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.
- 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.
CommentsKyoto 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!
