Full Moon wo Sagashite

This anime is sad when you think about the characters situation. Everything is good then it suddenly changes because of the situation the character is in. It got me thinking what would i do in a situation like this. It is one that makes you want to reach for your dreams as well. In the end the result is unsuspected and yet very pleasing at the same time. It is everything you could hope for in a good anime. I strongly recommend this anime. p.s i watched every episode.

Absolutly stunning this has a strong plot which is twisted to make you cry. The characters are very well developed and you grow to love them in a unique way. Takuto a personal favourite The plot is about a young girl who discovers from shimgami that she is going to die in a year from her throat cancer. This spurs her on to sing and try and reach her lost childhood love. It progresses with her becoming famous as fullmoon and searching for him along the way. But i wont spoil it to much. Beautful song choices from a real life band. And the series is funny and sad. this one mad me cry which is saying alot for it moved me.

How do I even start this? Searching for the Full Moon is my favorite anime of all time. First, the premise is super interesting; you would think that telling the audience that the main character is going to die in one year would make us care less about her. But the way the story is structured does the opposite; every decision she makes adds weight. You can feel the tension in every mistake she makes. The balance between chasing her dreams, trying to find her past lover, and spending time with her family is so wonderfully done because she doesn't have the time to do all of these. So she has to pick and choose what is most important to her. This show will likely make you cry, more than once. The premise is emotional and heavy, yet Mitsuki's charming personality balances it out really well. The pacing can be slow at first, but it makes the story feel more real. Each episode is like a week in her life; every week isn't going to be exciting, so by adding these 'slice of life' moments at the beginning, we can develop a deeper connection with Mitsuki. Takuto and Meroko play off of each other extremely well, and it's fun to see the dynamic they have with Mitsuki as the show goes on. Overall, I really recommend you give this anime a try if you like shojo or shows that give you a new outlook on life.

One of the first anime I encountered that actually left a great impression on me. I essentially watched this series in Korean back when it was popular, then got back to it later down the road. Generally thought the anime was good--original songs (unfortunately not sung by the CV herself) that's worth listening to even now and it also helps that there are Openings and such sung in Korean so definitely check that out I'd say. I suppose the issue I have with this series was that it relied too much on fantasy to create drama to the point the conflict that characters would go through seemed artificia and unrelatable. I suppose even if I turned a blind eye to this, the series also ended on some very convenient notes with a literal deus ex machina, so that's up for critique in my opinion.

This anime will surely make you smile and cry! It's very touching, and I, as a very tough person who isn't mushy & emotional (I'm called the Tough Cookie), I literally cried here. For me this is the BEST anime I've ever watched! MUCH BETTER COMPARED TO THE NOW-FAMOUS ACTION/ADVENTURE ANIMES!

