Clannad

Tomoya Okazaki is a delinquent who finds life dull and believes he'll never amount to anything. Along with his friend Youhei Sunohara, he skips school and plans to waste his high school days away.

One day while walking to school, Tomoya passes a young girl muttering quietly to herself. Without warning she exclaims "Anpan!" (a popular Japanese food) which catches Tomoya's attention. He soon discovers the girl's name is Nagisa Furukawa and that she exclaims things she likes in order to motivate herself. Nagisa claims they are now friends, but Tomoya walks away passing the encounter off as nothing.

However, Tomoya finds he is noticing Nagisa more and more around school. Eventually he concedes and befriends her. Tomoya learns Nagisa has been held back a year due to a severe illness and that her dream is to revive the school's drama club. Claiming he has nothing better to do, he decides to help her achieve this goal along with the help of four other girls.

As Tomoya spends more time with the girls, he learns more about them and their problems. As he attempts to help each girl overcome her respective obstacle, he begins to realize life isn't as dull as he once thought.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Okazaki, Tomoya Main

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Furukawa, Nagisa Main

Nakahara, Mai Japanese

Sakagami, Tomoyo Main

Kuwashima, Houko Japanese

Fujibayashi, Kyou Main

Hirohashi, Ryou Japanese

Ibuki, Fuuko Main

Nonaka, Ai Japanese

Ichinose, Kotomi Main

Noto, Mamiko Japanese

Sunohara, Youhei Main

Sakaguchi, Daisuke Japanese

Fujibayashi, Ryou Main

Kanda, Akemi Japanese

Furukawa, Akio Supporting

Okiayu, Ryoutarou Japanese

Furukawa, Sanae Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Hatta, Youko Producer

Nakamura, Shinichi Producer

Tafu, Naohiro Producer

Ishihara, Tatsuya Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

May 28, 2024

meowha

Recommended

Clannad’s from my childhood, but I haven’t rewatched the original series until now; I usually tend to go for a few episodes of After Story here and there instead. However the original sets up the characters and tone of the show extremely well and is a pleasant, casual watch with touching moments. Sometimes these moments can feel a little clumsy and overdone; the humor can also hit or miss. But overall it’s a classic; Sometimes you’ll be overemotional or make jokes that don’t land. The negative aspects I just explained make the anime feel truer to life and connect to its themes perfectly. KyoAni did ... an excellent job capturing the intended emotions and feel in this production.

+ Beautiful and cozy atmosphere, setting, and animation.
+ Character designs and the summer uniforms are very charming and cute. Also love the girl’s casual outfits.

+ Iconic soundtrack with tons of variation.

+ Best girl Tomoyo, love her as a character and her relationship with Tomoya.

+ Nagisa has also grown on me a lot outside of her relationship with Tomoya.

+ Feel like you’re living a realistic portrayal of high school life and growth through the characters.

+ The High School crush drama in particular was handled in a very adolescent and human way.


Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Nov 7, 2022

Myrmiderp

Mixed Feelings

Funny

Spoiler-free should-you-watch review of Clannad + After Story:

I seriously don't even know where to start with this review, I've started it five different ways at five different points from five different perspectives. My feelings about Clannad are a complete mess, much like Clannad itself; there are parts of this show that I simultaneously treasure and despise. I don't know if I can recommend Clannad, because it gets so close to reaching greatness that it only hurts that much more when it squanders everything it builds. For your entertainment, the tragedy of Clannad in five simple truths:

First simple truth: Clannad's first season is quite bad. The ... show has no idea the story it wants to tell, and so it feels like they grabbed a handful of random Visual Novel routes and slapped them together. Consider, for a moment, the genre tags on MAL: "Drama", "Romance", "Supernatural". It will come as a shock to you, then, that Clannad is godawful at evoking those genres, but pretty decent at Comedy. It has no problem slam dunking Drama and Romance into the dumpster to make a stupid joke 50 times an episode. Even when Clannad is trying to be serious, it doesn’t give you enough time or reason to care about any of its characters. Another genre tag that Clannad is missing is "harem", because its first season follows the tropes pretty well; a mostly uninteresting guy is suddenly surrounded by lots of cute girls (each a different dating sim archetype) that for some reason are interested in him. And where some anime might let a compelling setting pick up some slack, the super-natural element is closer to super-fluous; it's not really used or needed in the story and feels totally out of place. The cast of Clannad is full of Manic Pixie Dream People who do quirky nonsense for no reason, and the plot of Clannad is full of random disconnected traumas to trick you into thinking it's well-written. This means that it needs to use cheap tricks and emotional manipulation to get you to feel feelings, and it rarely works. Characters suddenly reveal *trauma* to surprise you into caring. "Oh no! Anyway…"

