Silvenxenia -

Breath taking animation, decent story, cliché ending. Not everything that glitters is gold, and this animated movie is a great example. If you see beyond the beautiful animation, the story develops beautifully too. And then it stops. Quite abruptly, akin to how some people choose to ‘get up in the morning and leave without a word after a mind-blowing night’. The anime has a very typical, predictable ending that can be assumed to be ‘open to interpretation’. That being said, I’m pretty sure that if the gender roles were reversed and if it were an older male teacher, the ending would have been written differently to show them getting together (like Fruits Basket or Ancient Magus Bride or Inuyasha’s SesshoumaruxRin- anime where the male character is a good few decades older, yet stay with the mostly underage teenage girls). Instead, this ending seems to have been caused mostly due to the fact that the lady feels ashamed and wrong for being older. Why? When will we stop judging and shaming people for their gender/age? Now, I do think 15years is too young for the kid- the author could have shown him as at least someone of legal age, not a minor nonetheless. Regrettably, Japanese animated shows seem to have a very, very long way to go to break out of gender stereotyping and societal norms.