Another storm of emotions in this episode. Ano Hana is doing a great job at keeping things interesting and turbulent. This episode had (at least) five touching moments. It started with Menma’s mother’s break down. Then Anaru made a teary confession, both of how she likes Jinta and how she feels guilty to have been glad Jinta said he didn’t like Menma. Jinta shares a touching moment with Menma’s brother talking about their parents, and then has a moment with his own father. Finally, Matsuyuki nearly strangles Jinta to death for claiming to see Menma (with the tacit support of everyone but Poppo). In the end, Menma reveals herself to everyone by writing a message in her diary.

I really love when a show can tie together a lot of different threads and characters, building them in parallel. It’s probably because I have a short attention span it really gets at the interactions between the characters. Hourou Musuko also did a great job at this. I greatly prefer this kind of interleaved format to more episodic formats.

One question though: if Menma can actually call people, write in her diary, cook food, and isn’t a figment of Jinta’s imagination, why didn’t she just do these things earlier? It would have saved them both a lot of misunderstandings. It’s not really important though, and it probably did make the show more interesting by adding some extra questions to answer and allowing some suspicion and distrust between the characters.