Anime: Hyouka 6o5o3p

I see what is Hyouka trying to go for – to show that even mundane things in life can be interesting. Not bad for a concept, though hardly original one. The stumbling block of this anime is just that – being mundane. Or to be specific, being too mundane. It’s not that the mundane things are told in a symbolic way, or that a hidden deeper meaning of small occurrences is discovered. No, it is portrayed as mundane and mundane it stays. It doesn’t fall into the “mundane made awesome” trope. The “mysteries” are wholly unexciting, uninteresting and I wouldn’t hesitate to call them irrelevant. Though maybe it would be going too far to call it irrelevant to the plot, as if you would take them away there wouldn’t be much plot less. So yeah, the very core of Hyouka is simply… boring.

Now you could object that perhaps it’s the characters that carry the script, not the plot itself. And to this accusation I must unfortunately also respond negatively. Well, the protagonist is what I think carried the popularity of this franchise, but not because he’s a greatly written characters – rather because he’s one of the “OMG that’s literally me” characters. You know, the usual “lone wolf outsider but somehow has a social circle build around him” and “clever but doesn’t want to even bother with most things”. The kind of characters to which people would point out and say things like “See, I’m totally also clever like them, it’s just that I don’t use this power” and “I’m also lazy like that, that’s so cool” etc. I swear large part of this series' popularity is thanks to two or so quotes by the protagonist that keep getting reposted on the internet. See also Hachiman and Ayanokouji. The heroine of the story, Chitanda… well, she's incredibly cute thanks to the typical KyoAni artstyle. But also quiet anoying. Rest of the characters are forgettable.

As mentioned above, the animation is moe, and up to the KyoAni standard. I'd consider it the only good part of the anime. Then again, it also seems like the high quality animation only serves to divert your attention from the plot being awfully boring.

Overall, to me Hyouka feels like just another of works that are aimed towards people that didn’t have much successful social life during their high school and are looking for a substitute in a form of fiction, one where the protagonist is cool but the plot is more or less still believably relatable for easier self-insertion. And I grew tired of these kind of works. If you’re going to dream, at least dream big and make it exciting, not this mediocre bullshit. But maybe it’s just me growing old. Or maybe it’s just some subconscious tendency to feel “elitish” – you be the judge. Only one way to find out, and that is giving it a try yourself.

Review
Hyouka is Kyoto Animation's attempt at the detective genre. It's a sweet tale of a lazy guy, an energetic friend, a cute curious girl, and a manga fan girl reveling in the mysteries of their school and their daily events. Of course, this was partially done in previous shows made by the studio, as even Haruhi Suzumiya had bits of the detective type, but now we have an exclusive of the genre. Once again, however, everything is set in a school club.

Hyouka's story is about a group of students that the classics literature club of their school. When they get together, the group learns of the protagonists' (Houtarou) natural ability to solve puzzles and mysteries, and with his aid the group start smashing their problems and acting as detectives to learn past events and mysteries of their school.

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1. Boys meet girls
   No matter how complex it can get, Hyouka is basically a show about a lonely nerd boy meeting a cute girl, as in nearly all romance shows from Kyoto Animation. This reminded me a lot of Clannad at first, especially because the best-friend of Houtarou is basically a copy and paste from the best-friend of Clannad's protagonist. The small romance that progresses is very similar, although this time we don't have lots of girls to fill screen time, but a few mysteries instead.
   
   Cuteness overload
   If this studio does something good, it is to create cute shows. Hyouka is all fluffy and cute since the start, one of the cutest works I've seen. Chitanda and her shinning eyes, the hyper-active restless friend, even the protagonists' lazy but surprisingly helpful demeanor. Everything makes for a sweet combo to a enjoyable and soft show. Fortunately, Hyouka lacks the dozens of girls the competition and even other works from the studio has, and that makes everything a lot easier to handle and far less fanservice-inspired than you should expect.
   
