I've Always Liked You - Confess Your Love Comittee -

Zutto Mae Kara Suki Deshita ~Kokuhaku Jikkō Iinkai~ (ずっと前から好きでした。～告白実行委員会～) is a 63 minute long romance anime film based on a series of songs/light novels by Vocaloid specialists Honeyworks. I came across this little oddity via recommendations by some good friends of mine and we sat down to watch it together. Safe to say I was a bit surprised and quite enjoyed my 1 hour sitting.

Based on the first few books in the Kokuhaku Jikkō Iinkai series of light novels, the film is about a group of 7 high school friends and the intermingling web of relationships between them. Issues of unrequited love, struggles in confessing their feelings and love rivalries are abound. The scenes and their scripts are fairly typical by shoujo anime standards, filled with plenty of teenage angst, rampant emotions and glittering backdrops. Fortunately, the decent writing, concise story and sprinklings of light humor throughout help keep the show focused and away from the excessive melodrama and pointless meandering that bogged down similar titles. By the end of the film (stay for the credits!), some of the relationships do come to a satisfying conclusion and the characters finally get together. With its short run time however, needless to say some characters were not touched upon as much as I would have liked, while some relationship threads are left still unresolved. Fortunately there is a sequel film coming out later in on the 17th of December 2016 which will hopefully resolve these issues.

Production wise the animation was handled by newcomer Qualia Animation, with some very pretty character designs and surprisingly good animation, much better than one would expect from a typical romance flick. The pleasant music score  is mostly a mix of soft piano tunes with plenty of inserts from Honeyworks themselves, there was even a Honeyworks concert in the film itself!

Overall, the film was a decent, no frills romance flick that is easy enough for pretty much anyone to sit through and enjoy. Don't go in expecting anything outside of typically teenage romance fare, but you could do worse than spending little over an hour for some warm fuzzies.