Love. One of the most fundamental of all human emotions, and one that can be expressed in so many ways. Love for an idea, love for another person, love for an artform. What happens when you get a series that attempts to address all of these types of love? In the case of Netflix’s anime original Love Through a Prism, you get an intriguing canvas, but one frustratingly missing in the finer details that mark a true work of genius.
Now, let us travel back in time to the early 1990’s, when a young manga artist by the name of Yoko Kamio launched a little series named Hana Yori Dango, or Boys Over Flowers as it is translated for English-speaking audiences. Kamio’s story about a respectable middle-class girl who enters an elite high school and finds herself attracting the attention of a clique of the richest (and most handsome) boys in the student body became an overnight sensation. While Boys Over Flowers did receive a release in the American market, it is hard to explain to Westerners just how huge this series was in East Asia for most the 1990’s. It was a seminal work in Japan, still holding the title of best-selling shoujo manga ever to this day, and inspiring countless copycats who recycled its tropes until they became standard cliches of the shoujo genre. It found massive success in South Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. In all of these countries it received a localized live action TV series adaptation that dominated the ratings and influenced popular culture.
Therefore, when Netflix announced in 2025 that it would stream a brand-new shoujo series created by Ms. Kamio exclusively for its service, I had my interest peaked. I never had the chance to get into Boys Over Flowers as it was a little bit before my time and my interests in the early 2000’s tended towards shonen anime. That this new show called Love Through a Prism (or Prism Rondo in Japanese) was billed as a historical drama made me even more interested.
The plot unfolds in the early 20th century, as Meiji Japan continued its efforts to become a modern industrialized nation. A young woman named Lili Ichijoin travels from her hometown of Yokohama to London, England at the height of its imperial glory and prestige as a world city. Lili is from a long line of kimono makers, but she has defied the expectations of her mother to marry and carry on the family tradition to pursue Western-style painting. Given a six-month deadline to become the best in her classroom or return home and marry a suitable husband, Lili is determined to take England by storm.
This is a pretty strong hook for the story, but one that gets frustratingly sidelined very quickly. Within hours of arriving in England, Lili encounters an eccentric but brilliant young artist by the name of Kit Church. She develops an almost instant distaste for him, which only deepens when she discovers that Kit is the number one student at the art academy she has enrolled in, Saint Thomas Art Academy. She will have to beat him in an exam to earn her place, but Kit possesses an artistic vision practically unmatched among his peers. Oh, and she begins to develop a poorly disguised crush on him almost immediately, and maybe Kit returns it? It is sort of hard to tell in the early episodes because Kit barely emotes anything outside of Lili’s imagination and on his drawing pad, but we will get back to that later.
Anime is one of the most notable exports of Japanese art in the 21st century, having helped redefine the entire layout of plot structure, artistic perspective, and overall aesthetic in global animation. It also owes a heavy debt to the Western tradition of comic books and theatrical animation shorts during its formative years. Therefore, an anime that proposes to examine Western art as it stood at the beginning of the 20th century should in theory be of major interest. This is one of the first places Love Through a Prism falls short. While it makes nods to various art trends in Turn of the Century Europe including Japonisme (the influence of traditional Japanese art on French and other Western European artists in the late 19th century) and the Art Nouveau movement (Lili appears to be a big fan of Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec based on the postcards hanging in her bedroom), it never gets much beyond the surface level. There are a handful of references to real world artists and artistic trends in the show’s script, but it is very scattershot and honestly seems of secondary concern to the love story being told between Lili and Kit.
Which leads us to the second problem with the story. The love story is frankly not very romantic. There are a number of very cute moments where Lili and Kit spend time with one another and supposedly deepen their romantic affections, but you could just as easily have slightly recontextualized these scenes and made them entirely Platonic. Lili builds up a number of other friendships over the story that show far more intensity and emotional depth than her constant fuming at the icy and remote Kit. This can be excused to some extent. Kit and Lili live in a very conservative, strait-laced era where interclass and interracial relationships are judged far more harshly than in the 21st century. Except…
We now arrive at my third complaint about Love Through a Prism: How little it uses the setting to set up conflict and explore social themes. Honestly, it at times felt that the Edwardian England depicted in this show was almost a fantasy nation with little in common with its real-life counterpart. The Great Britain of the early 20th century was a nation in the midst of great social change despite its outwards adherence to century old traditions. The Suffragette movement was in full swing, kindling some of the first flames of modern feminist ideology. There was great interclass conflicts between the rich and the poor that were manifesting in new political movements that would dominate 20th century British politics. Britain’s relationship with its vast colonial empire was under slow but steady revision. There was a wave of militarism sweeping the land that portended a great tragedy in just a few short years. Love Through a Prism only addresses the first of these briefly. The last gets more attention, but in a very strange and roundabout way. Foreign nations are never mentioned by name, dates are rarely clearly established, and the main cast seems oddly uninvolved with the greater world beyond their art classes and family drama, which when you consider that Kamio made Kit’s family have a direct link to the unfolding international conflicts, seems a bewildering choice. Why choose to explain it in only the vaguest details? It seems tied to another trend in this show, to gloss over any conflict that does not stem from poorly communicated affection or attempts to inspire others to create greater artworks. This point requires further discussion to fully expose the problems it creates in the overall narrative. Some major spoilers are ahead so be advised if you wish to continue reading.
