I want to bring back some of Director Yasuhiro Takemoto's comment about this series, and what he thought about adapting Hyou-ka into an anime
Quote:
Originally Posted by ultimatemegax
He said it was difficult to make it into an anime, but he feels he's done a good job.
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Looking at this episode, I feel that not only had he (and the staff) done a good job, but I honestly believe they made excellent improvements on the series when compared with the original novel.
I guess it should go without saying at this point, but I remain impressed with the visual aspect of this anime, not only in terms of the animation and attention to details (or how funny it is ... I seriously laughed when Chitanda got out of the classroom with Ibara only for her to come back again to get him (an old joke, but still fun to watch
), or how when Houtarou realized he was about to get dragged around to search the entire student campus
), but how well the art manages to deliver important clues about the cast and their personalities as well as allows us to learn more about them via showing, not telling. It's incredible just how good this episode had been at giving a lot of important information and clarification about our leads, to the point where I was left having to rearrange my earlier impressions about both Houtarou and Eru.
I suppose that if I was going to talk about the visuals, I should start with how much we got to learn as well as understand about Houtarou himself. I think that
Acejem was right in saying that Houtarou energy saving mode is more of a facade than anything else, since his reasons for refusing to help Eru were more out of realization that this isn't something that anyone can really take on lightly, as well as him helping her along at the end. In a lot of ways, I'm reminded of Claude from
Ikoku Meiro no Croisée, since both of them have a certain loner aura, but without the anti-social mindset and they certainly are crude and a little unintentionally callous but are deep down actually very considerate and caring (as well as having a conscience, going by how unsettled he was when Eru brought up the Secret Club thing, since he did trick her and felt rather bad when should took it as a sign of his intelligence). Of course, there is an area that makes Houtarou more interesting (and likable) and that is how we get to see how his mind works and how does he view the world.
I didn't really understand what was the point of having Houtarou experience these ''alternate reality scenes'' in the past two episodes other than perhaps to give the animators some differing scenes to experiment on, but in here I get what they were gunning for. The reason of having Houtarou thinking about the events he sees in such a manner isn't only to make impressive looking scenes, it's to also make us understand how exactly does someone like Houtarou who isn't really all that intelligent could manage to solve these puzzles so easily by merely taking in a few details and without further research.
What these alternate reality scenes aim to do is give us an idea of just how imaginative and attentive Oreki really is. When he noticed these sensors(lol) or when he deduced where the safe was from just going into the room and managing to figure out what the Senpai was hiding, when he kept on trying to avoid eye contact with Eru and focused on the customers newspaper all the while imagining her story with her uncle as a pop-up book, or when he saw Eru as being like a child trying to find something she lost ... these are scenes that give us insight into how Houtarou views the world, how he solves the ''mysteries'' by reconstructing the world in a different light to get to the answer he wants, how his mind wanders into an imaginary world where he can see people in the way they are deep down, and how creative his brain actually is .
If Eru's strong aspects are her high senses of smell and memory, Houtarou's key strength is his creative mind and attention to details. With that, I can now see where Houtarou Oreki's potential is at that
Blue-kun once told me about, and that he might really become an interesting protagonist.
Of course, what makes this all the more impressive is that we didn't need a lot of dialogue to understand all of this. It was merely by the body language and the art that all this got across. Some of it was pointed out yes like this weeks case, but a lot of things weren't. The scene at the café where we got to see that despite his claims of constantly energy saving and not caring much about what happens around him, Houtarou still ended up becoming very tense the moment Eru told him she was about to confess to him, thinking she was about to till him she loved him. His behavior from not really knowing how to answer and avoiding any sort of eye contact (or looking at her directly for that matter) till he got a better idea of what she meant, or how his thought about how she was like a child matched her previous behavior (grabbing him without remorse or shame, ignoring his personal space etc.) and her answer to every time he helped her with a simple child-like nod.
The same can be seen when he was taking his mid-terms, where we got across the entire timespan in less than a minute of footage by simply showing us what was the essence of a student taking these exams would feel like. First day of studying, a quick exam, second day studying, a bit longer like, third day and you see him starting to worry and the pressure getting to him
before having what seemed like the longest sitting for him. I could relate to that scene since it felt like an abridged version of my high school exam years haha. In a lot of ways, I'm reminded of how this effective time usage is similar to
Boy's on the Slope and how despite the quick pacing and fast forwarding in the in-story time, the show still manages to get the point across just as well if it had spent more time on it.
Of course, no matter how great the visual-audio experience is, it remains to be seen if the writing can match up to it. I'm still liking the chemistry between Oreki and Chitanda, and do think they might make for a cute couple if the story decides to go down that route (I don't know if it does, or if it will end as a good thing, considering the ''bittersweet'' warning stuck here ... I hate to have the story bring two characters with a lot of nice interactions and good feelings emitting from them only to separate them in the end, so I'll be keeping my distance for the time being from that aspect
) but so far, the Achilles heel for myself remains how little there is in terms of substance there is to this story. We did manage to get a little closer to what appears to be a continuous storyline, but I have been finding myself less interested in the mysteries going by how poor the pay off had been for them, and worry that this one will be the same, especially we seen it having this much importance on Eru and her very being (or so we are told).
Regardless of how the future episodes might end playing out, I thought that for the 3rd episode, this one was so far the best I had scene from this show, and gives me more hope for the 7th one