The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Information of Anime

On the first day of school during class introductions, a girl named Haruhi Suzumiya made strange introduction.  She tells everyone that she has no interest in ordinary humans.  She's only interested in aliens.  Kyon is amazed by her interest & soon become one of few people that can talk to her normal.  After joining & ditching every school clubs, Haruhi decides to form her own club & uses Kyon as her assistant.  The name of the club is S.O.S Brigade.  With the formation of the club, many wild adventures happen for this club.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I have seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

In order to interact with aliens, Haruhi forms the S.O.S Brigade.  Haruhi virtually drags people at random to make the club bigger.  One of them is Mikuru Asahina who is "kidnapped" into the club & Yuki Nagato who is really there in order for her to do some reading.  All of this is told from Kyon's point of view.  In fact, the show is narrated by him & gives a lot of his personal opinions of how he feels about Haruhi's activities.

The S.O.S Brigade does a lot of strange activities in order to get it's name out to the public.  They include dressing up as bunny girls in front of the school gate & joining a baseball tournament.  A majority, based on Kyon's views, is due to Haruhi being bored & wanting to do something exciting.  Also, Haruhi would almost do a lot of extreme things to build her club & they include using Mikuru as a sexual tool or object to blackmail people.  One example is the scene where Haruhi purposely grab the hand of the computer club president into Mikuru's breasts as a form of sexual harassment.  Aside from these weird activities, things pick up quite early in the show.

In forming the club, Haruhi actually gets her wish.  Yuki Nagato is an alien, Mikuru is a time traveler, & Itsuki Koizumi is an esper.  All three of them joined the club to examine Haruhi closely & pretty much came because of her wish.  A change happened three years ago to the planet & all three of these groups believe Haruhi is the cause of it.  Also, they believe that Kyon is the key that will help Haruhi achieve whatever it is that she's aiming for.  Some believe he already triggered most of the problems.  From there, a lot of strange events happen, such as the disappearance of people & entering mysterious dimensions.  It was only until Nagato & Mikuru gave Kyon warnings & hints & Koizumi showing him what's currently happening in closed space.

After seeing & hearing Koizumi's explanation of what Haruhi's doing with the current old world, Kyon gets an idea about the problems if Haruhi creates a new world.  It was only until Haruhi drags him into her world when they fall asleep & the creation of the new world is processing more faster.  Surprised by the surroundings of the new world, Haruhi seems to enjoy it & what's to say with Kyon in this world.  However, Kyon wakes her up by  telling her that he likes the old world better with his friends around & the memories & times he had in it.  From there, the old world is kept in place.

The show ends with the old world left untouched & the three races continuing to monitor Haruhi's activities.  It ends off with Kyon waiting for Haruhi for the club activities & him planning to tell her about aliens, time travellers, & espers.  However, the true ending is where winter comes & Kyon is walking with Haruhi home after club activities.  Kyon thinks back about the times where he spent his time hanging out with the S.O.S Brigade.

My Personal Review

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an anime that really got me hooked.  The first episode really got my attention in trying to figure out what the anime is about & manages to grab my interest in continuing to watch it.  It's strange in its own way & really full of laughs.  However, it does have plenty of ecchi content.  Also, the show has this FLCL feel to it in terms of weirdness, but it doesn't reach that level as it's more on the realistic, scientific, & philosophical view.  If you are looking into some strange comedy with loli ecchi on the side & weirdness, you should pick this up.

Animation

The character designs are pretty cute on the female characters.  The faces are simple, but really has its charm.  However, I couldn't see how Mikuru is a loli type character.  Her face is very similar to other girls even though she's a bit more cuter.  For the guys, they aren't bad & blend with the female characters.  What I mean by that is they don't look out of place.

The backgrounds are pretty good.  They lack detail & are quite simple.  However, they do draw you in a bit with its dull colour tones.  It gives off some realistic appearance to it.  The colours of the backgrounds mix well with the character's colour tones.

The animation movements are pretty good.  Very smooth even at insane fast paces.  If you want to get sick, Mikuru's breasts bounces pretty weird.  It's like unreal how they bounce.  I guess it attracts the male audience well with those.

Sound

The sound effects are more on the realistic side.  Hardly any silly sounds involved.  Being a sci-fi comedy, one would except some "out-of-this-world" sounds such as lasers or summoning.  However, given the nature of the anime on how it's pretty much on the realistic side, you would probably forget about those stuff.

The seiyuus here aren't too bad.  The screams of Mikuru being harassed can get annoying at times.  Not only that, it doesn't seem real as in the emotional side.

The music is pretty much slim to none here.  There could be a lot of background music in this show, but I hardly notice it.  The music is soft & on the silly side. It probably sets the mood well that you don't notice it.

Story

Basically the "normal" activities of the S.O.S Brigade getting itself expose to the public, even though their strange activities are more than enough to get the name across.  It's nice that we see & hear things from Kyon's perceptive.  Kyon is almost as real as you & I can get; a free going person that finds these supernatural events hard to be true. 

Aside from the realistic Kyon, you has a nice assortment of characters in this show.  The cute loli Mikuru that gets harassed, the insane Haruhi that does things the way she wants, & the strange & silent Yuki who proclaims herself as an alien.  The creator of the series really knew how to use these types of characters well & I'm pretty impressed by it.  This show is pretty realistic that I could find myself relating to Kyon's views.  That is if you ignore the later parts of the show where the universe stuff created by Haruhi kicks in.

There isn't much of a storyline going for this show.  It pretty much covers the club's activities around the school year.  However, the three races that are examining Haruhi & Kyon raises some interest.  But it's barely touched on as the show heavily focuses on the strange activities that Haruhi does.  They may be key elements that will affect the main storyline possibly.  As the show progress, there are a lot of events that don't make sense.  In these situations, we would react like Kyon & try not to believe them when they actually happened.  Sometimes, it makes the show a bit boring for some reason.  Maybe I'm expecting too much of the normal stuff from it. 

The flow of show was quite choppy in the beginning.  It jumped around quite a bit as it puts the viewers into a different timeframe.  One example is the one part episode that occurs in episodes six & eight.  In between, there was an episode that doesn't tied between the two.  It may be a breather for some, but it can be annoying to some as they waited to see the cliffhanger.  However, if you follow Haruhi's episode numbers, the show makes sense as that is the correct order.  To do that, you need to record the shows or get the DVDs since you can't rearrange them by watching the on air version.

As the show reaches to the end, it gets very complicate to understand.  It uses a lot of philosophical phrases & references to the universe & other dimensions.  It can quite hard to follow as times as a lot of science is involved.  It really gave me the impression of FLCL without the silliness.  When it reached the end, I felt a little empty.  It seemed rushed & I wanted more.  Although the ending was complete, it seemed open-ended.

Overall Conclusion

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an interesting anime show to come out for the spring of 2006.  Although it's weird, it's somewhat natural & realistic of having some weird girl only interested in aliens, espers, & time travellers.  Personally, I strongly recommend watching this for the laughs.  However, if you are offended by sexual harassment jokes on lolis, you may want to turn away of this.  However, Mikuru isn't truly a loli sizied character.  However, it uses some complex terms a the show reaches it's main plot.  It's really a big turning point for the show.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya gets a 9/10.  The show is calmingly soothing with it's animation & music. Although it's got lots of difficult theories in its plot after episode eight, the laughs are there to keep you entertained.  With such a simple theme of getting some whacked out girl only interested in aliens espers, & time travellers, this is hardly used in some of today's anime shows & kept in a realistic level.