Clannad - Reviews

First of all This will Review will be for both Clannad and for Clannad after life : [SAME REVIEW FOR CLANNAD AFTER LIFE]

So, after watching clannad specialy after life i cried whole time from Ep-16 to Ep-21. It is one of those anime and manga which mand me cry, though i'm bit serious type person with anime emotion complex.

my thoughts for this anime JUST GO AHEAD and Try to Understand whole series and also i recommmand watch in  japanese Because It gives bit Clear emotionl touch and felling of character

It filled with School life romance, Bit Supernatural phenomenon (Diffrent Dimention), Lots of emotion (Specially in After Life ), Comedy

POINTS TO REMEMBER  WHILE WATCHING CLANNAD / AFTER-LIFE

1. Since this anime is made long ago in 2007-2008 its animation is not good in 360p-480p i think so. may be 720p is bettter, ( i watched Whole series in Blu-ray 1080p so i did'nt get feel of old animation i was not sure of anime beacuse of  art but it wins my heart when i watched it )
2. As i suggested before too, Watch in Japanese 
3. Also, i recommandad watch whole series in one go or in 2-3 partition if u keep days diffrence in watching its feel and emotion along all the episode cannot be continued
4. yea also If u are downloading First Download all ep then watch so it convenient to wach Without trouble
5. Watch Movie in last or else it will leave lots of spoiler in your mind then dont tell me in reply u did't mentioned in review

Yes link for Blu-ray 1080p Clannad and Clannad After-life

Clannad :  Click Here to Go Google Dive Page All Episode Include Extra

Clannad After-life :  Click Here to Go Google Dive Page All Episode Include Extra

Sorry If Mistakenly i Mentioned any Spoiler But i Dont Think so if it has I am kindly sorry Because i know how it feels to get spoiler ahead of time like how someone Spoiled My whole Avengers : End Game one of the Best Movie of Century

Cry from open heart let Emotion comes out and let you feel it

WATCH IN NIGHT SO NO ONE CAN SEE YOU CRYING ^_^ (I hide my behind the desktop to cry 😛)

See You after Anime 

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So was it 

Clannad or At Least I Didn’t Have to Keep Pressing the A Button.

Story - 4/10

Clannad falls into a category I’m personally not very familiar with, Romantic Comedies (well minus the comedy) and visual novel based shows that take themselves a bit too seriously. While I have seen others that fit into these genres, Clannad is the first that really put the drama label as their main focus, and it’s just a shame they did it with a pretty bad and cliche story. They also went a bit too far with the whole “gal game” aspect, as it more or less felt like they took what was in the original platform (which I’m unfamiliar with) and just animated to it. Where as most adaptations of these games take the game premise, but still focus on making a television series, I just didn’t didn’t get it here, especially considering that they didn’t make the quest part tongue and cheek, and instead had our lead literally completing tasks all so he can get the desired items for our final goal.

Clannad starts off as a story about Tomoya Okazaki and his desire to help a lonely young girl named Nagisa Furukawa. He finds out that Nagisa was left back in school because of all the days she missed while ill, and now she doesn’t really have any friends. They decide the best way for her to meet some new people is to join a club, so she chooses the drama club, though they now find out the club has been on hiatus and if they want to restart it they’ll need to start from scratch, with new members and a new advisor. So now, despite apparently being a lazy delinquent, Okazaki has a goal of rebuilding the club so that this girl he just met can meet some new people.

Along the way Okazaki gets sucked into helping every other girl he meets complete some inane task, in the hopes that it will get them to join his club. The first of these girls is Fuko Ibuki, a freshman that he finds carving wooden stars, a task he notices is causing injury to her hand. When she tells him that she’s creating these as invitations to her sisters wedding, he and Nagisa agree to help her out, eventually passing out the starfish invites to everyone at school. Soon though all the students completely forget about the starfish or the girl who gave it to them, because the show’s writers had the dumb idea that this pretty serious show should just throw in a completely moronic Sci-Fi storyline for no reason other than to take up a third of this already thin series.

Once they finish wasting two hours of time with a useless plot they move on to one that’s a little bit more down to Earth and in line with what you’d expect from such a show. Okazaki is now working to help Kotomi, a girl he meets sitting alone in the library cutting pages out of books. Much like Nagisa she doesn’t have many friends, but for her it’s because she’s incredibly gifted and therefore doesn’t have to take classes with the other students. Eventually, after being given a scare by a bus accident near school, she locks herself away in her house, refusing to go to school or talk to any of her new friends. Okazaki eventually learns that her parents died in a plane crash, so Kotomi is very sensitive to such issues. He also begins to remember that he had met Kotomi when she was little, and even then he was her only friend. His new task to is fix up the garden outside of her house, get her to trust the outside world again, and throw her a big birthday party to make up for the one he missed when they were both kids.

