Love Through a Prism is the lavish new period romance anime series. It’s mostly set in England of the 1910s; it’s animated primarily by Wit Studio (though with a plethora of collaborating studios in the credits); and it’s co-written by Boys Over Flowers creator Yōko Kamio. To clear up any confusion, this is an original story, though a manga adaptation (not by Kamio) has just launched. As far as the anime goes, its ending is definite enough to make any continuation unlikely.

For all the brickbats that can be thrown against it, Love Through a Prism is darn entertaining. You could patronize it as comfort viewing, but it sometimes excels in ways that transcend proficiency and deserve to be called artistry, which only fits a series about artists. It looks magnificent. It’s a series where a girl can run frantically down a London street, driven by the burning passions of her youth, and still find time to look over at the grand stone government building she’s passing and exclaim how beautiful it is. The series does England proud, be it in the noble architecture, the blossoming countryside, the cultivated gardens, or the sands under Dover’s cliffs. It’s a continual pleasure just to look at.

The anime’s other main asset is its heroine, Lili. She’s ventured from her parents’ home, a kimono shop in Yokohama, to study art at a London college, though her mother only let her go on sufferance. She must become the number one student at the college within six months, or else return to Japan. But Lili’s no starchy student. We first see her on the ship that’s brought her to England, dashing from her cabin, bouncing off the passage walls with a yelp, then comically reversing her steps to close the cabin door. She’s capable of dignity and elegance, but also of floundering energy. In another lovely moment, she emerges from a study, every bit an immaculately polite and serious student... and breaks out in a huge yawn.

Lili’s designed like an old-fashioned Hollywood film starlet, even if her most prominent feature is her puppet-like pointy nose, raising fond memories of Nobuteru Yuki’s designs. She’s immensely expressive, often in very funny ways, even outside the super-deformed moments, which are rationed for bigger laughs. Lili’s further energized by her Japanese voice, at first in familiar enthused-girl mode, but with far more emotional range later – wait for her terrific face-off in a London church. I only checked the actor after finishing the series: it’s Atsumi Tanezaki, who’s also Frieren, Anya (SPY x FAMILY), and another stranger-in-England heroine, Chise in The Ancient Magus’ Bride. But I might like her Lili most of all.

Naturally, Lili meets a boy just after arriving in London. Named Kit, he’s a blond, shabbily-dressed youth sketching seagulls by the Thames with evident skill, before outraging Lili by offering her a lump of charcoal-stained bread. Equally naturally, he’s a student at her new school, the palatial (and fictional) St. Thomas Art Academy, where Lili will study oil painting. Kit is the artistic genius whom Lili must beat to stay in England. But by part two, he’s already helping Lili when she’s targeted by the school’s mean girls, and then tempting her into a trip to the country, and we know where this is going.

How Love Through a Prism handles our expectations within a glaringly generic set-up will divide viewers, and I often felt divided watching it. I hate spoilers, but there are stretches of the story that are laughably predictable, though mixed with less obvious developments and bits of true cleverness. There’s a juicy love-triangle rivalry that’s truncated so fast that I wondered what on earth could make up for it… But in the end, I thought it was justified. Around the middle of the series, there’s an excess of silliness that feels like a shark-jumping nadir, involving a devil-driving maid…. but minutes later, some of that silliness is lampshaded wittily into oblivion. Later, the story invokes the art of animation in an ingenious way to solve one seemingly inescapable story crisis. Then real history gets deployed to create another.

There’s no pretending that Kit is a match for Lili. For all the twists to his story, he’s a mostly reactive, soft-spoken, pretty-boy placeholder, though he’s allowed a few scenes of nuance when he’s taken from Lili by family circumstances. There’s also a treasurable moment which should make British viewers chuckle when he asserts his identity by deliberately messing up his blond hair, as if channeling a certain Prime Minister from a century hence. Otherwise, it’s still fun to watch Kit act in thoroughly thoughtless and infuriating ways, letting Lili display her self-respecting agency by taking none of his tripe. (There’s a great capper to all of this which I won’t spoil.)

But there are far livelier supporting characters than Kit, such as Lili’s always-enthused school-friend Dorothy, who has an otaku-esque fixation on samurai and ninja, but also level-headed attitudes to love and marriage. A poor little rich girl has amusing overtones of Wicked’s Glinda the Good, minus Ariana Grande’s singing. An upright art teacher at first just seems a pedagogical caricature, a clone of the headmaster in SPY x FAMILY, but later he nabs some of the most touching scenes.

Indeed, this is one of those anime where the individual scenes can be immensely moving and well-written even when the surrounding story is at its most rickety. That’s especially true of the last episodes, though they add interest by dropping into artful monochrome for much of the time, punctuated by glimpses of color. The in-story rationale for this device is clear at first, but it gets progressively less convincing. But why worry about it when it looks this good? Love Through a Prism might rehab the image of black-and-white anime among fans after the horrors of Uzumaki.

If you’re someone who ranks series chiefly by their endings, then you may deem this a failure. The conclusion is neither very good nor a memorable trainwreck. There are many better romantic anime, including at least one in a similar timeframe made twenty years ago, Emma: A Victorian Romance. Love Through a Prism surely won’t have anything like the cultural staying power of Boys Over Flowers. But it’s still admirably well-made and thoroughly entertaining.

The series is twenty parts long, with most episodes being TV-standard length. However, some are extended – Episode 6 runs 40 minutes – bringing the series close to a two-cour runtime. The last episode closes out with an extended post-credits epilogue.