By some curious alchemy of gentle emotions and effortless storytelling, Blue Box has become the kind of anime that makes you nostalgic for a high school experience you probably never had. It’s a sports anime without the overwhelming bravado, a romance anime without the melodramatic excess. But at its core, it contains something truly rare: a love triangle where everyone is so thoughtful, so painfully considerate, that you almost wish they could all just be happy together. Almost.

A popular adage in the otaku community is that love triangles tend to be more like emotional hostage situations. One party is usually scheming, another is painfully oblivious, and the third — almost always the “loser” — is the emotional punching bag that the story flings into heartbreak for the sake of tension. Blue Box, however, takes this familiar structure and thoughtfuly reshapes it into something more bittersweet, more lived-in, and perhaps more mature than the genre typically allows.

Director: Yūichirō Yano

Cast: Reina Ueda, Akari Kitō, Shōya Chiba, Chiaki Kobayashi, Yuma Uchida