Second simple truth: Clannad has a weird presentation. I wasn't sure about giving this its own section, but in hindsight it's probably the elephant in the room. Homo Sapiens display some fairly strong sexual dimorphism: body fat and muscle distributions, genitalia, height, etc. In Clannad, however, men are mostly regular anime guys, and women are sad baby aliens. I understand they wanted to maintain a consistent art style with the visual novel, but it's still uncomfortable. It only really works when they're drawing (you guessed it) sad babies and young children, and that would be fine if Clannad were more about babies, but unfortunately it's mostly about teenagers and above. It goes beyond the art, though. The soundtrack feels like it's ripped straight from an old visual novel, which only really works for the more ominous and atmospheric pieces. The dub isn't horrible but it's not spectacular, which is sad because I really like some of the voice actors. I get the feeling that Seraphim Digital generally has a hard time directing and editing dialogue to sound natural.

Third simple truth: Clannad botches its references to queer identities. This is kind of standard fare for older anime, but it'd be wrong not to talk about it a little. Also, I consider this paragraph more of a trigger warning than a spoiler, but it's on the fence, so be warned. Being gay in Clannad is a punchline, not a real thing that could ever actually happen. To Nigisa's credit, she is quite openminded about homosexuality at one point, but the show itself really isn't. If someone is suggesting two characters are gay, it's supposed to be 1) funny, 2) hot because they're lesbians, or 3) both. Worse, though, is the main character's best friend: he's a perverted douchebag in general, but this dude spends way too long trying to out a girl at their school as trans. Granted, yes, he's supposed to be an idiot, it's a joke, har har. However. The main character pretty much enables him the whole time, and eventually his actions bear fruit because she realizes she's not as feminine as she wishes she was. It's this weird disempowering arc that just doesn't need to happen.

Fourth simple truth: After Story has some really great parts. It's very hard to explain this well without getting into spoiler territory, but I'll do what I can. After Story starts with a similar feel to the first season, but very quickly develops into a show that's capable of taking itself more seriously. The little floating stories, despite sometimes being unrelated to the main plot, are better put together, and the main story itself is much more focused and poignant than in the first season. Although it drags sometimes, After Story actually gives you developed characters and moves the story in a really compelling direction. The supernatural elements seem like they're actually going to lead somewhere meaningful. One half of the romance is much better developed than the other, but it's still nice. There are heartwarmingly sweet and cripplingly sad moments, but the saddest moment of all is when Clannad betrays those previous touching moments for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.

Fifth and final simple truth: Clannad loves to shoot itself in the foot. Clannad's tragedy is not in plot, but in construction; it squanders the little good it can dredge up, and makes you feel like an idiot for thinking it was going somewhere. And, to clarify, a story isn't bad simply because it doesn't go where I hope it's going to go, I know this. I will do my best to explain how it fails without spoiling the details. If vague, I at least hope the following sections will be interesting.

In the first season, the problem was that Clannad wanted to spend all its time making jokes and messing with narrative novelties, rather than developing a compelling drama. When supernatural elements show up, Clannad makes sure they they feel pointless and distracting, particularly after the fact. When something compelling finally happens, it makes sure to add in some confusing detail that ruins what made it compelling in the first place. In After Story, Clannad takes some time to get rolling, but eventually it starts using those little details to make you feel like maybe there was a coherent story here all along. It zooms in to show you tender moments and complicated motivations. And then it has one idea too many. A brand new idea, definitely not a lesson we should have learned during the first season, no no no: add in a detail that ruins what made it compelling in the first place.

