Love and Lies: First Impressions

Love and Lies(Koi to Uso) was one of the series I was looking forward to for the Summer Anime 2017 Season. No, I wasn’t enticed by the summary or key art but a memory. I read a huge chunk of this manga a year ago and was left was unsurity. I didn’t know if it was good but I didn’t want to give up on this series. I believed it needed to be presented to me differently. Thankfully we now have the anime. Everyone loves to compare and contrast these stories but sometimes there’s an absolute winner. I believe this will prove true with this anime adaption.

This series has an interesting twist to the usually Slice of Life drama scene. In the near future, Japan must take extreme measures to save their ever decreasing population. To solve this issue, the Japanese government decided to arrange marriage teens when they turn sixteen years old. As much as this is nothing new in some cultures, but this is done with compatibility and whatever research they did to figure out how to create smarter children. It’s weird. Doesn’t really make sense and there’s a lot of holes in the plot but I’ll leave it alone since we’re only looking at this series for a first impression. Within this mess of a society, Yukari Nejima finally decides to confess to a classmate he has been in love with for five years. To Nejima’s surprise, she has also been in love with him… I know what you’re thinking, this can’t be good this is only the first episode. You’re right! Today happens to be Nejima’s sixteenth birthday and now he has to get married. FUN!

As I mentioned before, I did read this manga a year ago so I was wondering how long I’d really stick around. The manga had some of the weirdest pacings I’ve seen in some time. I won’t say it was bad. The mangaka knew how to keep me around… I think. It just felt like they had all these great ideas with no plan how to transition between them properly. The anime seems to be fixing said issues. Maybe weekly chapters of manga just don’t fit this story well enough. It’s hard to really tell but I am hoping it’s director, Seiki Takuno can continuously bring structure to this unstructured manga.

I want to love this anime. I do. I really do but it just can’t help being flat at times. I feel that the animation studio wants to try things to make it better but seems to fall short on execution. Small uses of CGI that become extremely apparent turned me off completely. Some may be wondering, if this is so bad then why are we even watching. Well let me tell you, it’s the small things that are keeping me here. For some reason, I’m still trying to figure out, these emotional scenes get to me. They remind me on my young love scenarios. They just don’t seem as forced as some other slice of life anime. When I say emotionally I mean those moments where these characters meet on a deeper level. These scenes feel genuine and even awkward. As they should be in their teen years.

With this series’ flaws, it did pass my three episode test. I hope that this series can continue to maintain this pacing and present this story the way it was meant to be told. It has many great things going for it. As much as I do like the catchy opening I didn’t talk about it because I really want to talk in great detail about it. This would probably fit better in my full review… If I’m still watching. Love and Lies is currently streaming on Amazon Prime’s Anime Strike.

What did you think about this series? Team Misaki? Team Lilina? Let me know what you think down below! Also, leave a like if you enjoyed the read!