Lili being a middle-class Japanese woman in love with Kit, who turns out to be the younger son of a duke, one of the richest men in the country and a senior diplomat trying to avert war, is treated with surprisingly little controversy by her peers. It is partially excused early on in the series by Saint Thomas being described as a school where students are judged purely on merit rather than race, sex, or wealth, but it is rarely remarked upon even by characters outside of this circle. I am not someone who feels the need to be revisionist about every aspect of British cultural prejudice, but when rural English farmers come across Kit and Lili hiking through the countryside and the only comment they can make is what a cute couple the pair make (which causes Lili to blush bright pink in true anime fashion), something is amiss. I would not necessarily expect hostility, but at least some astonishment from the farmers at meeting a Japanese woman for the first time would be appropriate. It would have been a very unusual event in rural England circa 1913. The only character who talks at any length about Japanese stereotypes is Lili’s best friend Dorothy, who is depicted as entirely innocent and well-meaning when she assumes all Japanese people are either samurai, ninja, or geisha. It is all played off as a rather bland running joke that is slowly phased out over the course of the story, supposedly balanced by Lili’s occasional swipes at how awful British cuisine is.
It is even odder when a Mean Girls-style posse of bullies at Saint Thomas who envy Lili for both her skill and connection to Kit make fun of her for her ‘heavy accent’, but Lili brushes them off and it is rarely referenced afterwords. This is not helped by the fact that in neither the Japanese nor English language tracks does Lili speak with any sort of unique accent. It is even stranger when you have the example of Shinnosuke ‘Shin’ Kobayakawa, a fellow Japanese art student at the school and a dogged nice guy who is friendly with Kit and would like to be more than friends with Lili. Everyone notes Shin’s English is impeccably good and on the level of a native speaker, but Lili speaks the exact same way as he does. How then does Lili sound ‘foreign’ compared to Shin?
In the Japanese language track, it would be hard to distinguish any difference between characters of different nationalities or regions because they all speak and act the same way with no emphasis on the foreignness of the setting Lili has traveled to. This is compounded by the clumsy insertion of standard anime tropes like the characters turning super-deformed and screaming at the top of their lungs when they get annoyed over something. This feels very out of place in an otherwise grounded setting and particularly in a society still very much influenced by the social mores of the Victorian era. It came off as a typical shoujo anime dressing itself up in a European frock coat and top hat to stand out, but otherwise changing nothing in its tone or content, and over time this became very off-putting to me as a viewer.
Nowhere are the above issues more obvious than when dealing with the pair of Peter Anthony and Joffrey O’Brien, Kit’s two guy pals at Saint Thomas who fill out the main cast. Peter is Indian, Joffrey is described as a ‘minor Irish aristocrat’; both would fit in with the cast of a hundred other shoujo romantic comedies in terms of the stock archetypes they fill. Peter is studious, serious, level-headed, and hard on himself. Joffrey is flirty, airheaded, a fun drunk, and a wannabe Casanova. There is nothing about them that reflects on their supposed social origins or the time period they live in. Peter is a very serious case because his Indian origin gives the series a chance to at least touch on the issue of British imperialism, which for better or worse was a reality of the early 1900’s, but it is never discussed. Not by Peter nor anyone around him. For anyone who was hoping that Love Through a Prism would attempt to be serious historical fiction, this was a major disappointment. I was forced to lower my expectations at that point.
This leads up to the final act of the series. Time passes and Lili discovers one morning in June 1914 that a certain Austrian archduke has been shot in Sarajevo. The world Lili and Kit have been having their little flirtation in is about to be permanently upended, and the unfolding war is treated as a major shock to the group. But this is because it will separate Lili and Kit, and in Kit’s case because he decides to join the Diplomatic Corps. World War I is treated almost entirely in terms of how it frustrates the potential romance between the main characters, and not for the massive death and social upheaval it visited upon Europe and the global political order in general. Lili’s childish inability to openly admit her feelings, a pillar of shoujo romantic narratives, seems grossly inappropriate in light of the bigger events surrounding it.