I have a sentimental relationship with Full Moon o Sagashite. I bought all the manga volumes as they were coming out and enjoyed the series immensely. I still own those manga volumes to this day and have no intention of getting rid of them. However, my attempts to watch the anime didn't pan out. I only made it to episode 10 before stopping due to other obligations like school. It wasn't until this year that I finally managed to complete the anime, and only because AnimEigo licensed it for a complete blu-ray release for the first time ever. Viz Media once attempted to release the series on DVD, complete with an English dub, but low sales made them stop halfway through, and many thought the second half of the series just never got dubbed, or if it did, it'd be lost forever. Imagine peoples' surprise when it was revealed that not only was the full series actually completely dubbed, but the second half of said dub would be on the new blu-ray! With the fact that the anime is now back in the limelight thanks to this news, I figured it was high time I got off my ass and finally watched the entire series. Though having knowledge of the manga, I do feel the anime doesn't really measure up. The core premise is the same as the manga: 12-year-old Mitsuki Koyama has lived a hard life. Her parents died when she was little, and she spent most of her life in an orphanage. Two years ago, her friend and childhood crush, Eichi Sakurai, got adopted and is living in America now. Mitsuki dreams of becoming a singer, if only so she can reunite with Eichi. Unfortunately for her, she has a cancerous tumor in her throat called a sarcoma, which makes it hard for her to both sing and talk loudly, and the only way for it to be removed is through surgery, and even then, the procedure could make her lose her voice. One day, she's visited by two death spirits, Takuto and Meroko, who are surprised she can see them. Mitsuki is informed that she has one year left to live. Mitsuki decides to goad them into helping her fulfill her dream of becoming a singer. In exchange for Mitsuki accepting her fate when her time is up, the two shinigami give her the power to turn into a 16-year-old version of herself that has no throat tumor. Against all odds, Mitsuki—under the alias Full Moon—manages to pass the audition she desperately wished to attend, setting her on the road to achieving her dream. Now she has to work hard to manage her newfound double-life while keeping it a secret from the discerning eyes of her strict grandmother, and dealing with the lingering presence of other shinigami whose intentions aren't good. Before I get too deep into dissecting the anime, I'm going to give a huge warning: If you're going into this thinking it's a faithful adaptation of the manga, you'd best throw those expectations out the window, because not only is the anime completely different from the manga in terms of its tone, it diverges so much from the manga's plot that it goes completely in its own direction. Granted, this is mainly because the anime was produced as the manga was still running. Hell, the anime only got made right as the manga reached its fifth chapter, so it had to make up a lot of stuff on the fly to not only fill up a 52-episode run time, or in the case of events that had happened in the manga during its run time, incorporate them into the anime in a way that fit the events of the anime. Because of this, a lot of stuff such as Meroko and Izumi's backstories are completely absent, some characters have different characterization or backstories than they did in the manga, and even whole arcs from the manga never got adapted. Not to mention the anime's tone is much more comedic, kid-friendly, and light-hearted compared to the manga's more darker approach and Don Bluth-like sensibilities. All of this will definitely affect whether or not you'll be able to enjoy the anime. One example of a change the anime made that completely changes the status quo: In the manga, Oshige and Dr. Wakaoji don't learn about the Shinigami until near the very end of the manga. The anime makes it so that they learn about Takuto and Meroko, along with Mitsuki's secret identity Full Moon, in episode 19, and they get more involved in keeping Mitsuki's secret from her family. Hell, Mitsuki goes to school and has friends in the anime, whereas in the manga her illness makes it so that she's unable to go to school at all. Not only that, the series even goes as far as to change the character designs to some extent. Meroko's black outfit is made red in the anime (Albeit with Tanemura-sensei's permission), and several characters' hair and eye colors are different than in the manga. If you're a manga purist who dislikes any kind of changes made in an adaptation, you're going to want to skip this. That said, is the Full Moon anime any good even with all these changes? Eh...it's fine. The animation by itself is your standard early 2000s digipaint fare, there's not much in the way of actual motion as was the style at the time, and Studio DEEN has always had a reputation for their work not being the best even on their best days. Plus, you know there's no way they'd be able to really depict Tanemura's highly detailed art into motion, but the effort they did put in is commendable regardless. The soundtrack is pretty good, and all the songs are decent, considering the series revolves around music, but it does have the problem of overusing certain songs way too much to the point that it gets extremely repetitive, diluting their impact during the more emotional moments. Speaking of the audio, I found a good portion of the voice acting to be pretty hit or miss. Several VAs sound like they can't act their way out of a paper bag, or use a voice that doesn't quite match the character's age. For example, Myco, Mitsuki's actress, can't sound like a 12-year-old girl to save her life. You can easily tell it's an adult woman voicing a kid, and she makes no effort to sound anything remotely close to child-like. I know they wanted to have an established singer to voice Mitsuki, since the whole series is about her being a singer and all, but not all singers can be good actors, as acting involves a whole other set of skills separate from just singing, though singing can help with things like controling one's pitch and projecting one's voice. Like I mentioned earlier, because the anime went in its own direction and couldn't adapt the manga faithfully during its run, the characters wound up suffering quite a bit in the adaptation process. Now, this isn't to completely diss the creative staff and their attempts to at least work with what they had, as they had no way of knowing how the manga would turn out in its later chapters, and even if they did, the divergences made in the anime would have made it impossible for them to course-correct. However, the lack of foresight on the staff's part does result in the characters lacking the depth and dimensionality they had in the manga, with Izumi being the biggest victim of this. The anime makes Izumi into the primary antagonist in the second half, whereas in the manga, he initially starts off antagonistic but becomes allies with Takuto and Meroko. This isn't to say the characters by themselves are bad, and again, the producers had no way of knowing about or being able to really adapt their backstories and depth into the anime without retconning everything they had established, but with the characters' rough edges being sanded off, they come off much more cliche and archetypal here than they were in the manga. There are also instances where, in order to fill up an episode's run time, they had to come up with rather cliche plots just to give the characters something to do, and sometimes this resulted in characters behaving out-of-character. Seriously, did we really need a whole episode about Tanaka and Oshige in a stupid competition over who can be the best housewife, and making Tanaka seem needlessly me…

