Rain, the Little Girl, and My Letter Review

story 5/10

When this six minute featurette begins to play, it clearly says it's an amateur anime. That being said, this is fairly obvious in most aspects, from the story to the inconsistent animation. This is the story section, though, so I'll discuss it a bit. Keep in mind this review in general won't be very long due to the feature only being six minutes. :)

I've always been interested in the mating rituals of kids in Japan, because it seems so childish. Giving someone a note if you are interested in them, even if you barely know them, is fascinating to me and reminds me of elementary school ("Do you like me? Check yes or no" with two little checkboxes). Clearly, this childish nature is prevalent in more than just the notes, since people date sometimes for months without even (GASP) kissing! For those of you who are as fascinated (or morbidly intrigued) by this cultural ritual, this short anime might interest you.

The story itself revolves around a girl who wants to confess to a boy she barely knows. She has written the letter painstakingly and is quite proud of it, like it's a work of art and a wonderful piece of writing. Without spoiling, I'll just say that the first few minutes involves her giving this letter to the boy, and seeing his reaction. The last half (if you can call it that at only three minutes) has a slightly different focus, with the girl going to work at a bookstore (it appears to be run by her family, but I'm not sure), and having an encounter with a strange traveling girl who happens to be in the store.

Genre-wise, I suppose it could be considered slice of life, but in general it's a very quiet, short tale that doesn't really tell us much. I think the studio had the animation in mind when they made this, with the story sitting on the back burner. It's fairly reminiscent of other short tales such as "She and her cat", but without the same charm. In general, this was a decent story but I wasn't terribly interested in it. Had it maintained one focus (the love letter) I might have thought it was a bit more charming, but due to the two focuses, it seemed drawn out past the point it should have ended. I wasn't thrilled about the girl in the bookstore plot anyways, though. This definitely is a short viewing you watch for the animation, if anything.

animation 4.5/10

The only reason you'd want to watch this would be the animation, but it's extremely mixed. Generally it's on the good side (hence the above average score, at least), but it's also definitely on the bad side a good chunk of the time. At its best, the animation will be reminiscent of any Studio 4C work (with lush, detailed backgrounds and colors), or a much more sharp looking version of Hoshi no Koe. These backgrounds and scenes dominate most of the six minutes, definitely giving you a feel that this was made solely for the animation. One unfortunate note is that the same backgrounds were recycled in some fashion, several times. For only six minutes, it was unfortunate that more backgrounds or scenes were not shown, especially if the intent was to show off the visuals.

On the flipside, the character designs were really, really terrible. I'm talking a slight notch above Magical Chocolate, and that says something. The characters are extremely simple, shaded weird, disproportionate, and in general just look... wrong. Any success the backgrounds had in making you think this was neat, was crushed by the terribleness when the characters were shown on screen. The girl in the bookstore looked incredibly child-like and grotesque to some extent, because of how crudely she was drawn.

All in all, very, very mixed animation.

sound 6/10

At only six minutes, you can't expect much from the music, but it worked in this case. Music was played most of the time, and was very light. The instrument mainly used was one of those steel drums that reverberates nicely. This gave the music a quirky edge that fit very well, especially in the scene with the little girl. To be honest, I had to watch this again to remember what the music was, which means I can't rate it terribly high. What that does mean is that it fit into the background so well that I didn't notice... but, that might be a bad thing anyways.

The voice of the girl was fine, her narration helped with the story quite a bit.

characters 6.5/10

For a six minute feature, it's hard to rate this section. I rated higher than average because of the narration. It was clear, concise, and made sense. It also gave us a glimpse into the main character and how she felt about her writing and her love. Besides that, we see almost nothing about her or how she reacts in situations, but that's to be expected due to the length. The girl in the bookstore is another character, but I didn't like her at all. She said almost nothing, was chibified for no reason sometimes, and had no relevant story that interested me. I still feel like that entire second half could have been removed and it would have been fine, including removing her. Overall, I can't give this a high score because of the length and how little we know about the characters, but I still think it was decent because of the narration.

overall 5/10

While Rain, the Little Girl and My Letter might be an admirable attempt by a budding studio, it still had a lot of problems that are too major to overlook. The animation, while interesting in some parts, was horrid in others (character designs). The story was light and interesting, but should have stopped after the letter incident. Yes, I know the title of the series references the girl in the bookstore, but still, I felt that half was totally unnecessary and ruined the flow of the anime. It's only six minutes so it won't kill you to try it out for yourself, I just felt it was very average on most levels (and below average for the character designs, definitely).