Are you tired of reading wall after wall of pretentious text?
Do you just want to know if you should watch the darn show?
Me too.

TLDR

This show is 20 minutes long from beginning to end. I wish it was a little longer. If you like super wholesome, cheesy, fluffy romances then this is for you. Gave me diabetes from how sweet it is.
Wholesome counter: used 10 times in this review

PLOT - None, but it was good

Honobono log has 10 episodes, with each being 2 minutes long. There isn’t much content you can cram into 20 minutes in total, and Honobono Log doesn’t try. It’s more of a loose collection of events than an actual show (if you want to get fancy you can use the word 𝓋𝒾𝑔𝓃𝑒𝓉𝓉𝑒𝓈). Each episode has a different cast and scenario with most of them being very wholesome. Only one episode didn't have the pure and sweet vibe and it actually managed to make me a little emotional. There was a non-zero amount of thought put into the order of the episodes, as the finale was clearly the climax of the show (that doesn’t have a plot), and was a perfect end to the series. Unfortunately, the whole thing was so short I forgot about it the next day.

CHARACTERS - Above Average

There are no characters in this show. There are only heartwarming moment delivery vehicles, and I want to inject that shit straight into my veins. My vocabulary isn’t large enough to have an alternate word for “wholesome”, so I’ll just keep using it. The characters are wholesome. They look wholesome, they act wholesome, they say wholesome things. Everything about this show is super sweet, and the characters are no exception. Watching this made me feel very alone. Considering the length of the episodes, don’t expect any major character depth. Objectively speaking, they’re flat and one dimensional. But if you watch the show and come out of the experience actually complaining about that, you’ve missed the point of it entirely and have no heart.

MUSIC AND SOUND - Below Average

Episodes are only 2 minutes long. So why is there a 20 second OP and a 10 second ED? That’s a quarter of the run time wasted for nothing. And what’s worse is that the OP and the ED are the same song. And what’s worse is that sometimes the ending won’t even use a different section of the song. They’ll play the same section of the song they used in the opening AGAIN, even though I just listened to it 1 minute and 50 seconds ago. The show also has no soundtrack that plays during the actual episode. This isn’t really a big deal and I never found myself wishing that there was music, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

The quality of the voice acting is pretty standard, but they don’t scream attack names or use annoying high pitched voices which is a huge plus. In general, the characters are very quiet. Absolute silence is pretty common but that’s not a complaint. A show like this is supposed to showcase the cute, simple moments in everyday life (according to google translate honobono means heartwarming), and having some dumb shit like a group of anime girls going “EEEHHHHHHHH?!?!??!” at the top of their lungs would have felt out of place.

ART AND ANIMATION - Great

The art style is hand drawn and cozy, adding to the vibe of the show. It was often simple to the point where it felt like there was too little on screen. Everyone just exists in a beige void and the most detail you could expect from the majority of the episodes was a table or a window or something. It honestly reminded me a little of Evangelion episode 26 when they ran out of budget.

The character designs fit the look of the world but are more detailed. The designs of the females are varied, but a bunch of the guys looked exactly the same to me (just watch the OP and see if you can tell them apart). They make good use of fast, snappy character movements for comedic effect, and the roughness of the animation kind of complements the hand drawn style. The rest of the animation is pretty smooth, and animation is good in general. # **WHO SHOULD WATCH THIS** If you like watching things that make you feel lonely (also known as wholesome romances), give this a shot. If you have 2 minutes to spare, give this a shot. This show requires so little time investment that literally everyone should try this. It’ll only take 1 episode to know if you like it. # **RECOMMENDATIONS** If you’re looking for another super cute, super wholesome, super short romance with no drama, check out [I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying](https://anilist.co/anime/20735/I-Cant-Understand-What-My-Husband-Is-Saying/). If you’re fine with something that has normal episode lengths, consider [Tonikawa](https://anilist.co/anime/116267/TONIKAWA-Over-The-Moon-For-You/) or [Wotakoi](https://anilist.co/anime/99578/Wotakoi-Love-is-Hard-for-Otaku/). # **CONCLUSION** Short but sweet. I wanted to give this a higher score but because it was so barebones and short, I couldn’t justify giving one. The show’s main problem was that it lacked substance and was very forgettable as a result. It really broke my heart to give Honobono Log the score I did, but you should know that __it reached 100% of its potential given the constraints it had__. I gave it a 66, which is the minimum for the rectangle thing with the score to be green. There is no universe where this show deserves an orange rectangle or below. ---------------- ##### Visit my profile @groggy1 to give feedback or to see my other work

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All of my reviews contain __spoilers __for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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It’s a cliché to begin any piece of writing on a short anime with defense of the form, but to indulge in that cliché a bit, sometimes a premise dictates that an anime’s episodes only really need to be somewhere on the order of 60-120 seconds. So it is with Honobono Log, a series with a not quite a cour’s worth of 2-minute scenes that, consequently, doesn’t even total a full half hour in length. I didn’t know going into Honobono Log that it was adapted from a picture book, but it makes complete sense looking at the show on the whole. The episodes present extremely brief vignettes; tiny windows into the lives of couples and families for us to peer at single, specific scenes from their time together. Animation is limited, backgrounds even moreso; the vast majority of the show’s lean runtime takes place against a solid yellow backdrop. But this isn’t so much a flaw as it is a strength in disguise, by cutting down on extraneous elements both spatial and temporal, Honobono Log leaves us with what really matters; these brief flashes of some emotion or another between two or more people who truly care about each other. An exhaustive list of these situations would completely spoil the point of the show, but they include aquarium dates, father/child disputes over gumdrops, and brief goodnights over the phone. In each case, the emphasis is less on the intensity of the emotion displayed and more on its casualness. None of these scenes involve anything along the nature of a romantic confession or, really, any identifiable romcom tropes as such at all. Hands intertwine, boyfriends reluctantly run an errand, fidgety girls are hugged, a mother comforts a daughter whose crush has gotten with someone else. What’s truly being drawn attention to here is the brevity—but also the importance—of these actions themselves, through naturalistic, understated voice acting and simple, unflashy animation that nonetheless takes joy in its movements. Any single one of these moments could crystallize into a memory for someone involved in it, and the show can in fact be taken as a memory catalogue of sorts, not for any one person but for humanity on the whole. One could find flaws in this—for something that clearly reaches for universal experience, all of the couples are straight, for one thing—but these minor criticisms are easily dismissed as flaws of absence. Points to be improved on, as opposed to things wrong per se. No, what we have here are ten tiny miracles. Little wisps of personable warmth and nostalgia, whenever you need them.

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