Josee, the Tiger and the Fish

ジョゼと虎と魚たち (Josee to Tora to Sakana-tachi)

8.6(1)

OtakuDen

8.4(281,060)

MAL Score

Ranked #247

Popularity #473

Drama
Romance
Adult Cast
Visual Arts

Episodes: 1
Duration: 1 hr 38 min
Aired: Dec 25, 2020
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

University student Tsuneo Suzukawa pours his energy into diving and marine biology, balancing multiple part-time jobs to save for studying abroad. One night, an unexpected accident brings him into contact with a wheelchair-bound young woman named Kumiko, who insists on being called “Josee,” sending his carefully planned routine in an entirely new direction.

Josee’s sharp tongue and guarded attitude make a strong first impression, but her grandmother persuades Tsuneo to take a paid position as Josee’s caretaker. What begins as a practical way to earn money quickly becomes more complicated as Tsuneo starts to understand the longing behind Josee’s behavior: a desire to see the world beyond the limits of her daily life. As he chooses to stay and accompany her on small explorations, their time together reveals how their shared determination—and the ways they challenge one another—may help both reach for the futures they want.

Otaku Consensus

Josee, the Tiger and the Fish earns its strong MAL and AniList standing because Koutarou Tamura turns Seiko Tanabe’s compact 1985 story into a polished, emotionally legible feature, with BONES’ character animation and the film’s shared-dreams arc doing the heaviest lifting. Critics repeatedly praise its grounded handling of disability, ambition, and young-adult romance, while the consistent knock is that its story beats are familiar and comparatively simple rather than formally surprising.

Why You Should Watch

If you want a young-adult romance that treats love as a negotiation between care work, money, creative ambition, and bodily limits, this is the compact feature to pick. It scratches a similar emotional itch to A Silent Voice’s concern for disability and emotional accountability, but trades school-age guilt for college-era pressure: jobs, study plans, skill-building, and the fear of shrinking your life to what is safe. BONES gives the relationship tactile everyday specificity, from Josee’s drawing world to Tsuneo’s marine-biology and scuba horizon. Viewers who dislike contrived fantasy hooks or endless will-they-won’t-they pacing will appreciate that the film spends its runtime on practical choices and mutual provocation. The caveat: it aims for catharsis over narrative novelty, so come for execution, not reinvention.

Key Characters

J
Josee(VA: Kaya Kiyohara)
Josee stands out because her tsundere defensiveness is tied to artistic self-fashioning and a need for control, not just romantic prickliness.
T
Tsuneo Suzukawa(VA: Taishi Nakagawa)
Tsuneo is a notably grounded romance lead: his kindness competes with a disciplined career map built around diving, marine biology, and studying abroad.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
BONES produced the story as a single theatrical feature rather than a TV-length romance arc, giving it the shape of an expanded short story with little room for side-plot sprawl.
2
The adaptation has literary roots: it comes from a 1985 short story by Akutagawa Prize-winning author Seiko Tanabe, with the anime version directed by Koutarou Tamura and scripted by Sayaka Kuwamura.
3
Its visual identity is split across notable craft roles: Nao Emoto provided the original character designs, Haruko Iizuka handled animation character design, Toshihiro Kawamoto is credited for layout design, and Yuuji Kaneko served as art director.
4
For a romance film, its AniList tag profile is unusually specific: Disability at 96%, Drawing at 70%, Scuba Diving at 61%, and College at 58%, placing practical life texture alongside the emotional arc.
5
Audience reception has stayed high across major anime databases, with an 8.38 MAL score from more than 281,000 votes and an AniList score of 83/100 with 7,573 favorites.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The film opened in Japan on December 25, 2020, which is why some English-language reviews discuss it among 2021 anime films despite its official Japanese release year being 2020.
Fun fact 2: Seiko Tanabe, the original creator, was an Akutagawa Prize-winning writer, giving the film a source-material pedigree outside the usual manga and light-novel pipeline.
Fun fact 3: The production credits separate original character design and animation character design, with Nao Emoto credited for the former and Haruko Iizuka for the latter.
Fun fact 4: The main Japanese voice roles are credited to Kaya Kiyohara as Josee and Taishi Nakagawa as Tsuneo Suzukawa, keeping the cast list focused tightly on the central pair.
Fun fact 5: On MAL, the film ranks far higher in score than in sheer popularity: #247 by rating versus #473 by popularity, a sign of strong approval among viewers who seek it out.