I recommended it weeks ago in a comment, I absolutely wouldn’t bother with this one at all in retrospect. It’s just bad, there’s nothing good or entertaining or interesting about it aside maybe how clearly the staff’s incompetence can be seen compared to usual. They even let the best girl win and I still don’t fucking care.