Hana-Kimi

Episodes 1-4

I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to start my reviews of Hana-Kimi with a nice meal of crow. In my “Most Anticipated” entry for it, I spoke positively of Signal.MD based on my memories of their work on Recovery of an MMO Junkie, only to discover that their more recent work has been… less than praiseworthy. Likewise, in my preview guide entry, I noted that the animation had “a little bit of fluidity” to keep things visually interesting, even in what appeared to be a lower-budget production.

Two things have happened since then. For one thing, I've gone back and read a bit of the manga, and I've realized how much was lost in the translation from the late Hisayo Nakajo's original art to the anime's more “modern,” generic style. Part of that is inevitable in the shift from one medium to another, and I understand there are parts of the manga's style that wouldn't look right with cell-style animation, like how Nakajo drew eyes and lips in the mid-90's. Still, the manga had a much greater degree of expressiveness that is really missing from the anime.

The other thing is that the animation quality is noticeably lower now. Crunchyroll heavily promoted Hana-Kimi well before the first episode aired; they wanted audiences to take notice, and an adaptation of an old shoujo high school romance was likely a hard sell. If it had debuted with outright bad animation quality, the series would be dead on arrival. But the subsequent episodes don't have that first-episode juice designed to draw audiences in. It's flat and kind of fuzzy, replete with bad compositing and mushy motion. Most of the outdoor scenes take place at sunset, leaving the characters awash in monochromatic pinks and golds that look dramatic without having to put thought into layouts or lighting.

So, yeah. It's not a good-looking show. I don't get the privilege of reviewing pretty anime this season, apparently. But that's okay, because between this and In the Clear Moonlit Dusk, I've been assigned to my “gender shoujo” era.

As I said in my first review for In the Clear Moonlit Dusk, the key to finding meaning in shoujo is looking for the tensions. Instead of searching for the kind of external conflict that leads to big confrontations and action setpieces, keep an eye out for chords of intra- and interpersonal dissonance that need resolution. After four episodes of Hana-Kimi, I'm really only starting to get a sense of the tensions that will drive the series.

One of them is obvious: Mizuki is a girl pretending to be a boy so she can attend the same all-boys boarding school as her crush, a high jumper named Izumi Sano. They end up as roommates (they were roommates!), and it doesn't take long for Sano to figure out that Mizuki is a girl. Mizuki doesn't know that he knows, however, and gender-related hijinks ensue! It's actually not quite as sitcom-y as I make it out to be, however. Knowing Mizuki's gender changes how Sano responds to her, both in his knowledge that she has a crush on him and when the two run into issues that happen between roommates. Weirdly, Mizuki leaves the curtain open while she's showering.

Of course, there's the issue of Nakatsu, Mizuki's new bestie. One of the parts of Hana-Kimi that has aged less well is its conception of gender, especially when it comes to attraction. The school nurse, Hokuto, is immediately able to detect Mizuki's gender because he's gay, which I guess gives him advanced girl-dar? The only plausible explanation is that he can tell because he's not attracted to her, which I would prefer not to unpack at this moment in time. Poor Nakatsu, on the other hand, has found himself wildly attracted to Mizuki but can't figure out why. This becomes such a deep source of tension for him: what does this mean for his sexual orientation? What is he going to do about this crush? How will it affect his friendship with Mizuki?

Another source of tension comes from Sano's relationship with the high jump. At first, we only know that he's no longer a member of the team, and gets angry when pressed on it. Finally, it's been revealed that right before his final meet in middle school, he was injured pushing a girl out of the way of a car. He blames himself for choking, saying that he subconsciously let himself get hurt because he buckled to the pressure he was facing. Now, he's incapable of jumping the same way he used to, but with Mizuki's encouragement, he wants to get back to who he was.

There's another source of tension, albeit one that's not part of the story: standards have gotten tighter for what you're allowed to depict in anime and manga since the manga first ran in 1996, and some changes have had to be made. In the manga, the characters openly drank alcohol, but you're not allowed to show teens behaving badly like that anymore. However, the ending of episode 4 hinges on Sano getting drunk and smooching Mizuki; while this was foreshadowed originally by the boys refusing to drink with him because he becomes a “kiss monster” with alcohol in his system, it's kind of out of nowhere in the anime. And because he's not allowed to drink intentionally, the anime writers had to come up with a cockamamie reason for him to accidentally drink wine. I'm sorry, but nobody is going to down a bottle of red wine thinking it's grape juice, even the fancy kind. Wine simply does not taste like grape juice. Although I did once have a grape cider that was quite strong and did taste exactly like juice…

I'm not trying to nitpick; however, I appreciate it when adaptations make changes, even if they're a bit silly. It's a bit like a game of spot the differences. Hana-Kimi may not be getting the adaptation it deserves, but it's a sign that they're putting at least some effort in.

Rating:

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Hana-Kimi is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.