The tasks that Okazaki must now complete start to get even more silly from here on out. In order to get an advisor for the drama club our group needs to convince the choir club to share theirs, but they won’t, so their brilliant plan is to play a game against the basketball team as a way to impress the choir club. So now Okazaki, Sunohara and Kyou, one of the twins who has a crush on Okazaki, play a three on three game against the underclassman on the basketball team, all because we needed some worthless sports episodes in this random series. This continues when their younger friend Tomoyo copies their plan to boost her reputation so that she can become student council president.

Eventually the group finally reaches their goal of gathering enough students and an advisor in order to reform the drama club, now their big problem is actually putting together the ideas needed for a play. Nagisa tells Okazaki she wants to do the play about a girl from an illusionary world, but no one seems to know where the story actually came from. While looking for information on the play, Okazaki and Nagisa’s father, Akio, look through their old belongings, which eventually leads to Akio finally revealing why he believes Nagisa is such a sickly child. When Nagisa also learns of the events of her childhood, and what happened because of them, she becomes depressed, as she now believes she’s been a burden on her family. Thankfully her issues were resolved in a way that managed to be the most over dramatic, somewhat nonsensical (as her father had no idea how she was even feeling) and completely intact with the awful writing of this series.

Somewhere in all of this is the story about Nagisa, her illness, and Okazaki’s growing desire to protect her forever, but most of that is relegated to a few minutes here or there, pushed to the back burner for these other stories that weren’t entertaining, funny or engaging enough to actually make a series watchable. When they do talk about it it’s mostly in the vaguest of ways possible, as they wanted to have a story about a sick girl, but they didn’t actually know how to write that story.

One area I really had to give them credit was in keeping the viewer guessing, or perhaps they were just keeping us confused. I always felt like I wasn’t sure where they were going with the series, which sometimes would keep me watching, but more often than not had me frustrated and disinterested, it again felt more like you were going off on side missions during a game, as opposed to viewing a well thought out series. The worst of these little journeys had to be the intertwined story of the lonely girl and her robot, which despite apparently being the basis for a play Nagisa wanted to perform, had no reason for being in our show other than the off chance that the creators learned each episode came up a minute short and they needed to fill in that time.

One of the terrible aspects of the show was their way of just dropping “drama” into a situation instead of finding a real way to create it. All the parts that are supposed to touch on your emotions aren’t built up, so much as they are just squeezed in with the clear intention of trying to make you sad. It takes work and talent to build up a heartbreaking story or creatively write a tragic loss, but here they would instead just have a brief moment were they’d tell you “So and So’s dog died,” in the hopes that makes you cry. It’s a weak attempt to play on the emotions of the audience instead of actually thinking up a great plot.

I expect Slice of Life type series to have some pretty pointless and inane stories, as they need to spice things up, instead of just having an entire series be about waking up, going to school and falling asleep, but Clannad’s take on this at times feels so much more boring and pointless than if they just followed those three steps for every episode. While the show always did keep the overall storyline of Okazaki trying to help Nagisa restart the drama club, as well as his new connection with her family as a replacement for his own, the episodes were far and away focused on the “side quest” stories instead of the real plot. There were the bones for a great show, but outside of maybe an OVA’s worth of episodes, everything else was mainly filler made of up of cliche stories, as opposed to something interesting and original.

Animation - 8/10

The series is animated and colored just beautifully, with no real noticeable areas of lazy drawing that seem so common in anime. They do a great job of creating the both the sunny and joyous real world, as well as the darker and gloomier side of the world inhabited by the imaginary girl. On top of that is the very nice job of having many different locations with amazing detail, when they probably could have got away with just reusing the same school background over and over.

Two areas I did have slight problems with were the character design and some character placement. Like many shows of this type they seemed to put some thought into the different male and adult characters, but every younger female is the exact same face with just different hair. They also had too many times where they would create a scene to be like that in a visual novel/ gal game, where you’d have a motionless character just in the middle of the screen with a voice talking over it, if you want to make an anime you need to animate the whole thing and not take this lazy route.

Sound - 7/10

They did a really good job of putting together a pretty sizable cast, all with V.O. artist that fit that character’s personality, with the only real exception being a throw away teacher who looked as if she was in her twenties, but sounded as if she was in her eighties.

