Canvas2 – 11

Summary:
Back from Hokkaido, Elis is apparently staying with Tomoko and away from Hiroki. At home alone, Hiroki turns the page to the calendar and notices that Elis’ birthday and the sports festival are both coming up, both falling on the September 27th. When she goes to school the next day, Elis finds out that she’s been made the anchor for the relay race during her absence. In art class, she’s still visibly uncomfortable around Hiroki. Kana and Sumire, who are on the sports festival executive committee, also seem to want to join Hiroki and Elis. They encounter Tomoko, and after learning that Elis is living with her, appoint her to be the information staff. The night before the festival, Elis is making an omelet lunch for Hiroki (he likes it sweet), but accidentally puts in all of the sugar when Tomoko starts talking about Kiri and Hiroki giving her a birthday present. Meanwhile, Hiroki tells Kiri on the telephone that what he told her last time was a lie and that he and Elis actually went to Hokkaido.
During the festival, while she’s running the relay, Elis accidentally drops the baton after seeing Hiroki and Kiri together cheering for her. At lunch, Elis is unable to pull out what she prepared after she sees Kiri’s impressive boxed lunch, which also has omelet in it. She makes up an excuse to go buy some drinks, but instead gives the omelet she made to Shouta. At executive committee tent, Tomoko tells Kana and Sumire what’s been going on. The group decides to make Elis participate in borrowing competition and plan to assign her a paper that tells her to find the person she likes. However, Kiri is also participating, and she runs into Elis’ lane and takes her note. Elis takes the one Kiri was supposed to get, which said “most important thing.” While Kiri knocks some sense into Kana and Sumire after catching onto their scheme, Elis goes and gets Hiroki, and the two cross the finish line together. At his request, Elis goes home with Hiroki so that he can give her a birthday present. She’s surprised when he puts a cake in front of her, one similar to what she saw in a book when she was young and wanted to eat. After taking a bite of the cake, Elis, nearly in tears, decides to come back home.

I have to respect Elis a little for deciding to live with Tomoko in order to get away from Hiroki. It A) gives her time to think, B) saves her from having so many painful run-ins with Hiroki, C) saves us from having to see a lot of unnecessary angst (though we get enough of that anyway), but most importantly, it D) gives Tomoko more screen time. That’s the highlight of the episode for me – Elis and Tomoko’s sleepwear – which should say a lot about how the rest of the episode went.
The animation is worse than usual and the Elis-choosing-Hiroki-and-running-through-the-finish-line part is corny as hell. At the end, Elis decides to come back home, which means we’re back to status quo. I like Elis’ character, but I’m very much at the point where I want to see more Kiri episodes, not more Elis angst. Unfortunately, next episode looks like Elis filler with a random little girl running around. Definitely not looking forward to that… *sigh*