1. Your Lie in April (Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso)

Director: Kyohei Ishiguro

Writer: Takao Yoshioka (screenplay), Naoshi Arakawa (manga)

Animation Studio: A-1 Pictures

Genre: Romance, Drama, Music

Runtime: Approx. 22 minutes per episode

Number of Episodes: 22

Streaming Platform: Crunchyroll, Netflix, Hulu

Synopsis: A talented young pianist, Kosei Arima, loses his ability to hear the piano after his mother’s death. His world changes when he meets the spirited violinist Kaori Miyazono, who teaches him to embrace music and life again.

2. Fruits Basket (2019 Reboot)

Director: Yoshihide Ibata

Writer: Taku Kishimoto (screenplay), Natsuki Takaya (manga)

Animation Studio: TMS Entertainment

Genre: Romance, Fantasy, Slice of Life

Runtime: Approx. 23 minutes per episode

Number of Episodes: 63 (3 seasons)

Streaming Platform: Crunchyroll, Funimation, Hulu

Synopsis: Orphaned Tohru Honda moves in with the mysterious Soma family, who harbor a magical curse: members transform into animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Amid unraveling secrets, she finds love and healing.

3. Toradora!

Director: Tatsuyuki Nagai

Writer: Mari Okada (screenplay), Yuyuko Takemiya (light novel)

Animation Studio: J.C. Staff

Genre: Romantic Comedy, Slice of Life

Runtime: Approx. 25 minutes per episode

Number of Episodes: 25

Streaming Platform: Crunchyroll, Netflix, HIDIVE

Synopsis: Ryuuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka strike an unlikely alliance to help each other win over their crushes, only to discover their feelings for each other along the way.

4. Violet Evergarden

Director: Taichi Ishidate

Writer: Reiko Yoshida (screenplay), Kana Akatsuki (light novel)

Animation Studio: Kyoto Animation

Genre: Drama, Romance, Slice of Life

Runtime: Approx. 25 minutes per episode

Number of Episodes: 13 + Special + Movies

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Synopsis: Violet, a former child soldier, seeks purpose as a ghostwriter and learns about love and human emotion through her clients’ stories.

5. Snow White with the Red Hair (Akagami no Shirayuki-hime)

Director: Masahiro Ando

Writer: Deko Akao (screenplay), Sorata Akizuki (manga)

Animation Studio: Bones

Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Drama

Runtime: Approx. 24 minutes per episode

Number of Episodes: 24 (2 seasons)

Streaming Platform: Crunchyroll, Funimation

Synopsis: Shirayuki, a herbalist with red hair, flees her kingdom after catching the attention of a lecherous prince. She finds a new home and love with Prince Zen of the neighboring kingdom.

The film is half a recollection of displaced Vietnamese kids who fled to America after the Vietnam War creating a community of their own around the super-popular New Wave music movement, and half a biographical journey of filmmaker Elizabeth Ai’s dive into her unexamined past and personal traumas. 

We all know the Vietnam War had a ton of repercussions, both in Vietnam and here in America, affecting soldiers and civilians alike for generations to come. What isn’t often discussed, much less even acknowledged likely due to vast amounts of shame, is the displaced Vietnamese children who, with their parents or not, escaped to America to flee the war. These children tried extremely hard to find some sort of place they belonged here in the good old US of A, and while their parents were carving out places for themselves by basically working themselves to death, the children had to build their own place to belong. This is where the New Wave music craze began, and these are their stories. 

There was no market for Asian singers in general, much less focused on Vietnamese performers, and so born-to-sing kids like the infamous Lynda Trang Dai took destiny into their own hands and began to cover the 80’s mega-hits from superstars like Madonna. The Vietnamese-language variety show Paris By Night began to showcase Lynda and others performing cover songs of the most popular hits too, and suddenly Lynda Trang Dai was at least a Vietnamese household name. 

DJ Ian Nguyen recalls his rebellious years as a teenager finding out about the New Wave scene being born and deciding he would be a part of it, a much larger part than he ever anticipated. A friend actually built DJ Ian his first real turntable and he would sneak out with his friends to hold impromptu New Wave parties where DJ Ian would spin for hours, sometimes all night, always for free, immersed in the music and freedom of it all. 