   Loads and loads of dialogue
   The beautiful artistic value and the gentle experience has lots of dialogues to it. Being a detective-type show, you should expect dozens of lines for the characters to explain their thoughts about the mysteries and the ways they used to solve them. It can grow tiresome, especially because many characters talk a LOT and they are mostly wrong. This means the protagonist always talks something clever (usually your script-insight way to solve mysteries) and right on the spot, making all of the other cast's long explanation completely useless many times.
   
   And its all too mundane
   Hyouka is a slice-of-life with detective bits that happens in an random city, at a random school, with random people. Everything here is very very mundane. After a first set of episodes where a mystery is based one of the cast's past, the show adopts the randomness at its finest. The mysteries that come in the next sequences are usually completely basic and unimportant in the long run, like "why the teacher likes helicopters" or "who is playing pranks at the festival". You won't see many events that tackles into the depths of the cast or mysteries that are indeed mysteries, so it ends up being quite pointless to watch it and quite weak to develop the characters at a greater level, like what happens in Usagi Drop. To worsen things, there's not even a climax ending, it just comes and goes and that's it.
   
   Energy wasting and girl-magnet
   As I said, Houtarou is supposed to be a guy who hates wasting energy in useless thing. That's a cool way of life, and I find myself playing by very similar rules. What happens, however is that he never really lives up to his idea. From the very first episode he's already wasting his energy by helping Chitanda, and his resistance to keep with his belief is basically zero. After three episodes he no longer can be said to save energy, he is just another protagonist helping his friends and in a relationship with the cute girl. That brings us to yet another current-day problem with protagonists: no matter how stupid he is, no matter how many times he ignores the girl, no matter if he just says a cold "no, go home, you're wasting my time", the cute girl still falls in love with him. Even the friend that supposedly never really liked him starts getting friendly. What the hell is this supposed to mean? Real life don't work like that, yell a "no, go home you stupid girl" and you got yourself a ticket to the lonely kingdom, not a sick love interest.
   
   And cuteness and other friends
   Chitanda is at the same the biggest strength and biggest weakness of the show. She's overly cute, you'll want to hug her and squeeze her everytime her shining eyes stares the screen, but at the same time she's absurdly unrealistic, with your typical dumb-girl template who is in fact very smart and knowledgeable (I think I've wrote this exact line at least twice in my recent reviews...). Sometimes she shines as a normal girl, but those moments are exactly where she also loses her absurd cuteness.
   
   Anyway, the remaining friends are nothing new as well. Houtarou's best friends is, as I said, copied from Clannad, and your energetic guy who annoy you all the time but also serves as the true link of the group. The second girl is the most realistic and human of the cast, but also the less interesting of the bunch, as she doesn't stand out in anything besides being a random girl who is surrounded by girl problems like jealously and secret love. The cast never truly have time to develop and many just vanish after an episode or so, but they manage to help the show when needed.
   
   Oh, KyoAni
   As hard as it can be to truly enjoy some of Kyoto Animation's show, it's impossible not to be amazed by how good these guys can make an animation look. Despite the generic K-On-based moe character design, everything here is simply superb. The semi-realistic backgrounds with hundreds of different locations, the fluid animation, the expressive characters, the bright colors, sharp quality, etc. It's nearly flawless everywhere, a complete overkill for a show that mostly base itself on lots and lots of explanative dialogues. Watching anything short of a triple-A after Hyouka is like going from a PS3 game to Atari.
   
   It needs more though
   A beautiful show is always nice, but sadly it's not that rare today. Last season we had Tari Tari doing a similar job but without the over-generic character template, and many other shows from the Kyoto Animation shared the same high values. However, it's always nice to see a show with cuteness but a decent cut in the female cast, it becomes less moe and more tolerable, especially when the premise is once again about a damn school club. Seriously, it's annoying to see how these high-school shows are all centered on a school club. Past shows didn't even mention clubs, or if they did it was only a background value. Anyway, Hyouka is a show that could be said "generic", but also has its bits of strength to make a stand, especially with the very powerful production values.
   

