When it comes to romance anime, there are often two routes that an anime can take. The first is your generic romcom often featuring the world's densest black hole inside the protagonist's brain. The other is a proper nitty-gritty romance anime like Horimiya.

Horimiya presents itself much like a warm bowl of mac and cheese. It is a comfort anime, delicate yet complex, lighthearted yet rich. It is an anime you could watch on a gloomy day to bring extra warmth into your life. At a first glance, it is simply a light skim over the romantic lives of several high schoolers, but at its depth, it is a deep thesis on metamorphosis and change.

Plot
Horimiya's plot is quite straightforward. For most of the show, you're given a view of the life of Izumi Miyamura as he progresses through his last year in high school. A recluse who hides both his inner personality and his physical piercings and tattoos, you take him to be the lonely otaku type until he has a chance encounter with Kyoko Hori with the traits he's hiding shown boldly to the world. From then on, it is a deep dive as Miyamura slowly but surely alters the lives of those around him as he is welcomed into a friend group and branches out. While the plot theoretically takes place over the course of one school year, the sense of time is really not emphasized safe for a few weather and climate cues. This style of pacing may be offputting for those who enjoy a consistent timeline with a consistent progression of time, but these "snapshots" offer the perfect opportunity to reflect the continuity and change that these characters undergo.

Characters
As I mentioned earlier, the majority of the show is centered around Miyamura as he tries to shed the shell he's clung on to for his entire life. Initially, in the name of giving Miyamura more development, side characters take on a more "cardboard cutout" approach as Miyamura settles into his new lifestyle. However, once Miyamura's settled in, the show goes and diverts the camera away from Miyamura, and instead showing us the inner workings behind the characters we once thought were flat and underdeveloped. In many ways, its poetically like how Miyamura would only start seeing how his friends truly are once he's had the time to know them and understand them. This kind of poetic development makes a ton of sense when you think about it, and while some may be turned away from the anime for suddenly spending its latter half focusing on everyone except Hori and Miyamura, it offers so much depth to these characters that by the time they graduate, each and every one of them feel truly real and lifelike.

But that's enough rambling about the side characters. As I've said multiple times, this show centers around Miyamura's development. So how well did they do on that?
I think that the way the anime approached Miyamura's development felt smooth and relatable as someone who was also the loner type in high school. Not only did they do an excellent job of highlighting some of the lingering regrets that may be holding Miyamura back, but they also painted his inner turmoil in an excellent picture. Miyamura's constant self-evaluation and dedication to become a better partner to Hori is born purely out of a desire that he alone festers, and the way that they have painted his slow reintegration into society is excellent. By the end of the anime he's changed so much that when you see his initial self again, you yourself is wondering whether or not that's the same guy. Love really can perform some serious magic.

Art
The design of this anime is a real soft spot for me. As some other readers of my reviews may know, I heavily enjoy anime who's art and sound design create a quiet ambient environment. While Monogatari does it with their roomy, piano-only soundtrack, Horimiya does it with their regular integration of white backgrounds or colored shadows. An example of which I'll add on below.

This type of fade-to-white background with colored shadows shows up whenever characters have a real intimate moment, and it illustrates their bond by "encapsulating it" in a closed environment. Its sorta like how you'd notice something better if you isolate it with a nonintrusive background. I find that this helped contribute to the overall ambient vibe and it really shows how close the characters grow with each panel.

That aside, the overall art style of Horimiya is quite enjoyable. It is both simple in detail and wonderfully intricate in design. The characters themselves regularly revert to chibi forms to illustrate funny moments, but otherwise their human designs are overall quite simple and elegant, allowing for a clear contrast with their very detailed backgrounds.

Sound
Horimiya takes after the likes of Monogatari and Bloom into You for their sound design. Most of their tracks are plain orchestral, and in some cases, a simple piano in an open room. This contributes to the ambient vibe I mentioned earlier, and it also allows for some very detailed sound design to illustrate each moment more uniquely. Their OP and ED are quite enjoyable as well, with the OP, in particular, bucking the trend of loud modern pop instruments and instead going for a more chilled and toned-down vibe. It also means that it is one of the rare few anime OPs that can fit in a study/work playlist.

Overall, Horimiya is the sick man's chicken noodle soup, or a tired soul's warm bowl of ramen. It aims to deliver pure goodheartedness and wholesome vibes with its anime, and no matter if you're swamped with shows to keep up on or too burnt out to watch another anime, there's always room for Horimiya.