Man, I went into this movie without having any expectations at all since most of the comment section here seems to hate this live action adaption, but honestly, color me surprised, I freaking love this movie sooooooooooooooo much! For anyone who isn't sure if they are gonna like this version of AnoHana after having already seen the original, let me tell you this:

I've already seen the original AnoHana anime series back when it came out in 2011 and I also watch this recap/after story movie as well and I have to say they both had absolutely fantastic story telling, however, I felt like generally the anime versions weren't nearly as emotional than what I felt while watching this live action adaption here. Sure, it had it's issues since the pacing felt a little off at times and they had to shorten some things in order to make everything important into the movie, but that was honestly a good thing. When I watched the anime version, the episodic format of that series had felt way too limiting as well for me, like since the story has been splitt up into mutiple episodes, some emotional events that took place didn't feel as serious since it has been"so long" since they last mentioned some important key plot development in an earlier episode if anyone knows what I mean.

Having this whole story as it's own movie that captivates it's viewers from the beginning til the very end is definitely the best format to tell this absolutely fantastic story about childhood and how children cope with their friend's dead over the years.  People that have very strong opinions about the original anime may be displeased about some changes they had to do in order to make this story appear more realistically, but exactly the additional realism that this adaption provided is the very reason why I think it's the best version of AnoHana. Nothing is more emotional to see real people's sad faces full with tears as even though they are just acting there, I do believe this story speaks to you in an ever deeper emotional level out of pure instinct.

And speaking of the acting, I also have to say that the actors were absolutely fantastic as well! Probably one of the most disliked aspects of live action adaptions  are the way the actors look, since either they try to make them look way too much like their anime counter parts and it looks absolutely horrible since... well, nobody normal in real life looks like an anime character, or they don't even try to make the characters look similar to how they looked like in the original and people feel no connection to the story that they already love. This time however, I genuinely believe that they couldn't have found better actors for each of their positions! Only one character looks drastically different than in the anime since her hair color used to be white and in this version brown, but that's definintely a good decision since white hair would simply look weird and not really relatable to someone in their person life for most of the audience.

So yeah, if you go into this movie open minded and don't compare everything to it's original all the time, trust me, you will definitely have an awesome time and an awesome experience to live through this fantastic story once again! Just don't be too elitistic about it :)