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Comments
Kyoto Animation is always a weird studio for me. Their abuse of cute things was something that never managed to lure me, but since Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, I've kept an eye to the things they made. Haruhi Suzumiya lifted their production values to the skies, but at the same time marked a change to 100% cute things.

Despite being very common and lacking climax points, Hyouka is satisfying to watch. The simple mysteries mix nicely with the slice-of-life feeling of the show, the production values are over the roof, the sound quality is superb and the cast, althought uninspiring, is not annoying. Mix these and you get yourself a show that is satisfying for Kyoto Animation fans, for moe-lovers, for those who want a bit of detective spirit, slice-of-life, and even for someone who is just looking for a beautiful show to time.

Hyouka is something you should expect from them. It's overly gorgeous, Chitanda is absurdly cute, the plot is gentle and sweet, but the cast is very one-dimensional and simple. It grows as the episodes progresses and there's bits of character development, but it never becomes a powerful character-driven experience or even a story-driven one. I would call that, as many other Kyoto Animation's show, it's a cute-driven experience!

Short review, if you write a long one, no one will care! (as always, might be some spelling mistakes )

You never know if you are going to watch something that you like or not, the only thing that might help you know are the ratings or the reviews from other people. When i was going to watch Hyouka i thought that i were going to watch something average and not so good, well i was wrong.

Hyouka is an anime that will surprise you, it takes everyday mysteries and makes it to something interesting. It's actually quite cleaver and after a while you wont be able to stop watch it. By the ratings from other animes i think that Hyouka is underrated, one of the few animes that i think deserves more points that it has. Well, i would rather see that pretty much 90% of the animes that are higher rated than Hyouka would have less points, because it should mean something to have a high rating. And i also think that NOTHING deserves a perfect 10 in a review.

The anime is about the boy Oreki who is really bored and hates to do stuff, and then he meets the girl chitanda, and when chitanda has something on her mind she NEEDS to know about it. Oreki will solve some basics mysteries for her and after that some more complicated ones. Oreki got his BFF Fukube who is a nice side character, and the you have the fourth and last main character Ibara that's inlove with Fukube. All of them will gather in the literature club, they will talk a lot and solve some mysteries. If you are not sold about anime yet, trust me it will actually be quite good.

Animation: Hyouka is looking quite good, the scenes when chitanda transforms in orekis mind are done great. The background is really nice and characters are done very well, only thing that's bad about the animation is that it has some quality drops were everything about the animation gets worse. But the openings... if you just would have counted animation quality in openings then Hyouka would be at the top!

Sound: Here is the part where Hyouka shines, it has one of the best (probably the best) soundtracks from anime. The classical music is just wonderful and it fits so well, the openings (first one is better than the second) are really good and you get a great feeling from watching them. I don't know if i can write anymore about the sound, because you can't complain about it, it's just so good.

Story: Every anime got something that's not so good about it, and the story department is "that" thing in Hyouka. They don't follow a main storyline in Hyouka, they have 3+ small mysteries that they solve. There is no "red line" that they will follow, they are not focusing about a big mystery. And that may be fine but one mystery will drag on to much (festival). One more is that they don't have a goal, the mysteries just come to their club room and they will try to solve them.

Value: There is no real life lesson in Hyouka, you may find that the characters will say that you should not be shy if you are good at something. You may also find that you will try to think diffrently, you will try to think like oreki do when he solves mysteries. For me i will this anime for a long time, it's one of the animes where i have no problem ing everyones name, i might not see it again for a while because it had no real plot, but i almost never see the same serie twice.

