One Week Friends

"Regretting the past forever won't solve anything."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Highlight the blacked-out text to read the spoilers.

Kaori Fujimiya is always alone. She doesn’t talk to anybody, she doesn’t have any friends, and she actually avoids making friends at all costs. She does this because every Monday, all of her enjoyable memories of her friends disappear. Despite this, a student named Yuuki Hase tries to get close to Kaori every week, wanting Kaori to be finally able to call somebody a friend.

For a show featuring a seemingly fictional memory loss concept, the way it was handled is very surprising. The concept of “losing your memories of only your friends every Monday” was handled with such care, realism, and respect, that it truly felt plausible. Actually, one word that could describe “One Week Friends” as a whole is the word “gentle.” Both the soundtrack and concept handling were handled with extreme care, even so much so that it almost got too sugar-sweet at times.

When a show is animated by the studio “Brain’s Base,” you know that the production is going to be good. And, of course, the animation is wonderful. The backgrounds are vibrant, and the colors beautiful. It perfectly fits both the sugar-sweet and dramatic parts, and the story as a whole. However, there was a unique problem that I had with the animation: sometimes, the characters moved very oddly. They performed gestures and movements that I can’t imagine anybody in real life doing, so it was very odd and distracting at times.

As much as I want to avoid spoilers, I have to break my unspoken rules here. At the end of episode 9, Kaori loses all of the memories of her friends. Before the memory wipe, Kaori was slowly gaining memories of her friends back, so one would expect this setback to be major, right? Actually, I felt that this plot point was completely unnecessary due to how quickly it was shrugged off. This problem barely had an effect, and soon after it was introduced, it was solved. "One Week Friends" is the type of show that is completely subject to melodrama, and it's a shame that it went this direction.

7.5/10- All in all, “One Week Friends” is a good show. Though the character movements were strange and there was some unnecessary melodrama, the show is similar to that one friend who you just can’t stay mad at.