Heart Cocktail: Spring Stories

As hoped/promised/threatened, DarkOrphanChaser is back with more Watase Seizou; in this case, his latest spin on the Heart Cocktail formula: Heart Cocktail Colorful. This series of 15 shorts is organized around three seasons: spring, summer, and winter. (No fall, I guess.) We're bringing you the series in seasonal bursts, starting with the "Spring Stories."

Colorful doesn't break any new ground. It follows the familiar Heart Cocktail formula of romance found, lost, or regained, in five-minute stories usually focused on one man and one woman. The five stories in this group are:

1. "Stone Letter." A separated couple, Shinju and Emi, keep in touch by snail mail. One day, Emi sends Shinju a single pebble as a message. What could it mean?
   
   
   
   
2. "The Planet Beneath Our Feet." A single mother named Kaede is supported, at a distance, by her former high-school classmate Yuusuke, who still remembers their encounter in the Astronomy Club.
   
   
   
   
3. "Tandem Venus". Yuwaka is interested in both his junior, Natsuki Noda, and his boss, section chief, Saya Tokitou, only to discover that the two women are romantically involved with each other.
   
   
   
   
4. "Gentle Rain." Karen, the daughter of Takeshi from the original series, comes to Jessy's Bar to leave a letter for her estranged father. She is getting married and wants her father to know, because she and her husband are going to Africa to work for an NGO. But Takeshi has been watching over her all along...
   
   
   
   
5. "The Beauty Who Turned Around." At a company event, an unnamed man falls in love with Shizuka, but she is still entangled with another. They promise to meet in a year, but she takes another job. He returns the next year anyway, but is she there?

As in the other Heart Cocktail series, the animation is minimal, but the shots aren't completely static, as they are in Chalk-iro no People or the other "animated manga". But this lack of movement, and the much larger full HD canvas, created a problem: the scenes look empty and are visually boring. (A lot of blossoms blow through to fill the frame.) So this series adapts a trick out of the statically animated shows: it puts some (but not all) of the dialog into signs. There's no point in having the same English line as both dialog and sign, so the dialog signs are not typeset. Rest assured, real signs (there's only one in these episodes) are typeset.

The voice cast is also minimal:

• Mitsushima Hikari played Carina in One Piece Film Gold and Mayu in cocoon Aru Natsu no Shoujo-tachi Yori.
• Kamenashi Kazuya played Odagiri Ryuu in Gokusen live action and Shizuku Kanzaki in Kami no Shizuku live action.
• Okuda Tamiyoshi is primarily a narrator. He appeared in Heart Cocktail and Heart Cocktail Again.
  

The fansub staff is the same as before. Darkonius translated and timed. Yume translation-checked. I edited and typeset; the biggest typesetting challenge was the rainbow in the title. Nemesis and Uchuu QCed. Skr snarfed the raws off Japanese TV, and an anonymous friend encoded. MartyMcflies provided support and coordination. Like previous Watase Seizou projects, this is a joint DarkWispers, Orphan, and LonelyChaser release. 

I remain quite fond of the Heart Cocktail concept; its slow pace and lack of melodrama suits me. Admittedly, the author is ringing changes on plots he has used before, but there's still room for new ideas. You can get this mini-batch from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news. The remaining ten episodes will follow, although the exact timing is unpredictable.