Character: I don't know if everyone will agree but i really think that atleast two of the character in Hyouka are really well made and fitting, and the rest are just well made. Oreki is one of the best main characters in any anime that i've seen, it may be because i'm lazy and hates to use my mind as well. Oreki is really smart and can solve mysteries by using logic, and the way how he is acting is really well made. Chitanda is a character that has great dialogues with Oreki, she is very forward and when she has something on her mind she wants to know it NOW. They compliment eachother REALLY well and the best moments in the anime are when Oreki and Chitanda are together. Fukube is Orekis best friend, he also has some great moments when he and Oreki talks to each other. He might not be as smart as Oreki but he has his moments, he adds some quality to the show and you need a character like him, he is not as well made as Chitanda or Orkeki but still quite good. The last one is Ibara, she is just someone who is there, i don't feel that she adds to much to the show, she is the reason why the characters wont have a higher score.

Enjoyment: I can't write to much here, i can either write that i enjoyed the anime to some degree, i may also write that i loved it/hated it, i might also write that i thought that it was average. The closest thing that i get is that i loved it, it may just be that i was in the mood to watch an anime like Hyouka, but it may also be that i love animes with great characters and sound. And Hyouka got just that, great characters, great animation and great sound. I fully recommend this anime to everyone, if you don't like the genre just try some episodes, i know i did and i loved it.

Hyouka does what it sets out to do very, very well. It's a gentle, slow paced slice of life / coming of age story. If that's what you're looking for, I really recommend it; if it's not what you're looking for, don't be fooled by the whole "mystery" angle-- there's no real drama and the 'mysteries' are really just there as a plot device.

I'm going to disagree with the people who are comparing this to K-on! and calling it 'moe'. The female lead is, indeed, fairly moe; though even she is drawn and voice acted moe, but doesn't really act that way-- at least not in any over the top fashion like K-on!. I understand why someone would say that, I just don't really agree. And as for the rest of the cast, and even the side characters, I don't think many people are going to label them as moe.

I found all four of the leads to be likeable, and I cared about what happened to them. Actually, I think I preferred the two ing characters a bit more than the two leads, but I thought they were all entertaining and sympathetic.

The animation is just gorgeous, and if that's something that you appreciate for its own sake, you owe it to yourself to at least watch a few episodes.

As with just about every entry in this genre, you have a hinted-at-but-ambiguous ending. The anime is based on a light novel series, so I can only assume that part of the reason was so that they can do a second season if it's popular.

In a perfect world I guess I'd like a 22-episode series like this to have a bit of romance-- there are certainly some elements of growing romantic interest, but the romance itself is virtually non-existent. It's not a fatal flaw and I really consider it to be purely a matter of preference, since it makes no pretensions to be a romance.

One of the things I really appreciate about the series is that it never once strays into the land of anime silliness. There are no caricatures, no impossible happenings, no surprising reveals, nothing like that-- it's played completely straight. There is the obligatory "let's be ironic and make a pool episode", but even that isn't done for comedic effect, doesn't really feature anything resembling fan service, and stays within the bounds of a reality.

In the late 2000s there was this weird explosion of a subgenre most didn’t care about. Anime with loli detectives begun to sprout like mushrooms all over the place as if all of a sudden they were the coolest brand new trend that every animation studio just HAD to be part of it. Here is the list:
I.G.: Loups=Garous
J.C. Staff: Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, Heaven's Memo Pad
Gainax: Dantalian
Bones: Un-Go, Gosick
Silver Link: Tasogare Otome x Amnesia
There was no indication for making anyone to assume such a thing would work, and not even one of them ended up being above average. After a few months of ridiculous hype most in the fandom didn’t care about them either. It’s as if a representative of every studio gathered around the same table and made a bet on who’s going to create the most unmemorable show.

