Sing “Yesterday” for Me is a story about a group of young adults who are trying to make their way through the world as best they can. None of them are very ambitious, and they all have somewhat mysterious pasts that they’re trying to escape.

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It makes the relationships between the characters complex and intense, and the series a more melancholy look at what life is like for people just out of school who aren’t totally sure what to do next in their lives and whether any of it matters. 

10 Kei Toume

Kei Toume, the creator of Sing “Yesterday” for Me doesn’t have a huge bibliography of manga that she’s written. However, she does have two notable manga that may be recognizable to Western audiences: Kurogane, a story about a young boy who is well-known for his excellent swordsmanship and ability to kill, and Lament of the Lamb, a story about a young boy who loses control of himself at the site of blood, only to learn that he’s a vampire. These horror-focused series have a very different tone from Sing “Yesterday.”

9 Inspired By RC Succession

RC Succession was a rock band from Tokyo. They made music together from their debut in 1968 until 1990.

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The band was an inspiration to Kei Toume, who thought of the concept for Sing “Yesterday” while listening to one of their songs. Toume is also a big fan of the band, and she contributed art to fanzines and magazines about their music and life.

8 Junichiro Taniguchi

Many anime adaptations of manga don’t look quite the same as the manga, since the characters and art style might not translate well to animation. In the case of Sing, the character designs have been adjusted for the anime to better suit the animation. Junichiro Taniguchi is responsible for the character designs. He has been prolific in the anime industry and has worked on such stylized animated series as Fullmetal Alchemist, X-Men, and xxxHOLIC.

7 Manga Is Long-Running

Sing “Yesterday” for Me was originally serialized in the manga magazine Business Jump. The manga debuted in 1997 and ran for almost 20 years, concluding in June of 2015.

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The anime series picking up five years after the end of the manga, and more than two decades after its debut, shows what a strong story it is and how well-regarded the manga has been.

6 Yoshiyuki Fujiwara

Yoshiyuki Fujiwara is on board to direct the anime. He is best known for directing such anime as Attack on Titan and Sword Art Online. These series are heavily fantasy and action-oriented, which is a much different focus than Sing, which is a quieter, more pensive series. The different kinds of directing necessary for the different anime should be an interesting juxtaposition in style for Fujiwara.

5 Targeted Toward Adults

Most of the anime that achieve really high levels of popularity in the West are shonen or shojo manga, which is geared toward teenagers. These stories are usually high-energy adventure or fantasy stories, so they’re easily accessible and fun to watch.

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Sing “Yesterday” for Me is a seinen manga, which means that, though teenage audiences might enjoy it, it’s geared more toward an adult audience, particularly the early-20s age group shown in the series.

4 Jin Tanaka

Jin Tanaka has been charged with adapting the manga into screenplays for the anime. Tanaka has experience working on One Piece and Tokyo Ghoul, both shonen anime. Tokyo Ghoul, while action and horror-oriented, is also a quieter, more somber anime than something like One Piece, so Tanaka will bring some of his skills adapting other manga into anime with Sing.

3 Self-Contained Story

Many anime can go on for hundreds of episodes, especially if the manga that they’re based on is long-running. But Sing “Yesterday” instead has chosen to take a focused approach to the adaptation of the manga.

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Instead of covering all of the material from the 18-year run of the manga, the anime is only 18 episodes, choosing instead to tell one self-contained story that gives a final ending, instead of an anime that might go several seasons.

2 Kana Hanazawa

Beloved voice actress Kana Hanazawa plays the main female lead in the series. She has a large following and is known for voicing popular female characters in many favorite anime series. Some of the more notable roles are Angel in Angel Beats!, Akane Tsunemori in Psycho-Pass, and Rize Kamishiro in Tokyo Ghoul. She is also a successful singer, having released five albums.

1 Theme By Yourness

Rock band Yourness has done the theme for the series. The song is called “Kago no Naka ni Tori,” which translates as “A Bird in a Cage.” This is a good thematic title for the melancholy theme song of the series, since the main character is interested in birds, feeling particularly close to crows, and feeds a group of them out behind his convenience store job. He feels trapped by his life as well, like being in a cage. His ex-girlfriend, who he becomes close to again when he runs into her by accident, also has a pet raven that she cares for.

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