This is hammered home even more in the final episodes, when we learn none of the characters or their extended family end up serving in the military, nor die during the war or the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed on its tail, or that the Britain that Lili yearns to return to seems untouched by the carnage. It is very odd overall, and even Japan is depicted as sad and depressing not because of any major social changes (the events of World War I being crucial to why Japan descended into unrestrained militarism and dictatorship in the 1930’s), but because Lili is separated from her true loves, Kit and painting. It makes Love Through a Prism come off as a profoundly unserious story that could have easily taken place in the 2010’s and would have been far less offensive for it.
Now that I have spent a sufficient number of words airing my grievances over Kamio’s lightweight storytelling and characterization, I can go on to talk about what is good with the series. First off is the animation and art direction. Love Through a Prism is a very pretty series to look at, with very consistently rendered character art and backgrounds. Much of Edwardian London is brought to life through the use of CGI, but it almost never clashes with the digitally drawn characters who inhabit it. It is very consistent from the beginning of the show to its end, and at many points is well animated too. This is courtesy of WIT Studio calling upon its finest talent and that of many other major players in the anime industry like ufotable and A-1 Pictures. This is not a story that lends itself to major animated sequences, but small details like how characters hold objects like paintbrushes and chisels in their hands look smooth and natural, which helps emphasizes that these characters are skilled artists who take their craft seriously.
There are other clever artistic devices here as well. In the stuffy, dust-filled rooms of old London you can see CGI dust particles twinkling in the background as they come into contact with beams of sunlight pouring through the windows. It is done well enough that it takes some time to realize that it is present at all, which shows a subtlety in art direction that I wish had been applied to the art depicted in the show. Another clever effect was towards the end of the series when episodes are shot mostly in a grayscale filter to emphasize the dreariness of Lili’s life after the war. It looks like an old movie reel complete with dust marks and little grainy imperfections popping onto the screen at small intervals. The only problem with it is that the characters and backgrounds are still drawn in a very sharp modern style and then digitally colored as gray. It still looks like a 21st century animation project, albeit one with a very clever filter put over it.
Naoki “naotyu-” Chiba provides a very elegant and fitting music score that tries to stay in line with the Old-World setting with a heavy emphasis on piano and strings segments. I am not a qualified music critic but I feel overall Chiba did a fine job in his role. His resume shows that most of his experience is working on anime opening and ending songs, so to be able to assemble a whole score for a project like this, where the music needs to be very different from a more standard anime background soundtrack is a strong accomplishment in my book. Nothing in it will become a timeless classic, but it works for what it is.
It is also worth pointing out that the show uses a very unique episode structure. Love Through a Prism is divided into twenty episodes, but not all of them are the same running time. None are shorter than twenty-four minutes, but some span well over a half an hour. This allows the story told in any individual episode to unfold at its own needed pace rather than be cut off or rushed to hit mandatory stopping points. This is further emphasized by the show’s opening sequence, which is about thirty seconds long and seemingly inspired by the Fauvism art movement, with a bold but rather simplistic drawing style completely at odds with the more modern anime aesthetic in the show proper. It was clear that the director was more focused on taking as much time as was needed for the animation and dialogue within the episodes themselves rather than a flashy opening sequence that could have taken time away from the main story. The overall results were uneven, but I would be interested to see this structure applied to other streaming exclusive animated series as well.
The final strong point of Love Through a Prism is its main character, Lili. For all the issues with the story, Lili herself is a perfectly lovable and engaging young woman who you want to succeed. While she acts more like a modern Japanese high school student than a twenty-something bachelorette from Meiji Japan, she is kind, principled, and willing to learn in just about every area except being honest about her romantic feelings for Kit. One thing the writing gets right in this show is that Lili is at her core a born artist. She can try to repress those feelings and attempt to fit in with the more mundane world around her, but she can never find happiness unless she accepts that part of her who is driven to create great works of art. The one thing I can credit about Kit’s character is that he clearly recognizes this part of Lili and wants her to act on it. He is terribly vague and uncommunicative in his methods, and there are other characters who do in a far more straightforward and healthy fashion, but you can tell he means well and it does help make him just a slight bit more human and relatable to the audience.
Overall, Love Through a Prism was a decent viewing experience, if not one that utilized its full potential. Once I adjusted my expectations to take the story for what it was, my overall enjoyment of the series increased. For those who are not as obsessed with the finer details of history, it will likely be even more enjoyable. I would at the very least would be willing to try out and watch another story by Yoko Kamio set in more modern times. I suspect her formula works far better in the original context of a Japanese high school than it does in some far away land in a faraway time. As it stands Love Through a Prism will likely never become a classic as such, but for those who are looking for a pleasant little love story set in a comfy setting and the idea that the passion to create beautiful things will conquer all challenges, this show is for you.