If Clannad: After Story was tying your shoes, it got through one half of the bow, then stopped and told you your shoe was tied. No tucking the second loop, no pulling the knot tight, nothing. You take a few steps and it just falls apart. But boy, wasn't it great when it was still tying your shoes? Back when you thought your shoes would be tied once it was done? It even gave you hope; you realized that maybe After Story would be able to use some of the tangles Clannad Season 1 left in your laces to form a pretty knot. You thought "boy, After Story sure seems to be much better at tying my shoes than season 1". Those were the days. Clannad then hands you a third shoe that's already tied. "But Clannad, I wanted you to tie MY shoe. The shoe on my foot! What am I supposed to do with this?" Clannad smiles, thinking it did a good job, and floats off into the sky. It's not deus ex machina, it's something even less satisfying, and more than disappointing it's just really lazy.


Closing Thoughts:

There's something beautiful here that I can't quite put my finger on, something that transcends the show: the real-life failure of Clannad to live up to its own story makes me think of the in-story meaning I had started to derive while watching. That meaning isn't gone just because Clannad dropped the ball, but it's weak, and and I feel kind of stupid for caring about it now. Moreover it's heartbreaking, because I *really* liked that short period of time when I thought Clannad had its story worked out. This is my second time trying to watch Clannad--I quit on episode five last time because I couldn't stand it. Prior to this viewing, I was prepared for disappointment, and I'll happily admit that for a beautiful few episodes there in After Story I was blown away, ready to take it all back. If anyone is shocked at my frustration, it's me.

How would I change Clannad? Remove most of the first season, the beginning and end of After Story, and trim the fat from what's left; tell a story, don't waste the audience's time. The comedy is fine, but dial it back and know when it hurts the story. Give Nagisa better character development, and make the main romance a little more convincing. Either remove the supernatural element entirely, or give it enough definition and restraint that it doesn't feel cheap to use; it does have setup, but it's so loose that it clashes with the realism of the rest of the show. Either way, make better use of the slice of life setup to carve out a story. In particular, I'm thinking replace the very end of After Story with a longer arc. The original ended right after it stumbled upon something really great, and I want the show to live in that moment a little longer.

So here's my final recommendation: the ideal audience for Clannad is particularly susceptible to poorly supported emotional digs. If that doesn't describe you, you may still like Clannad if you don't plan to think very much about the story. Clannad is not deep, and it's not that confusing, it's mostly just disappointing. It's also funny, and once you're familiar with all the characters, the alternate timeline OVAs are nice. This next part will sound like blasphemy, but no, I'm not joking. If you're set on watching Clannad, watch the first season at 2x speed in whatever language helps you keep up. The first season does not respect your time enough to deserve normal viewing speed, and to be perfectly honest, the jokes are improved at 2x because they're almost totally reliant on surprise and bafflement. Then, watch After Story at normal speed.

That's it. Have fun, or steer clear. You do you.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Apr 7, 2023

lastnameEver

Not Recommended

Funny

Clannad is a visual novel created by Jun Maeda and adapted by the only anime studio in Japan to respect the human right to a salary for a day’s work. Clannad is astonishingly trite. It would take an unbelievable amount of naivety to take on its clearly manipulative storytelling tactics in good faith and glean any sense of enjoyment out of it. It’s considered a classic by people who have no idea what they’re on about. They must’ve been off a perc, off a xan, too much henny, baby-battered out of their mind to consider Clannad a classic. Clannad is not a classic. A classic ... implies it has stood the test of time. Clannad can’t stand any test. It is chronically paraplegic. The story is paced so slowly that it feels as if centuries pass before an episode finishes. You can marry, have kids, buy a rabbit, buy a dog, watch the dog eat the rabbit, watch every season of Friends on Netflix twice, adopt a cat, sell its kittens online, shoot the dog, sell your kidney to a Nigerian politician for his daughter, brush your daughter’s teeth, become the head executive of five oil companies, lose it all, write detective fiction, understand an anime directed by Ikuhara, decipher the entirety of Ulysses, grow old, and die, and the same episode will still be playing. That’s what it feels like watching Clannad. That is exactly how it feels watching Clannad. The minutes stretch on like hours. Each frame of animation lasts a lifetime. Any enjoyment cultivated will wither up and die before the narrative reaches any sort of conclusion. You will wither up and die watching Clannad.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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