Here is Greenwood

I really don’t get why all the boys seem to tease Kazuya right away, including telling him that his roommate, Shun Kisaragi, was a girl. It does play a lot into the yaoi feeling of this show. All the characters from his brother to anyone else in the school are really out of control. All of them seems a bit too stereotypical, Kazuya is pathetic, Mitsuru is cruel, Shun to cutesy, and yet, we sympathize with the characters when they tell us their sad stories. The worse characters for that craziness seems to be Mitsuru Ikeda and Shinobu Tezuka. All four of them seem tohave a love hate relationship the whole time. My little fan girl was squealing the whole time for the little hints of Yaoi. The episodes feel really rushed, making things confusing. It’s like we are reading Kazuya’s journal and he’s not too good at writing it. A lot of the time, they seem to be saying ‘go read the manga’ which of course is something I hate about these animes. I really don’t get the episode that they have a ghost in it. It just seems like a bit of a stretch to do that. Other then the episodes and the odd characters, one thing it has is pretty much a lot of is understanding of feelings. All the characters have problems with something in their lives. The way they show off these issues helps make them understandable. Sadly, we don’t get the whole story as again, this is only 6 episodes and they skip so much that’s in the manga. The animation is pretty much on the low side, I think partly because of being vintage and partly because of the low budget. It’s pretty boring animation and nothing really stands out. The English voices are really off for the women and the men feel a little un-emotional most of the time. I can’t stand Sumire’s voice. It’s really high pitched and annoying. I also don’t understand why she keeps saying Ya as well. Is she supposed to be Chinese or something? There really was no music that stood out to me at all. Normally its way to quiet to get any music or it’s just so standard that there was no change in it. The show is basically just bland and doesn’t stand out but it is still worth a watch.

This anime is an odd beast, many of these OVAs start out lackluster and then get better as they go along. With this one I felt like it was the other way around, it charmed me from the first episode but then started to fall apart as the show went on. The art is nice looking and the style is nice, the animation is a bit choppy but ok for an OVA like this, the music and sound is ok, but nothing really stands out. Where the show really falls apart though is the character development, or lack of it. This anime was obviously made for fansof the manga and absolutely no one else, and as such they expect you know EVERYTHING about these characters already. This isn't about there being no real overarching story, I know what a slice of life anime is, and I appreciate them. But there are huge gaps, things that should be filled in and it just leaves the viewer confused and frustrated. Over all this anime is a huge disappointment but I feel like an anime based on this manga could work and be wonderful, maybe it will be revisited by more competent hands one day If you are a fan of the comics I might recommend it, but otherwise I'd say give this a pass. You will just end up confused and frustrated like I was.

This came as a surprise. I often mention "folding" in my anime and film reviews, it's a term coined by some cognitive scientists who study the film industry, it can be roughly defined as the dynamics of how we create stories on different levels of abstraction, especially using a visual vocabulary, sometimes it's too obvious it verges on the ironic, but it's to my utmost interest when it's done very subtly the normal viewer wouldn't notice it usually. Anime and manga is semi-primitive compared to cinema in this. Here's a classic example though, the folding is explicitly ironic, we have in the 3rd episode a showwithin a show, filmed as a play inside the dorm of the students, it's clever fan service and narrative twists and turns for girls who love to see pretty boys around each other, it's worth observing compared to other examples, and there's a spark of innovation with the role of a mangaka who actually caused all of the narrative around this specific fold, that's something. Midori, Evangelion and Millennium Actress tried to explore that more creatively. There's also another folding device with a sensitive girl ghost who enters the fantasy of one of the boys, possibly mirrored by a soap opera show one of the characters is watching. I also liked how the characters developed and grew within each other. It's lite and fun stuff, but I'd recommend it only if you're interested in the making of the thing than the final result itself.