Hana-Kimi

Episode 5

I decided to watch Hana-Kimi dubbed this week for two reasons. One was that with four episodes under my belt, I had a decent basis for comparison between the Japanese and English tracks. The two different language versions are, in some ways, different works, each with its own interpretations of the characters; you can't expect two actors to turn in identical performances, and each will have their own strengths and weaknesses. Doing a comparison can help my darling readers figure out which version is right for them, which version of the characters, and so on.

What I found was consistent with most modern simuldubs: performed well enough, and nothing I'd call bad acting, but nothing that particularly excited me or made me feel compelled to choose it over the Japanese version. It did make me confront just how out of the dub scene I've gotten, since I don't recognize any of the principal actors, even with lengthy resumes. Katelynn Barr's performance as Mizuki is more convincingly boyish than Aya Yamane, her Japanese counterpart, who doesn't sound in any way like an adolescent boy. The sole pain point for me was how everyone pronounced Nakao's name as “Nuh-kow.” It's consistent enough that it must have been a deliberate decision from someone higher up the chain. I do wonder if it was a choice by ADR director Jad Saxton, because an accurate pronunciation involves vowel clusters that are rare in English and would have caused some trouble for the dub cast, or if it's another entry in a long string of baffling mandates from the Japanese licensors about how names and words should be pronounced.

My other reason for trying the dub was more selfish: I haven't slept well in several nights, I'm very tired, and I wanted to watch it while lying down in bed. I can watch stuff with subtitles on my phone, but dubs are just easier. Unfortunately, that freed up my field of vision to really notice just how bad the animation was. I know CG backgrounds are commonplace these days, but it's striking how every element except for items the characters held in their hands was visibly drafted in three dimensions. Striking in a bad way, in case that wasn't clear! Lighting is different for characters and background elements. Nanba lounges on a bench, appearing to hover as he leans his head against a nonexistent armrest. That, plus the limited character motion, obviously done using a paper-doll motion animation program, has the effect of making the cast look like paper dolls in a dollhouse, rather than humans moving through space. Also, in one shot, Sano is walking away, and his butt is shaded so it looks like he has a full, saggy diaper. This might make him more attractive to some viewers, I suppose, but it's certainly not my thing. Unclear how Mizuki feels about it.

Let's get back to those tensions. This episode hurries through its tensions curiously quickly, partially because Mizuki seems to be an unusually self-aware teenager. Sano wakes up the next day sporting a black eye after he drunkenly assaulted Mizuki, thanks to her frantically punching him in the face. Sano and his pals are confused about where it came from; I guess in this version of the world, none of them know about his secret identity as the Kissing Bandit. Mizuki, meanwhile, feels confused as well. She likes the idea of kissing Sano! She didn't hate that he kissed her! But she certainly didn't envision their first kiss, which was also her first ever, being without her consent while he's blackout drunk on half a bottle of wine.

While I like the idea of her feeling conflicted – what he did was assault, after all, and assault victims often have conflicted emotions around their assaulter – the episode moves along quickly after that. After a little chat with Nanba, she's right as rain… up until the next problem! Someone has been doing mean things to her shoe locker! It takes all of nine minutes for them to figure out that it's Nakao, after he comes up and starts being needlessly mean to her about her relationship with her older brother. When he just happens to drop his phone, revealing his lock screen, she realizes it's because he's jealous of her friendship with Nanba. Well, isn't this easy to resolve? The most interesting thing about this scene is that she connects her own experience of having a crush to his. He seems to take it to mean that she's a fellow queer kid, and while I think a transmasc reading of Mizuki is possible, it's certainly not the original intent and frankly is something of a stretch. In that light, it feels a little disingenuous of her to relate her crush to his.

But hey, I get that in the moment, it feels right. This is emphasized by the following scene, when a couple of high school girls run up and offer her and Sano chocolates. Ah, I thought, here's a tension: she gets to be close to Sano, but cannot reveal her feelings to him, because she thinks he thinks she's a boy. She has more opportunities for emotional closeness, but it can't progress into romance or (consensual) physical closeness. But then she goes and unpacks all that with Umeda in the final scene, and talking things out famously tends to relieve tension.

But there is one understated tension throughout the episode that threatens to play a greater role in the next episode: Mizuki's cultural background. She reveals that she has a mixed-race half brother who she adores, but it manifests in other ways as well, such as her inability to read the threatening notes Nakao leaves in her shoe locker. She's fully ethnic Japanese, but grew up in the US; it's unclear where she was born. I'd love to see the show dig in a bit more about what that identity means to her, examine her culture shock a bit more. Much has been made about the struggles of returnees to fit in, after all.

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Hana-Kimi is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.