The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide

Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai

Theron Martin

Rating: 2 (of 5)

Review: Kyotaro Kakei has always been a bookworm, and even once received what he was told was a ticket that would allow him to enter a special library where a magical book existed. As a teenager he is an elite student at the vast Shiomi Academy, though he regularly eschews offers to join the student council in favor of focusing on his reading and being the sole Literary Club member. One day, shortly after receiving a cryptic text message from someone calling himself The Shepherd, Kyotaro uses a premonition to save the life of Tsugumi, though the effort initially gets mistaken for a molestation attempt since he does accidently cop a feel in the process and a picture of him doing so gets widely-distributed. Once that is sorted out, Tsugumi, her friend Tamamo, and Kyotaro's friend Ikkei all decide to join Kyotaro in the literary club to further Tsugumi's ambition to have fun at Shiomi. Kyotaro, for his part, decides to go along with it because he sees in interacting with Tsugumi the potential to understand some things that he doesn't currently understand. They are all startled when their action is greeted by an approving text message to all of them from The Shepherd.

Daitoshokan is an anime adaptation of a franchise based around an adult visual novel, a point which gradually becomes obvious as the progression of female characters and how they might interact with Kyotaro plays out. It is not quite a harem format, or at least at this point does not give that vibe; the tone is quite different, perhaps a little more somber and contemplative, than such fare usually gets, and the girls introduced so far do not entirely fit the normal formula. There's also the matter of the mystery surrounding The Shepherd, including exactly what he is and why, and what the conversation at the very end of the episode means.

The problem is that the mystery and the offbeat tone simply are not enough to sustain interest. The first episode does show a little capacity for both humor and fan service (although the latter is limited to the breast grab scene and chest-focusing camera angles), but it is not strong in either, and the artistic effort is mediocre at best. Kyotaro and Tsugumi are both mildly interesting as characters, but that's it. While the series does show at least some small modicum of potential, it will have to do better than its first episode to escape Dullsville.

Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai is currently streaming on Funimation.com.

Nick Creamer

Rating: 1

Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai's first episode left me filled with questions. Difficult questions, questions to which there may be no answer. Questions like, what is this show even about? I'd describe the plot for you, but this first episode was honestly closer to a series of truly disjointed, meaningless events. And not even the “disconnected but independently intriguing” vignettes some first episodes use - here, we followed main character Kakei around all day, but by the end I was no closer to discovering what I was supposed to care about. Kakei's love of reading? His ability to see the future, which results in a boob-grab joke that ultimately ends up somehow dictating the plot of the entire episode? The vaguely insinuated ideas about the “Shepherd,” a mysterious figure who seems unnaturally interested in the events of Kaiki's incredibly dull and meaningless daily life?

Another question - was it supposed to be funny? Were there moments when the audience was supposed to laugh at the events on screen? I can postulate that this is true, because many of the show's scenes had a variety of the superficial trappings of jokes. There were times when the characters made strange faces at each other and stopped talking. There were times when characters went “kyaaaaa” and the camera panned up. There were times when nobody talked for a few moments, as if something funny had been said and the show was waiting for the audience to react. But curiously, none of these moments were accompanied by actions or words that could be accused of containing “humor.” Another question, perhaps one never to be answered.

A final question. How was I supposed to invest in this story? Was I supposed to relate to Kakei, whose personality is “I like books”? When he finally declares that boob-grab target Shirasaki is “acting on something other than emotions or words,” am I supposed to take his sudden fascination with her as reflective of an understandable human emotion? And what of Shirasaki - what about her “Happiness Plan” that doesn't actually have any structure or purpose at all? Am I supposed to be invested in her simply because she exists?

Pondering these questions would have perhaps been more entertaining if the show offered solid production, but unfortunately, this was also not to be. The characters were frequently off-model, their base designs weren't particularly compelling in the first place, and there wasn't much animation to speak of. In the end, Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai offers nothing but questions, and none of those questions are related to anything the show is actually trying to do.

Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai is available streaming at Funimation.

