In a season full of women supporting one another, let us take a moment to reflect on Flower and Asura, streaming now on HIDIVE.

Haruyama Hana is a young woman who, after being moved by a performance of  reading on television, begins doing recitations. She lives with her mother on an island in, I’m presuming, the Seto Inland Sea, commuting to school by ferry and entertaining local children with her recitations. When she is scouted by the ebullient Usurai Mizuki to join the high school Broadcasting Club, Hana will confront her limitations and hopefully, break out of her shell.

This is an anime adaption of a manga series written by Takeda Ayano, who is already well-known for another high school club series, Sound! Euphonium, illustrated by Musshu, an artist who has been contributing to Yuri anthologies, such as the Éclair anthologies, and who is currently illustrating the There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover…Unless manga.

The premise of this series is a typical “high school club helps a low-self esteem character find themselves” and it is a bit worn at the edges from the get go. Hana has already been performing recitations for years when Usurai-sempai sees her. The locals think of her more as an act to keep the children occupied, but Hana clearly loves what she is doing. So her bouts of social anxiety feel a bit overblown, since we are given little insight to her as a person beyond her genesis as a performer. But if we accept that publicly shy / confident performer personalities are not that uncommon, it becomes easier to understand accept.

As a sempai, Usurai is the perfect catalyst. Seeing Hana’s skill, she is persistent about getting her into the club, without being annoying. She’s all about fostering her team’s abilities – even though she has a specific goal of winning a major competition. This is a soft enough conflict for the early episodes as Hana asks the question I keep asking through all these “we gotta be the best!” series – isn’t just having fun enough?

I have no doubt that Hana will  find her answer to that question and it will undoubtedly be that working with a group towards a goal is the more than just enough. But I trust Takeda to do that in a way that allows the characters to mature into themselves.

On the animation side, the recitations allow the animators to play around a little with the feel of the scenes, expressing the sentiments of each of Hana’s recitations in a visually resonant way, adding a component to a skill that has no inherent visual quality. A bit like the animation of mah jong strategies in Saki.

For yet another great sempai-kouhai relationship that is about emotional support and growth, Flower and Asura, streaming on HIDIVE is a very decent skill-based anime.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 7 This early on, they are types, rather than fully developed
Service – See above
Yuri – 0 and not likely to be any, outside people’s personal headcanons

Overall – 7

The whole series feels a bit sponsored by the NHK National University Broadcasting Contest contest to drum up interest. ^_^