The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (TV) Review
Yeek, been a while, hasn't it? Well, I've got enough material now to keep me going for a few weeks, so I should be a little better, at least for a while.
Despite the fact that it's been three weeks since my last update, I really don't have much to talk about. Been replaying Final Fantasy Tactics for about the billionth time. That game never really gets old for me. Also playing Titan Quest, the Diablo clone I commented on previously. That will likely be next week's update. Oh, and a little update to the last post: I acquired a copy Re-ACT Final Tuned, the expansion pack for Melty Blood, and I must say it makes some definite improvements over the base game. I don't like everything they did, (why did they have to mess with my Arcueid, durnit) but most of the new stuff is pretty awesome. The 'Heat' system and the addition of an arcade mode are great, and the new characters are a lot of fun, Satsuki especially.
Okay, quick bit about the Fourth of July. (My apologies to my international readers. As an American citizen, I am not only permitted, but am in fact obligated to show a bit of national chauvinism at this time of the year; it's in the Constitution. Just please bear with me.) We were kind of lazy this year, so we didn't go down to the park to see the fireworks. Which turned out just fine, since the fireworks came to us. Nature went, "Fireworks? You call those fireworks? Pfft, lemme show you something." It was probably the best lightning storm I will ever witness in my life. One bolt filled half the sky with zig-zagging arcs. As lightning storms go, that was an easy Eleven.
Not too long ago I did a Mini-Update raving about a T.V. series called "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Well, that series just finished it's run this last week, so I thought now would a good time to give it my final review, so we can bring this chapter of the blog to a close. Thus, I present The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
I may as well say it right off and get it out of the way: I liked Haruhi, and found it to be quite a good show. So, if you were expecting a fair and unbiased review, then... Hi, you must be new here! (Yes, I know I've used that joke before; I don't care. I like it, and I'll probably use it again.) That said, though, a couple of the statements I made in my last post on the subject were a trifle hasty. We'll get to those a bit later.
First, the good parts of Haruhi. The thing that'll really hit you, about as soon as you start watching the show is the animation. I won't go so far as to call it revolutionary, mostly because I rather doubt that many animation companies will follow it's example. So I will settle for slightly stronger but less controversial adjectives, like jaw-dropping and eye-popping. The show maintains near movie quality animation pretty much all the way through. It only being a fourteen episode series helps, but even so, the budget must have been phenomenal. And beyond the sheer level of quality was the attention to detail. This biggest example of this was how they completely avoided the Static Face Syndrome. Anyone who's watched more than ten minute of anime will know what I'm talking about here: it's where you have a shot of a character's face where nothing moves except the mouth, often for a good chunk of time. In Haruhi, we don't get this; character's expressions change, their postures shift. It really makes the whole suspension of disbelief thing a little less difficult. One final note about the visuals: this series contains some of the most seamless CG I've ever seen in an anime, especially in episode twelve, it took me a couple times through to realize what all was CG.
Moving past the visual elements, we come to the auditory. Voice acting was incredible. Every actor in the series was brilliant, but Aya Hirano as Haruhi stole the show. She captured Haruhi's many many different moods perfectly. Plus, the woman can sing. She did both the opening and the ending theme, plus both insert songs. Yuki Matsuoka (one of my personal favorite voice actors) as Tsuruya was also genius in action, and did not get nearly enough screen time. On the musical side, the opening and ending themes were great, and the animation sequences that accompanied them were great fun. Particularly the ED. The background music was, well... present. For most part it just did its job, but there were a few stand out moments. The use of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 in the final episode being one of them.
So far I've been pretty liberal with my flattering adjectives, but that doesn't mean I didn't find any fault with the show. My biggest quibble is one that pretty much anyone who has ever talked about the series has touched on: the airing order. What they did was they broke up the main plotline, the first book, into three chunks of two episodes each, and then set them at the beginning, middle, and end of the series, and dropped various chapters from the rest of the book series in between them to flesh it out into a full season's worth of episodes. Now, I can understand why they did this. Fourteen episodes wasn't nearly enough runtime to cover the entire book series, and at the same time there was no way to stretch just the first book to fill that much space. Doing the first two books would have been a way to fill the entire run, but would have left viewers with the feeling they had just watched two separate shows, while putting the whole of the main storyline first would have made the extra chapters feel even more disconnected than they already do. So, I don't know if there really was a better way for them to order the show, but they way they did do it meant the series peaked around episode eleven or twelve, and, at least for me, there wasn't a lot of incentive to finish watching after that.
Aside from their monkeying with story order, the show remained pretty faithful to the books. Leaving in Kyon's sarcastic, rapid-fire narration was a nice touch, and the character designs, with the exception of anime-fying the hair colors a bit, remained the same as in the books' illustrations. The show is very good, and, thanks to Kyon's commentary, downright hilarious, but the airing order is enough of a problem for me to knock it down a bit. So, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya gets a Ten out of Eleven, though if I were in the habit of decimal scores it would be about a ten point seven.
Which means that Azumanga remains as my all-time favorite T.V. series, at least until Yotsubato! gets animated. Next time, as I stated above, I will be reviewing Titan Quest. Hope to see you then!
Despite the fact that it's been three weeks since my last update, I really don't have much to talk about. Been replaying Final Fantasy Tactics for about the billionth time. That game never really gets old for me. Also playing Titan Quest, the Diablo clone I commented on previously. That will likely be next week's update. Oh, and a little update to the last post: I acquired a copy Re-ACT Final Tuned, the expansion pack for Melty Blood, and I must say it makes some definite improvements over the base game. I don't like everything they did, (why did they have to mess with my Arcueid, durnit) but most of the new stuff is pretty awesome. The 'Heat' system and the addition of an arcade mode are great, and the new characters are a lot of fun, Satsuki especially.