And somewhere in there, as the making of a documentary-style movie about the New Wave way of life and music scene stretched into years and filmmaker Elizabeth Ai birthed her daughter, uncomfortable questions about her own past traumas began cropping up. Why did Liz’s mother, a Vietnamese immigrant herself who came to America and unhappily became the sole earner for the entire family including those still left back in Vietnam, initially refuse to speak to her daughter about their shared traumatic past? Why would any grandma, regardless of nationality, not want to see her newly-born grandchild? In this instance, I suspect it was because Grandma wasn’t ready to face the very real problems her absence throughout Li’s childhood caused. But children, even the very young ones, pick up on far more than their elders think. And suddenly, the documentary Liz was making about lost Vietnamese-American kids and their musical therapy, was now being turned into a semi-autobiographical journey about Liz’s own personal journey into her past, to find a way to reunite with her estranged mother and a path together in the future. 

Uplifting and sorrowful at the same time, a meditation on lost generations of Vietnamese refugees and their stories of loss and redemption through surprisingly good music, plus a very personal story of trauma and reconnection, New Wave will make you want to sing, even through your sympathetic tears! 

The amazing 4K restoration of a beloved 1984 classic for its 40^th Anniversary, Shanghai Blues tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers who are determined to meet up after the war with the Japanese is over, endure all sorts of misadventures trying to find each other some ten years later! 

When our soon-to-be-departed soldier and his pretty lady met under the bridge during a raid, they didn’t exchange names. They did, however, manage to save each-other and make a promise to each-other to meet when the war was declared over. I rather doubt either of them expected it to be some ten-odd years later, but hey, fate is fate! Right? 

So it’s some years later, and our pretty little nameless lady is now a nightclub singer generally known as Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang) in Shanghai, older and more experienced and a bit jaded about everything but still kind enough to take in a newcomer fresh from the countryside, calling her Stool (Sally Yeh). Stool is prone to mishaps concerning her money but never shies away from protecting her virtue with whatever is at hand, or even just her bare fists and powerful voice, if it comes to that. Stool is just ripe for falling in love, she’s in love with the idea of falling in love, which by turns both charms and irritates Shu-Shu, for she’s still waiting for her soldier from the bridge to come find her. 

It turns out, in this slapstick comedy of errors because of course, that’s what happened, that a would-be song-writer who took a room above Shu-Shu and Stool’s now shared apartment, is the soldier everyone’s looking for, now called Do-re-mi (Kenny Bee). And while he’s desperately searching for his lady from the bridge too, well, lots of other stuff is going on around them – gangsters and singer rivalries in the nightclub, policemen crackdowns on the tiny beggar community of displaced wounded soldiers that took up residence under The Bridge, the never-ending rat race to make enough money to live on, and oh yeah, the all-important search for True Love. 

Of course, Stool decides she’s fallen in love and is Meant To Be with Do-re-mi, and her consistently informs Shu-Shu that she’ll get a good job so that it’ll just be the three of them – Do-re-mi, Stool, and Shu-Shu – together forever and always grates on Shu-Shu’s carefully crafted aloof elegance as a nightclub singer. And perhaps as a woman jaded to the idea of fated love, as well. The three of them adorably chase each other round and round, and Stool manages through a series of disastrous mishaps to land the cover photo for this year’s Calendar Queen, catapulting her to instant fame, or perhaps rather infamy. 

The series of debacles that was meant to lead to Stool getting molested by the big boss after her Calendar Queen debut party is presented in a slapsticky way, but honestly, one could not get away with such shenanigans in a movie in the modern world today. A series of power outages might have saved the day and Stool’s virtue in theory, but it’s not something we really want to touch on for the sake of comedy. 

Shu-Shu has decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and let Stool have Do-re-mi while she effectively sells herself to a plutocrat on a crowded train, but their love is destined, damnit, and Stool is enough of a romantic fool to try and thwart that decision. The 1984 film was lovingly restored in brighter 4K for the showing, and all the voices had been redubbed in more accurate depictions of the various languages – French, Japanese, variations of Chinese, etc – showing the cosmopolitan nature of Shanghai in the films’ timeframe. Full of shlock and joy, the blues of pursuing life and love and continued happiness, Shanghai Blues is an adorable romp of a comedy of errors and everyone should see it at least once!