Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You.

The Quarantine of the Heart

It still feels a little early to turn the summer of 2020 into something wistful. We are not that far removed from lockdowns, canceled graduations, and the dead air of those first COVID-19 months. And yet Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You goes straight at that idea. By dropping a familiar shoujo reverse-harem setup into the suffocating uncertainty of July 2020, director Junichi Yamamoto finds something gentler and more affecting than I expected. I did not think an anime about four absurdly handsome childhood friends circling one girl’s love life would end up feeling like a genuine time capsule. But sometimes pastel packaging hides a sharper cultural memory.



The framing device is a little awkward. We first meet Mizuho Nishino as an exhausted adult manga editor, looking back on the supposedly "sparkling" days of her youth. I’m not convinced that part works. Ben Morris at The Contending was right to say the setup leaves viewers "uncertain where it was going," and the repeated cuts back to her drained present-day life can flatten the tension at the wrong moments. But when the series stays in the past, it finally breathes. The visuals slip into a faded, humid palette. The world narrows to a suburban neighborhood. Adolescence already feels claustrophobic, and here that pressure gets intensified by the simple fact that nobody can really go anywhere.