The last one who entered the competition was Kyoto Animation with Hyouka, and the thing we all know about that studio is that it attracts ronery virgins and pedos who are totally not into real girls with their K-On moe style. And yeah, these people are really watching Kyoani shows for the theme exploration and not for the cute girls doing cute whatever.
Beyond the Boundary: I am totally watching this for the ghost hunting
Sound Euphonium: I am totally watching this for the music
Dragon Maid: I am totally watching this for the dragons
Violet Evergarden: I am totally watching this for people suffering from PTSD

There is a third type of people attracted to these type of shows and those would be the sasugafags, people who only care about pretty colors and disregard everything else. Why do you think Demon Slayer won the anime of the decade award? For its amazing plot? It was the animation. Kyoani shows are known for that and they overall look much more detailed, lively, fluent, and cute than their contemporaries. Voice acting and music pieces are also good for what they aim to accomplish (making you feel fluffy inside). But in case you are looking for something out of the ordinary in of plot or themes, you are not going to find it here, because moe shows are comfort food for tired people who want to fall asleep after another day of exams, deadlines, school bullies, demanding teachers, nagging supervisors, gang shootouts, and insane otakus burning down your studio. You only get more of the same high schools and generic looking moe chicks that would you get everywhere else, and that’s the only thing you care about.

And now that the basics are out of the way, let’s talk about really unimportant things, such as the detective aspect… in a detective show. You heard right, it’s completely unimportant although that what the show is supposed to be about, since the mystery cases are some of the dullest, first world nonsense you can imagine. Their seriousness is of the same level as “Why did the chicken cross the road” and the answers will always be something like “Because it saw a worm on the other side.” The only thing they do for making you give a damn is having the waifubait of the show looking at the camera with those huge starry eyes of hers and saying as if she’s talking to you “I really wanna know”. Even if there isn’t much to know, since it’s just a chicken crossing the road. The animators are just luring you in with moe and let the horny males to imagine she is asking them to answer where do babies come from. She is willing to use her body as a test subject, guys, show here how it’s done.

Most of the duration is obviously spent on the slice of life aspect of the show, where you get to know the characters. It’s supposed to be motivational for making the viewer being more active with his life, since the main character is bored and uncaring and doesn’t want to do anything with his life. Until the dream pixie girl appears and spurs him to be part of activity clubs, and mysteries, and stuff no sane person wouldn’t be bored of after a couple of hours. The catch here is that the main waifubait is thrilled with how smart he is and can figure out the answers to bottom of the barrel mysteries, so she is constantly begging him to give her explanations. And after a lot of internal monologue that amounts to “You can’t say no when a cute girl is asking you to do favors for her”. Talk about patting a certain type of people on the back in a too obvious way.
Are you an anti-social person, with a rosy but otherwise boring life? Someone who deep inside feels you are charismatic and cute girls should be very interested in you, even if you act like an uncaring person that would normally make everybody to be fed up with you? Then Hyouka is the show for you!

Obviously the only thing that remains after the nonsense mysteries and the waifu begging you to do her favors, is what you learn about the characters as the episodes gradually flesh them out more and more by having a lot of internal monologues that dig deep into their psyches. The thing is there is very little psyche to dig into, as most of the show is just about carefree moments and the characters can be summed up in three lines at the most. You are not going to much once it’s over, especially if you watched Oregairu that does the exact same thing in a more memorable way.

So ultimately, the show suffers from the same problem most moe anime suffer from. They don’t focus on something other than being cute, and as a result that is the only thing the audience re. There is not much of a plot, hardly any gripping mysteries, and the characterization is fairly basic. The moment the next moe show comes your way, it won’t be hard to get over Hyouka. With that said, as far as loli detective shows are concerned, a subgenre nobody ever cared about, it’s the best of the lot. There is no magic or fringe technology that would make the solution to a mystery nonsensical. The missions are not murder cases solved in 10 minutes and treated like nothing much has happened. The mysteries are also a light excuse for the characters to do something, open up to one another, and it gives them a goal other than studying for school and growing old without doing anything with their lives. It does it in very subtle and eventually superficial ways, yet it’s still more than what the other loli detective shows were doing. Thus Hyouka is the best of the worst in a fad that came, left, and nobody gave a damn.