Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #265: Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2020).

 

Cherry (voiced in the Japanese-language version by Ichikawa Somegoro VIII) is a shy teenage boy with social and communication difficulties who expresses his feelings through haikus instead of verbally, and always wears headphones to block loud noise out. Meanwhile, Smile (Hana Sugisaki) is a teenage girl who externally projects confidence and vivaciousness as a social media influencer, but wears a mask because internally she's deeply insecure about her very large and braced front teeth. One day during summer they have a fateful chance meeting and quickly become more than friends, but then Cherry's father Koichi (Hiroshi Yamiya) informs him they will be moving town in a month.

This anime romance from co-writer and director Kyohei Ishiguro is frequently so fluorescently colourful it could give even Baz Luhrmann an epileptic seizure, but that's a very clever artistic choice and indeed it's the point because it helps the viewer see the world as both the protagonists do. Smile is, as I said, an influencer, an occupation and lifestyle which can frankly be very superficial, and Cherry is quite evidently autistic, which often means being hypersensitive to visual brightness or having enhanced visual perception. That is also why they together make a realistic couple because it's a case of opposite attracting, and it makes their separate arcs more relatably modern. They are also affectingly voiced, and the animation shows a perfectionistic approach throughout.

The pacing is occasionally meandering, but overall Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (and how fun and cute is that title?) struck me as a really sweet, intelligent and balanced anime love story from Ishiguro and studio Signal.MD. 8/10.