Okay, quick bit about the Fourth of July. (My apologies to my international readers. As an American citizen, I am not only permitted, but am in fact obligated to show a bit of national chauvinism at this time of the year; it's in the Constitution. Just please bear with me.) We were kind of lazy this year, so we didn't go down to the park to see the fireworks. Which turned out just fine, since the fireworks came to us. Nature went, "Fireworks? You call those fireworks? Pfft, lemme show you something." It was probably the best lightning storm I will ever witness in my life. One bolt filled half the sky with zig-zagging arcs. As lightning storms go, that was an easy Eleven.
Not too long ago I did a Mini-Update raving about a T.V. series called "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Well, that series just finished it's run this last week, so I thought now would a good time to give it my final review, so we can bring this chapter of the blog to a close. Thus, I present The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
I may as well say it right off and get it out of the way: I liked Haruhi, and found it to be quite a good show. So, if you were expecting a fair and unbiased review, then... Hi, you must be new here! (Yes, I know I've used that joke before; I don't care. I like it, and I'll probably use it again.) That said, though, a couple of the statements I made in my last post on the subject were a trifle hasty. We'll get to those a bit later.
First, the good parts of Haruhi. The thing that'll really hit you, about as soon as you start watching the show is the animation. I won't go so far as to call it revolutionary, mostly because I rather doubt that many animation companies will follow it's example. So I will settle for slightly stronger but less controversial adjectives, like jaw-dropping and eye-popping. The show maintains near movie quality animation pretty much all the way through. It only being a fourteen episode series helps, but even so, the budget must have been phenomenal. And beyond the sheer level of quality was the attention to detail. This biggest example of this was how they completely avoided the Static Face Syndrome. Anyone who's watched more than ten minute of anime will know what I'm talking about here: it's where you have a shot of a character's face where nothing moves except the mouth, often for a good chunk of time. In Haruhi, we don't get this; character's expressions change, their postures shift. It really makes the whole suspension of disbelief thing a little less difficult. One final note about the visuals: this series contains some of the most seamless CG I've ever seen in an anime, especially in episode twelve, it took me a couple times through to realize what all was CG.
Moving past the visual elements, we come to the auditory. Voice acting was incredible. Every actor in the series was brilliant, but Aya Hirano as Haruhi stole the show. She captured Haruhi's many many different moods perfectly. Plus, the woman can sing. She did both the opening and the ending theme, plus both insert songs. Yuki Matsuoka (one of my personal favorite voice actors) as Tsuruya was also genius in action, and did not get nearly enough screen time. On the musical side, the opening and ending themes were great, and the animation sequences that accompanied them were great fun. Particularly the ED. The background music was, well... present. For most part it just did its job, but there were a few stand out moments. The use of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 in the final episode being one of them.
So far I've been pretty liberal with my flattering adjectives, but that doesn't mean I didn't find any fault with the show. My biggest quibble is one that pretty much anyone who has ever talked about the series has touched on: the airing order. What they did was they broke up the main plotline, the first book, into three chunks of two episodes each, and then set them at the beginning, middle, and end of the series, and dropped various chapters from the rest of the book series in between them to flesh it out into a full season's worth of episodes. Now, I can understand why they did this. Fourteen episodes wasn't nearly enough runtime to cover the entire book series, and at the same time there was no way to stretch just the first book to fill that much space. Doing the first two books would have been a way to fill the entire run, but would have left viewers with the feeling they had just watched two separate shows, while putting the whole of the main storyline first would have made the extra chapters feel even more disconnected than they already do. So, I don't know if there really was a better way for them to order the show, but they way they did do it meant the series peaked around episode eleven or twelve, and, at least for me, there wasn't a lot of incentive to finish watching after that.
Aside from their monkeying with story order, the show remained pretty faithful to the books. Leaving in Kyon's sarcastic, rapid-fire narration was a nice touch, and the character designs, with the exception of anime-fying the hair colors a bit, remained the same as in the books' illustrations. The show is very good, and, thanks to Kyon's commentary, downright hilarious, but the airing order is enough of a problem for me to knock it down a bit. So, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya gets a Ten out of Eleven, though if I were in the habit of decimal scores it would be about a ten point seven.
Final Score:
10/11
10/11
Which means that Azumanga remains as my all-time favorite T.V. series, at least until Yotsubato! gets animated. Next time, as I stated above, I will be reviewing Titan Quest. Hope to see you then!
posted by Mr. the Tiger at 12:15
4 Comments:
Okay now that you've peaked my intrest once again I have but two questions - -
1. Did you find an english dubbed version or did you enjoy the series in Nippongo?
2. How do I get a 'good' version to enjoy myself? :)
I really do need to get back in the books - I lost track for a bit while waiting for the translation.
Either way a good sign if the show can even come close to keeping par with the books.
Well, it's a bit early for a dub just yet. The show just finished airing in Japan a couple weeks ago, and none of the localization companies have picked it up yet. (Which comes as something of a suprize to me; the fansubs of the show are blisteringly popular. I suppose compared to the much more marketable shows that have finished recently, like Fate/Stay Night and Black Lagoon, Haruhi is still too much of a gamble.)
As for where you can get it: I really don't like to put that kind of info on the blog...
No worries - - I'll keep my eyes open as I wander the web - last thing I want to do is commericalize your site.
Well at least until they start sending you large amounts of money first :)
Someone giving me money to write in this blog? Hah, that's about as likely as, I dunno, me updating regularly, or something crazy like that....
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