Kyoto Animation are fast establishing themselves as one of the best animation companies in Japan, despite being so small that they can only work on one series per season. After the success of last year’s AIR, they have scored another hit with the otaku, the hardcore anime fandom, with Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu.
Just as with AIR, the anime looks beautiful. Cute character designs, superbly detailed backgrounds and animation so fluid it makes water jealous. The cast are all perfect, the music always fits well and action scenes really are explosive.
But like AIR, even though I initially liked the series, I ended up disappointed. Haruhi is a much more entertaining series than AIR overall, but nothing near as brilliant as I had hoped it would be.
I raved about the first episode after I saw it, an inspired pastiche of student filmmaking. It takes some good animation to reproduce bad camera work, and the hilarity of watching a terrible piece of filmmaking, accompanied by the extreme sarcasm of the cameraman as he watched the final edited piece, made me think we were going to have a new Genshiken, but better: a series about normal students with delusions of grandeur, perhaps in a film-making club.
What we got was very different. One boy (two really, but the other is a bit of a non-entity) is in a club with three girls who fit neatly into quiet/mysterious, shy/cute and bossy/heart-of-gold-underneath moulds. There’s more to Haruhi than meets the eye, and indeed, just about everyone gathered around her is possessed of unusual powers as a result. What makes this palatable is that it is all filtered through the perspective of the narrator, Kyon, an extremely sarcastic and sceptical boy who is thrown into an unbelievable world but still sees it in his inimically glib, cynical way. This unusual perspective is what makes the show work. In another twist, the episodes are told out of sequence, mixed up so that often, we hear references to things in the past we have yet to see. This sometimes gives interesting effects, and makes the series start off in a more interesting way, but is occasionally messy and makes one or two episodes seem very inconsequential, crucial in a show of only 14. Several of the action scenes involving the powers of the SOS Brigade (the aforementioned club Haruhi formed to investigate the paranormal, unaware of how much of what she seeks is right in front of her) are extremely impressive, there are some clever genre-hopping moments, and I DID like the characters, but in the end, the lack of story, the frequent humour mis-fires, the blatant targeting of teenaged boys’ sex drives and the laziness of the resolutions of most of the extremely artificial problems made this feel like a fun anime trifle, not the instant classic its proponents wish it to be.
A great-looking and fun series; I would like to see another. Do not, however, believe the hype.
(Originally posted 04.07.2006, before the second season and the movie)
No comments:
Post a Comment