REVIEW: ‘Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk’ Blooms Into A Must-Watch Romance

Between its grounded characters, excellent visuals, and sapphic yearning, Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk is the dark horse of this anime season. If you’ve watched enough anime, you’ve likely been there. After weeks of simmering tension between a pair of hot-blooded teammates, brass players aiming for nationals, or whatever other homoerotic pressure cooker setup, you finally realize the sad truth: this television show is actually very straight.

Despite the tease, these guys or gals will not kiss. Your favorite ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again.

In the yuri-sphere, this tradition can be traced back to Class S fiction, a genre that focuses on the very close bonds between classmates at all-girls schools. Despite the apparent sapphic implications of these stories, they always stop atom short of romantic love, as if the laws of the universe forbid it. Whether you were burned by Sound Euphonium! or countless other stories inspired by these tropes, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical if an anime doesn’t make it clear that it’s queer from the first episode.

Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk delivers on the promise of queer relationships. 

In this context, Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk is the best kind of surprise. It’s a slice-of-life romance series that stews in slow-burn relationships, taking its central characters from friends to something more until eventually plowing past its initial premise (a hobby anime about alcohol) like two college kids knocking everything over while desperately trying to make out.

Buoyed by creative animation and strong direction, it pulls us into the emotional minutiae of dorm room evenings with surprising force. And best of all, this show is undeniably, canonically gay.

The series, based on HEY’s manga of the same name, centers on Botan Kamiina (Sayumi Suzushiro), a bubbly 20-year-old student who becomes interested in her dormmate, Ibuki Tonami (Yoshino Aoyama), a girl who tends to peel away from the group. When Botan finds Ibuki cozied up with a highball, she learns that her peer is a bit of a booze connoisseur with an unfortunate secret: she doesn’t like drinking around other people because she’s incredibly self-conscious about her hiccups. From here, Botan strives to learn more about both alcohol and Ibuki.

The low-key story gains emotional weight through the grounded characters. 

From the first episode, the series leans into playful innuendo. The show’s title, Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk, references how the protagonist flirts with Ibuki once they start putting back their fancy drinks, and the script from Youko Yonaiyama, Hideaki Shirasaka, and Tomoko Shinozuka doesn’t stop there with double entendres.

Like many low-key stories, these grounded tensions and concerns only carry dramatic weight because the characters feel tangible. Their troubles outside of romance are a bit thin upfront. Ibuki’s main hang-up is her anxiety about drinking around others.

But the show’s intense focus on Kyoto Animation-esque quotidian details makes it work. Watching Botan and Ibuki get to know each other, one outwardly unremarkable encounter at a time, is a delight.

The personalities of the characters enrich the story. 

The extended cast is great as well: there’s Kanade Gujō (Minako Kotobuki), a cinephile computer science student who secretly has a crush on Ibuki; her fellow film-lover Chang Chin-Lan, a Taiwanese exchange student who also has a crush on a girl in the dorms and isn’t subtle about it; and the “close friends” Yaeka and Akane, whose married couple coded bickering never gets old.

While the narrative only lightly alludes to their worries beyond sapphic longing (which there is a lot of), small particularities make them come across as well-realized people rather than stock anime tropes. You probably will never watch another series where two anime girls bond over a shared love of Edward Yang’s four-hour masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day. And especially not one where interest in the film becomes representative of one character’s burgeoning feelings toward the other. Gujō’s Letterboxd account probably goes hard.

These characters’ inner selves are further sold by a motif-heavy visual style that basically realizes the “this too is yuri” Tumblr meme (for those outside the know, this is based on a gloriously unhinged interview from author Iori Miyazawa, where he declares that anything can be yuri if you put your mind to it).

The series, directed by Takashi Sakuma, has fun with the visuals. 

In this case, the cords of PlayStation controllers intertwine like lovers, and cups sit in tidy pairs. The subtlety of these sights varies — there are at least two points where Botan and Ibuki are literally backlit by the oranges and pinks of the lesbian flag — but whether with a hammer or a scalpel, the cinematography and storyboarding deftly capture underlying desires.

The most ostentatious detail, and one that will definitely disorient some viewers, is that the show’s aesthetic can change radically from episode to episode. Director Takashi Sakuma confirmed in an interview that the series doesn’t have a chief animation director (the person responsible for keeping character and background designs consistent), and that Soigne studio instead empowered its episode directors to go wild. They did.

While the change-ups can be a tad distracting at first, these stylistic shifts are well-executed enough to make up for it, making each date and drinking session memorable. Episode 3 is defined by incredibly loose linework that conveys the carefree energy of fast friends, while in episode 9, Botan and Ibuki’s feelings for each other grow so large that the background melts away entirely.

Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk gains momentum, becoming an under-the-radar gem. 

The romantic payoff is excellent, but admittedly, it does take time for Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk to get there. The first few episodes focus on the less compelling “alcohol hobby show” conceit, which is fine but not nearly as thoughtfully handled as the rest of the story. It’s mostly a source of nerdy explanations rather than anything deeper; for instance, the series never delves into the depths of binge drinking and addiction.

But then week after week, small, seemingly throwaway moments come together into a greater whole, transforming the series from another breezy hobby show into something that burns with (almost) as much queer tension as Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk is an artfully crafted, under-the-radar gem that’s a great send-off to Pride Month.

Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk is available now on Crunchyroll.