The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2006 2:57 am
This is a very new title (April 2, 2006 – July 2, 2006 in Japan) I just saw and I wonder if enough people have seen it to make decent conversation on it. Due its newness, it's obviously only available as fansubs, for now, so if you have a strong convinction against them, you propably won't be seeing this series, any time soon.
I would call the series a curious crossbreed of Azumanga Daioh and Serial Experiments Lain. The first curiosity you see watching it is, that the episodes are not in a chronological order, making the whole thing a bizzare memory game, where you must memorize the beginning and the end of each episode to understand, where it goes on the timeline. The purpose of this, I assume, was to both emphasize the quirky nature of time and space in the series and to work around the fact, that chronologically speaking the climax of the story takes place halfway to the series - this way they've gotten it to the last episode, where it belongs.
The plot is a rather difficult thing to convey, without spoilers. In the basics, it's just another high school drama with a cast of bizzare personalities gathered conveniently together around the near-manic, yet oddly charismatic person of Haruhi Suzumiya. In this story, though, you could say that the whole idea behind the story is to explain, just how can such a group of stereotypical anime-personalities come together in a manner that seems downright scripted. In other words, at least some of the characters are aware of the fact, that life shouldn't work like a story and make their theories of why it is happening, nontheless. This curious meta-plot element kept me interested in the series.
Most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but plotwise even that begins to make more sense, as the story develops.
The animation, by the way, I've heard, is shot HDTV quality. It certainly looks good enough, even in the fansubs.
[The end of advertisement]
It'd be fun to see some discussion around this series.
I would call the series a curious crossbreed of Azumanga Daioh and Serial Experiments Lain. The first curiosity you see watching it is, that the episodes are not in a chronological order, making the whole thing a bizzare memory game, where you must memorize the beginning and the end of each episode to understand, where it goes on the timeline. The purpose of this, I assume, was to both emphasize the quirky nature of time and space in the series and to work around the fact, that chronologically speaking the climax of the story takes place halfway to the series - this way they've gotten it to the last episode, where it belongs.
The plot is a rather difficult thing to convey, without spoilers. In the basics, it's just another high school drama with a cast of bizzare personalities gathered conveniently together around the near-manic, yet oddly charismatic person of Haruhi Suzumiya. In this story, though, you could say that the whole idea behind the story is to explain, just how can such a group of stereotypical anime-personalities come together in a manner that seems downright scripted. In other words, at least some of the characters are aware of the fact, that life shouldn't work like a story and make their theories of why it is happening, nontheless. This curious meta-plot element kept me interested in the series.
Most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but plotwise even that begins to make more sense, as the story develops.
The animation, by the way, I've heard, is shot HDTV quality. It certainly looks good enough, even in the fansubs.
[The end of advertisement]
It'd be fun to see some discussion around this series.