Spoilers ahead.

Context

Airing in 2009, White Album was a latecomer to the 2000s gold rush of adapting romance visual novels into anime. To name just a few:

/anime/685/toheart-remember-my-memories
/anime/1530/kanon-2006
/anime/1555/tokimeki-memorial
/anime/2167/clannad

With so much prior material for reference and inspiration, and the visual novel itself being popular, one might think that White Album had all the makings for a successful anime. However, it's clear that Seven Arcs weren't going for another safe cookie-cutter production.

Direction

Not a scene goes by in the anime without some bizarre choice in direction cropping up. Strange camera angles, bad crops, uncomfortable pans, and more. But even if one discounted that simply as poor quality control and lack of skill, there are some truly jarring choices made that are clearly deliberate:

The (typically hard-to-follow) inner thoughts of the MC appear as on-screen text a few times each episode with no clear pattern as to when and why. Once every few episodes, you'll get treated with a sudden shift in art style, for just a brief second. Granted, it's used to good effect in some significant moments, but other times it calls attention to something that, even after the fact, can only be described as arbitrary. _My favourite moment of wacky direction is this three-minute cut in which we very slowly zoom in on a motionless Rina during her very long monologue. This struck me as some beyond Evangelion-level corner-cutting._

There's also an absolute obsession with telephones. Every character has a telephone in an individual colour, some have answering machines (though mostly everyone is missing each other's calls anyway), some use pay phones, and one even owns a car phone. As much as I've searched for symbolism, though, I'm really not sure what they're going for.

One of the many, many telephones.

Characters

I've got this far without mentioning how much of an unbridled scumbag the MC is, which is really the core of the show. He, Touya:

• is a bully to his only male friend Akira, this show's half-price Sunohara whose tsukkomi never quite lands;
• insistently ignores the kind-hearted Haruka. The reason (season 2 spoiler)?
  Spoiler, click to view

  he holds a petty childhood grudge;
• cheats on his girlfriend left, right, and centre with every woman who will make eye contact with him (who are bafflingly many);
• lies to his girlfriend left, right, and centre to sustain this cheating behaviour;
• is inexplicably rude to his father;
• is dangerously overfamiliar with high school girls;
• is so broke that he has to rely on his girlfriend's staff for rides around town;
• is catastrophically bad at keeping promises and focusing on his priorities;
• objectifies women to the extent that he names random strangers the "goddess of the day".

This is actually an interesting contrast to the usual romcom/harem MC who is either a complete herbivore or a straight-up alpha male; this guy breaks the mould by being both despicable and pathetic to the core. The one poetic justice to his character is that his ostensibly out-of-this-world idol girlfriend is vacant and always out of reach. Essentially, they are made for each other.

As for the other love interests? Their personalities range from well-meaning, to scheming, to mysterious, to playful, and actually, they're all pretty engaging. Conspicuously more so, and certainly more available, than Touya's actual on-paper girlfriend – which I suspect was an intentional writing choice to attempt to excuse his infidelity.

Story

While much of the show's draw is in following the mesmerising immorality of Touya, an experience like gazing at the sun for too long, there is nonetheless a compelling story gluing the whole show together. Each character is driven by something or other, and somehow Touya manages to collide with each of their worlds like a snooker ball bounding around a table. Not to say that he really helps them chase their dreams. He's mostly just there as a spectator, watching them put in all the work. But they're all up to something interesting, and it's easy to get invested in their stories and curious about what will happen next.

Surprisingly, I found the side stories to be the most enjoyable parts. The actual core idol plot suffers from overexposure to the enigmatic director, Eiji Ogata, who always seems to smugly know about something that we don't, yet he never clears things up, to the point that everything he's involved in just becomes tiresome. His bits become a necessary quagmire to wade past in order to get to the good stuff.

Conclusion

White Album is characterised by hamfisted yet artsy direction, a depraved MC, a pretty engaging cast of characters, and a fairly decent story. It is by no means a masterpiece, but it makes for very entertaining group watching, through its sheer quarry of things to critique and scratch heads over. If you like B-movies, I can't think of a better anime to recommend!