The music throughout the show worked perfectly for the slow paced series, and while at times it could be a bit too relaxing, any dozing off could be blamed more on the missing story than the music. The opening theme isn’t bad, but it does get annoyingly screechy towards the end, but otherwise it works as a fitting theme to the show. The biggest stain in the audio comes from the closing “Big Dongo Family” song, as it was truly awful, even for a goofy anime theme.

Characters - 3/10

Most of the characters in the series are severely hindered by the show’s need to be more of a romance visual novel than an anime series.

Our lead, Okazaki, is talked about as if he’s the worst delinquent in anime history, but his actions instead show him to be one of the most selfless and caring. He treats every random person he meets with kindness and does so much to help them, but still he’s somehow the “bad boy.” The slight backstory he’s given fits more to the hoodlum personality pinned on him, but again it doesn’t really click with the actions he takes. He’s not a bad character by any means, he’s just one that has a severe disconnect with what is said about him versus how his character is actually written.

The female lead of the story is Nagisa, a young girl who had to repeat her final year of school due to a mystery illness, though how she even made it that far is surprising as she’s written as if she needs a map just to find the route off her bed in the morning. They try to write her as a sweet and endearing character who just needs a little help, but she comes across more as an overly emotional child who takes all her friends hard work for granted. After Okazaki notices her all alone outside school, he tries to help her make friends, which turns into the two of them trying to reform the drama club, despite her never being in, or even seeing, a play. While she is there next to Okazaki’s side for the duration of the series, and is his driving force, as a character she just didn’t bring much to the show.

The only female besides Nagisa who really has some decent plot behind her is Sakagami. She’s a transfer to the school who has the strength and skill to take on groups of male bullies all by herself. Despite her reputation for being a bruiser, she wants to be the student council president and joins in on Okazaki’s various deeds as a way to fix her reputation. Really the only strong female in the show, she would have been an entertaining character to follow, but instead most of her air time is just there for laughs when she beats up the clueless Sunohara.

The other females in the show, almost all of whom are there for the sole purpose of Okazaki helping, run the usual gamut of anime females. There’s the timid girl in love with our lead and the violent girl in love with our lead, both of which happen to be twin sisters. There’s the brilliant loner who is a mystery to many of her classmates….who at one point was also essentially in love with our lead. The only somewhat different character is the young girl who may appear like many from the anime world, but is also apparently a type of ghost, which basically throws the show in a pointless direction that makes no sense. Like Okazaki these females aren’t terrible, and they almost all are better than Nagisa, but the writers did little to make any of them more than someone for our hero to save.

Okazaki’s best friend, and fellow delinquent, is Sunohara, the character with the unenviable task of trying to make the stale and unfunny jokes entertaining, which he can’t. He’s often portrayed as either a lazy student who wants to always skip school or a pervert who has no idea how to actually approach a female. He’s someone the show could almost do without, if not for the fact you need a friend for our male star to talk out his problems to.

Nagisa’s parents are inserted as a slight form of humor, but instead just come off as unfunny and as imbecilic as their daughter. Her father, Akio, is an attempt at being the comical, overly emotional sorts, but instead he feels more like a letch who’s prone to violent outbursts and fits of brainlessness. Sanae is her mother, and while much more of a normal kind and caring parent, is supposed to entertain you with her random crying because she’s told her baking isn’t good, which leads more into the show’s continuous use of making all the females weak and worthless, all needing to be saved by their male counterpart.

Due to the nature of this series, and the need to stick so closely to the visual drama format, the characters never really get the build up they deserve, instead having most of the time spent on the tasks the characters need to perform instead of the characters themselves. Okazaki and some of the females, who aren’t just your cookie cutter damsels in distress, get a decent base but they never put the work in to actually make them full characters. On the other hand when they do try to build a fuller character, like Nagisa, they give a compelling backstory, but instead just turn her into the overgrown child whose look, but legal age, makes her just a little too convenient for the ever prominent creepy viewer contingent.  

Overall - 4/10

Maybe I was let down by my own expectations, as Clannad was always written and talked about as if it was a truly groundbreaking series with great characters and plot, as well as being a show that could really tug on your emotions, but sadly I think even if I had no previous knowledge of the show I still would have been let down.