Hands down, Full Moon wo Sagashite might be one of the best Shoujo anime I might have seen out there. Maybe even could go as far as nominating it one of the better titles I have ever seen in the whole of the anime medium. Because seriously, if I had to point at a flaw this series have it would be no doubt how its first episodes feel kinda "rushed" and "badly done" for how a generally complex and emotionally charged story such as this one is (not to say they are necessarly bad, just "less enjoyable", let's say, to overall how good the later half of the series's episodes feel), other than that, its pretty much flawless on whatever it proposes to do. Its history? Heavy and emotional, sprinked here and there with some moments of hapiness. I have heard people complaining about this anime having "too many unnecessary episodes" and suggesting "cutting some of them down the make the more thing more compact and thus, interesting" but I disagree with them on a fundamental level; while some surely don't have the patience to go throught the 52 episodes of Full Moon and would prefer a faster pace overall, I myself am very fond of the slower approach it goes for as a way to soothe us, the audience, of the more emotionally charged content with some "lighter" episodes in between that serve primordially to elaborate on the characters of Mitsuki, Yui and Takuto aswell of the occurences of their daily lives. Not to mention that it aligns more than anything with how these kind of things in real life work: there are some days where so many things happen one ends completely exhausted by the end of them, and many, many more days in between where nothing really happens and one is able to ooze off. Just like Full Moon wo Sagashite with its episodes! Not really related to the plot of its history, however, but I would like to mention the producers of this anime planned beforehand to spread the duration of its series across an entire year to simulate Mitsuki's last year in the world of the living sort of in real time, which means the happenings of whatever episode of Full Moon was airing originally at the time were occuring cannonically at the same time in her own "universe". How cool is that? Again, not really relevant or even related to the plot of Full Moon whatsoever, but I believe its a nice detail on the side of the show's producers and tought about mentioning it as a way to demostrate why it deserves such a high score as it does. Its character development? Near perfect; Full Moon wo Sagashite is truly one of those animes who doesn't have an uninteresting charcter. Every cast member who gets introduced at some point of the anime feels organic and natural; just like one would expect from a real-life person. They are multi-dimensional characters with overlapping layers of complexity manifested in the form of their own (generally tragic) backstory that caused them to form a certain series of values and beliefs more often than not based on their insecurities and negative experiences who lead them to act in certain maners provided the different circumstances they find themselves througt the anime. That's precisely why it is such a pleasure watching them interact, evolve and mature as the story goes by: their chemistry is so intrincate and so well done you can do nothing but delight at the "realistic" portrayal of human relationships as well as everyone in the Full Moon team growing increasingly close together and forming such a strong bond not even time would be able to deal with it. Even characters who initially seemed poised to be nothing but a way to thwart Mitsuki's journey into stardom, such as her grandmother, for example (and who I will admit, caused me nothing but frustration when dealed with during screentime), became fully fledged at some point of the journey and even turned to be sympathetic once their circustances where explained (which again, proved me wrong when judging a character beforehand). Situations like this are the mark of a very good anime series with a strong and believable writing, and do nothing but reinforce the fact Full Moon wo Sagashite is one of those. Aesthetically, it is very pretty. All of its character's designs are very cute and nice to look at and its backrounds, altough nothing special or worthy to writte home about (as is to be expected from these types of animes from the early 2000s) are nice enough for me to not write a complaining about them. Its music, the very thing this show is about is also very sweet and nice to hear. You see; I am not really a fan of "contemporary" music (as "contemporary" as the music of this show could be considered, 20 years later...), but the tracks of Full Moon wo Sagashite proved to be an exemption; the real-life bands who provided the themes for this show really knew what they were doign. They are all very nicely-made slow pop ballads who manage to mix their sad and melancholic melodies with more modern electronic sounds that really add to the overall athmosphere of the series and define Full Moon's character as she sort of tells about her own story and the feelings surrounding it as she sings. A genre of sentimental music who, for whatever reason, is not really produced anymore; a fundamental part of the show's identity that adds to its magic overall. I would also like to praise the voice acting from everyone involved on this anime: Myco, the singer in charge of voicing Mitsuki knew nothing about voice acting before taking this role and yet gave everything when making the character memorable sound like a real person through pretty much beginning to end of Full Moon. Not only does she really have a nice voice, but indeed, she sounds like she's genuinly happy whenever she meets Ooshige-san or Wakaouji-sensei or sad and shocked whenever something bad happens to her. Altough those praices could also go to pretty much everyone on the series aswell, if we are beign honest. Everyone took their role seriusly and made this anime one of the more convincing when it comes to voice acting for all what matters. Props to them for that. Overall, Full Moon wo Sagashite can only be descrived as a magic experience: it is cute, it is sad, it is emotionally heavy and it is complex on its plot, it is one of those experiences you have to witness yourself to truly take it all in. It might not be for everyone, that's true, but for viewers with tastes like me it could possible the best type of anime it could be produced for. Mitsuki is a genuinly sweet and innocent character it is easy to fall in love with and you genuinly get to care about her and her quest for stardom and get to fell her pain whenever something bad ends-up happening to her (situations who, sadly, are far too frequent on this series). It has its own unique atmosphere modern series can't really replicate with only adds to the charming nature Full Moon already had beforehand, enticing it. I hope one day my children will be able to see Full Moon or at least a similar anime, because I would love to experience something like this as a kid, and chances are, you will be able to enjoy it also at whatever state of life you find yourself in, dear reader. Give it a chance :)