Hope Chapman

Rating: 1

Trying to watch Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai is like trying to eat air. Based on a year-old dating sim VN, this is a show with absolutely zero ideas the likes of which I haven't seen in a very long time. It's baffling. This season's Fruit of Grisaia and In Search of the Lost Future had hooks. I didn't care for either show, but at least they had a hook: weird characters, dark plot twists, something to illicit mild interest.

Daitoshokan kind of pretends to have a hook, but it's so vaguely defined, (our bland male lead who goes to normal high school might turn out to be "the shepherd," a figure that grants wishes maybe/kinda/perhaps,) that it doesn't take at all. That leaves us with the rest of the show, which stretches the "male lead and his pervy guy friend meet 3+ girls at their new school and decide to start a friends-making-nothing-doing-going-home-club-thing" to take up the full twenty-minute episode. This one is called the Library Club because our leading man likes books, but his passion for books isn't tangible or relevant to the story at all. You could substitute the library clubroom with a gym-storehouse clubroom or a backstage-of-the-auditorium clubroom and nothing would change. None of his new friends/love interests have any unique or interesting traits. It's just a giant pile of bland zilch interrupted only by a contrived "protagonist was photographed groping a girl but it was just an accident" conflict that resolves itself by episode's end. It's not an intentionally plotless GJ-bu type comedy either. There are very few jokes of any kind, but there's no dramatic sad backstory or shocking twists on formula here either. It accomplishes nothing on any intellectual or emotional level, either high, low, or even middling. It barely exists.

Don't bishoujo games need to have more of a hook than this to get their own anime? It's not 2007 anymore, studios aren't just grabbing any old eroge with decent sales or sale potential and slinging it up on the TV. (Otome games on the other hand...no, you know what, not even those! There's still more of a quality barrier there that restricts the volume of such pointless productions.) I don't understand how adaptations like this get green-lit in what is supposedly a highly competitive market. I nearly fell asleep trying to write about it. Please do not waste your time.

Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai is available streaming on Funimation.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 2  (out of 5)

Kyoutaro Kakei loves to read in much the same way I do – to the exclusion of all else. When he was a child, he had an encounter with a mysterious man who told him about a magical tome in which all the knowledge of the world is recorded. That man was (apparently) The Shepherd, and he is affiliated with the school Kyoutaro now attends, Shiomi Academy. One morning Kyoutaro gets an email from him that warns him of something horrible to come. Kyoutaro immediately has a vision of Tsugumi, the bright and happy – yet charmingly shy – young lady who was passing out fliers at the bus stop. In his vision, she gets run over by an out-of-control bus, so he rushes to save her. Unfortunately, he knocks her down and grabs her breast (and then squeezes it a couple of times, because anime), which is immediately captured by all cellphones in the vicinity. Now Kyoutaro is branded as a molester, and the whole school is out to get him.

That's only the first six or so minutes of Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai, which Funimation tells us translates to “A Good Librarian is Like a Good Shepherd.” The rest of the episode is basically wacky antics as Kyoutaro tries to clear up the misunderstanding and the show tries to introduce the full compliment of girls who will make up his harem. We also have his friend Ikkei, who thinks he's really smooth. (When ordering lunch, Ikkei also orders a big smile from the waitress, only to be charged for it when he pays for his food, which is the one part of the episode that actually made me chuckle.) By the end Kyoutaro has been joined in his library club by Ikkei, Tsugumi, and Tsugumi's hot-headed friend Tamamo, only they've re-branded the club as the Shiomi Happy Project, with the somewhat suspect goal of making the school happy. Oh, and Kyoutaro is revealed to be a “Shepherd Candidate” and to have forgotten something involving the one girl whose name and image flower we don't yet know.

Basically Daitoshokan started out with potential. Its opening segment has elements of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's amazing novel The Shadow of the Wind, and given that it features a reader as its hero, I was hopeful that it would head in that direction. Instead it falls into comfortable tropes that have little to do with reading or libraries. It doesn't even do the tropes especially well, although it should be mentioned that Tamamo is clearly shown to be an “act first, think later” character rather than one who is just unreasonably angry all the time, which saves her from being much more annoying. The art is decent enough, as is the animation, and good use is made of silly faces by a single character when everyone else looks normal. With better writing, that could be really funny, so here's hoping it improves as it goes on.

Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai is available streaming on Funimation.