Ef- A Tale of Memories

The story to Ef - A Tale of Memories is a unique experience, don’t go into watching this show thinking it will be a run of the mill romance story, it has one of the, if not the most, original stories you will likely come across in the genre.

The show is divided into two stories, in one we have a guy named Hiro who meets a girl named Miyako and they end up spending a lot of time together, this creates jealousy with Kei, Hiro’s childhood friend and an intense love triangle is formed. The other story focuses on Renji and Chihiro, Chihiro has a condition that makes her forget everything that happened 13 hors ago, she keeps a log in her diary allowing her to recall moment, she and Renji form a close bond as he helps her realise her dream.

The art for this show is beutiful to say the least, you can really tell this is a Shaft project as they include so much of there defining characteristics, like there use of text on solid color scenes inserted into the show, they also have quite a lot of ‘Photoshoped filter effects’ scenes, and quite often silhouettes are used and many shot are styalized. Each character is drawn well and the background art is often very pretty, the show uses a lot of dark tones and rarely see the light of the miday sun as a lot takes place either at night or at sunset. Another thing i noticed but the characters often ended up talking to each other face to face but quite a few paces apart and the camera being pulled back so the background gets a lot of focus. The animation quality is great, everything is beautifully animated and rarely do we see incosistant animation and the use of CG was to the minimum.

Sound is another thing this show really makes wonderfull use of, the background music always did its job of enhancing certain scenes and making them stand out, the opening and endings were great, i lost track of them quite often because i swear they kept changing or switching from time to time but each one was a nice song, they mixed up a lot of styles as a harmonica is used then goes into a ballad, the opening was a cool pop rock song that used English lyrics that even had a Japanese version, every song was powerfull and had great feeling to them. All Seiyuu did their job spectacularlly and really gave feeling to the characters.

There are five main characters to this show and are split 2-3, Renji is a boy who enjoys a good book and likes to read in quite places where he meets Chihiro, she has an illness that can cause a lot of trouble but her and Renji always pull threw there problems and help each decided and pursue there dreams. The other story has an emotional love triangle, Hiro is a Manga artist who often skips school and has a childhood friend, Kei, who tries to get him to keep coming back so he can get a good academic score, Hiro then meets a girl called Miyako, who has a fear of disappearing from the people shes close too, and he ends up spending Christmas with her and a lot of time after that, this love triangle included a lot of really emotional and powerful scenes like the voice messages, but then also had its clichéd moments that we see in plenty of other shows, such as the difference between sibling love and the romantic kind. The side characters are just as important, Yuuko and Himura appear to the different characters and often give them advice and assistance when required and act as people who they can go see, we also see including those two another guy who turn out to be the main protagonists for the sequel/prequel.

Overall the show is an emotional rollercoaster, there are moments that offer a little bit of comedy but it does focus on its drama. It is definitly one of the best in the romance genres and shood not be missed. Everything in the show, the art, the animation, the sound, everything comes together perfectly and really creates the mood of the show.