This review contains 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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