Heart Cocktail Colorful: Winter Stories

DarkOrphanChaser is back with its final set of Watase Seizou's Heart Cocktail Colorful episodes. These five are set in Winter (actually, Fall and Winter); hence, "Winter Stories". Despite the season, these stories are a bit more optimistic, a bit more hopeful.

1. "Mr. Frog." Takuto Yoshimura has fallen in love with his co-worker, Mei Shimamoto, but she wants to focus on her career. As Takuto is folding an origami frog for children in foster care and brooding over his misfired romance, he remembers an older man making an origami frog for him to "jump over his shadow." At Jessy's Bar, Takuto recovers his determination and makes his own origami frog jump.
   
   
   
   
   
2. "Button." When he was younger, Souta Misumi shared a house with a would-be poet, Ito, and an older woman, Kanna, an accomplished seamstress he had a crush on. When a button she sewed on for him pops off, Souta reaches out to Kanna for the first time in years. At a poetry reading, he discovers that she is married, with children, and now she sews for them.
   
   
   
   
   
3. "Nandina." A divorced man has not seen his daughter, Yuri, for a decade, to avoid disrupting her relationship with her stepfather. One day, she tracks him down and invites him to her wedding. Despite misgivings, he attends, bringing a branch of the Nandina he had planted to commemorate her birth.
   
   
   
   
   
4. "A Town Where Snow Falls." Whenever he visits a strange town, Kunikata Shirakawa always visits a hostess bar and asks for "Midori," the work name his single mother used to earn money when raising him. On a snowy night in a strange town, he finds a "Midori" who is also a singe mother, and he vows, to himself, that he will return to see her again.
   
   
   
   
   
5. "A Christmas Miracle." A long time ago, an older man donated blood that saved the life of a young girl. In the present, he is facing a lonely Christmas when they meet again. Although they are complete strangers to one another, there is an instant connection: a Christmas miracle. 

I liked all the stories in this set, particularly "Nandina," with its possibility of reunion and reconciliation, and "A Town Where Snow Falls," where romance surfaces in the most unlikely of circumstances. "A Christmas Miracle" is completely far-fetched, but the Japanese do believe in blood-type astrology.

One translation note: Nandina or sacred bamboo is not a bamboo but an erect evergreen shrub that grows up to two meters tall. 

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 final mini-batch of "Winter Stories" from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news. Final batch soon.