Clannad encompasses the phrase “There just isn’t much there, there,” as essentially most episodes just acted as filler in the style of a “gal game” where Okazaki helped random students, with the outcome being so pointless that one of the longest running arcs involved a character who literally disappears and has no bearing what so ever on the show (which also became annoying as the show tries to be completely realistic, but then throws in a story that is complete science fiction for no real reason.)

While I’ve read the many reviews on the show, with positive feelings coming from both sexes, I just can’t tell who they were targeting with the series. The “gal game” and harem points would first have you believe it’s for males, but then there isn’t much else, be it story, character development, successful comedy, action or the typical ecchi that would support that route. If you think it’s for females you’d assume it was because of the love story aspect and the soap opera feel to the show, but then they’re also completely degrading their audience by having most of the females be helpless dunces who all are infatuated by our lead just because he’s nice to them. I guess there is that slice of romance fiction that is focused on just finding someone who loves you unconditionally, I just feel there are better ways of going about it, say like the show Our Love Story.

There are so many series that take the school drama route, or any drama route, and do it much better than Clannad, and one reason is that even if they stem from the visual novel world, they make the necessary changes to adapt it into a successful anime. Here they have the show literally be one guy trying to help an extremely childish girl reach a goal, while performing subtasks in order to get the items (classmates in our case) to help her succeed. In the end the show felt less like an anime and more like a visual novel where you didn’t need to press any buttons or make any choices.

I'm an average...ish 16 year old boy, so when I read the synopsis and looked at the tags, I was initially a little put off, kinda expecting it to be a "super girly pansy" type thing with lots of flowers and fluffy dogs.

How Wrong I Was!

I watched all of this, then the after story straight after! Although the intro episodes were a little slow, once it starts rolling you become hooked! It was absolutly EPIC. The storyline was so engrossing, the characters were amazing and with such character development, you come to love all of them, from the empathy for Tomoya, to the comical genius of Akio and the down-right awesomness of Tomoyo's fighting spirit.

With the most amazing parts including the un-avoidable attachment to one of the supporting females (be it Kyou, Tomoyo, Nagisa, Ryou or Kotomi) that every viewer ends up with, and the general INTENSITY of the ending, let's just say it WELL worth watching and if you don't cry like a little girl, your a robot ;3

 

Clannad is a story in which a guy (Tomoya Okazaki) is a lonely and depressed guy living with his dead-beat dad who has and is ruining his life at what seems every opportunity. Clannad takes off when our main character Tomoya meets what is the obvious girl he will end up with Nagisa. Nagisa is a cute dango loving girl that is having to retake her school year due to falling sick for a large portion of the last year.

The story in clannad is fairly weak throughout and is carried hard by some of the strongest characters you can find in anime. The biggest problem that seems to happen within this anime is that there is so many filler episodes and story lines throughout the 23 episodes and most of what actually is important to the story seems jammed in at the end although I do think this is more relevant in conjunction with after story.

There is a very common misconception with clannad being a very sad anime, however this on the most part isn’t true at all. The anime has so many happy moments and generally has a happier tune to it than sad. I think that another problem with clannad is that there are lots of sad moments throughout the anime a lot of it seems very forced and really brings the story down a bit. As well as this the tomoyo extra episode seemed more thoughtful, depressing and real than the whole season combined which doesn’t help the series at all.

The way the anime is truly remembered is through its array of fun characters. Each character is very unique in the anime and each one brings something different to it. Although there are a few characters with similar traits such as Nagisa and Ryou who are both very shy girls who both clearly like Okazaki. The characters are the ones who make you feel both the sadness and the happiness in the anime, it’s almost as you feel for them even though they aren’t real cos the emotions portrayed are so strong.

All in all clannad is a good anime but far from perfect. The story shows lots of promise throughout but is never executed quite well enough for clannad to be a top tier anime, however it does successfully bring tears to your eyes when it wants to and has brilliantly transferred characters from the visual novel to the anime. Clannad is a beautiful and cute anime with always the best intentions at heart.

Amazing. This anime is one of the best I've ever seen. The storyline for this show is amazing. Even though at first glance it appeared somewhat childish, it isn't. It touches on real-life situations both good and bad. It's so easy to get emotionally invested in this show. It's not an easily predictable anime. Meaning even though the result of some situations is predictable, the story to get to that result is not as easy to predict, making it very interesting. The characters are interesting, I am glad they spent enough time showing the characters backgrounds and developing them throughout the show. This is the first anime I have ever watched that was able to play with my emotions, for that, this anime is truly a good watch, no matter who you are. Even if you don't enjoy animes with no actions, this anime will still be good to watch with just how real it can feel.