Heart Cocktail Colorful: Summer Stories

DarkOrphanChaser is back with a second set of Watase Seizou's Heart Cocktail Colorful episodes. These five are set in Summer; hence, "Summer Stories". Despite the season, these stories seems a shade more wistful, even melancholic at times, than before.

1. "Perfect Girlfriend." Shuujirou Nishina and Keiichi Hayama are hanging out together, enjoying time at the beach. She's his "perfect girlfriend," but he's marrying someone else, for reasons going back all the way to their shared childhood.
   
   
   
   
   
2. "Otoha and Tatsuya." On a business trip, Tatsuya has an unexpected encounter with his childhood friend, Shiho Hamanshi. She's achieved her long-held dream of becoming a geisha, stage name Otoha, but his dream of becoming a novelist has faded away.
   
   
   
   
   
3. "Beyond the Tube." Young Junya discovers that his father, a famous painter, had had a long-term relationship with his beautiful model. She wants to return a kimono that his father treasured, but Junya can't bring himself to show it to his mother.
   
   
   
   
   
4. "Hidden Behind the Rain." The backstory of Jessy, owner of Jessy's bar. When he was young, he fell in love with Marie, a cruise ship singer. They were supposed to be together, but he ended up alone... until a warm summer's evening decades later.
   
   
   
   
   
5. "Two Paper Planes." Hiroyuki Tsuyama and his wife Miho are getting a civilized divorce. When he visits her to deliver the divorce papers, he discovers that she's become an accomplished ceramics artist... and he's brought the wrong documents.

"Beyond the Tube" is bittersweet, as a son attempts to grasp a side of his father's life he had never known. (It's also recycled from the first story in Boku no Oldies wa All-Color.)  "Hidden Behind the Rain" has a nicely melancholic atmosphere, although the gimmick explaining Marie's current situation is strictly an anime contrivance; but all the stories are good.

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. 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 a few in these episodes) are typeset.

The voice cast is unchanged, as is the fansub staff. 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. 

You can get this mini-batch of the "Summer Stories" from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news. The remaining five episodes will follow soon.