This Week in Anime

The Haruhi That You Might Have Forgotten

Chris
Sylvia, unless my calendar's off, it looks like it's the right time for a religious celebration.

So let's don our holy armbands, make the pilgrimage down to the club room, and ponder that most profound of spiritual mantras:

What if God were one of us?

I swear I already did! Hey, repetition's appropriate for reminiscing about being back somewhere we were twenty years ago!

It was honestly bizarre to think about this earlier this month as the twentieth anniversary of Haruhi originally premiering rolled around. It's an anime that was emblematic of "new" and "fresh" for me at the time, and here it is as old now as Project A-ko was in 2006!

It's to the point that I had to reckon with the fact that there are whole generations of anime fans now who came up utterly unfamiliar with the zeitgeist of the series. Case in point: when the possibility of discussing Haruhi in the wake of that aforementioned anniversary came up, our somewhat younger cohost Coop effectively confirmed you and I would be best suited to cover it, since we're, uh, experienced scholars...of classic material...we are old.

I similarly caught the series just a bit after its initial airing—on YouTube, in all its three-parts-per-episode glory, incidentally enough. This was pretty much my first exposure to watching "new" anime via unlicensed fansubs. People were just talking about Haruhi that much, and I got curious what all the hubbub was about!

It was worth it, too, as this was a case where I came to realize that sometimes popular things are popular for a reason. That first season of Haruhi was pretty dang good! And revisiting it after a decade or so, still pretty dang good!

Right, this is what I meant about the zeitgeist and how impossible it is to overstate it for people who weren't there. Haruhi wasn't just a popular anime at the time, she was the face of the otaku fandom for this period.

I feel like most people who missed it know the Hare Hare Yukai dance and maybe the whole Thing that was Endless Eight. But I also have to emphasize that there were a ton of other fanart, doujins, and memes Haruhi and pals were starring in, nyoro~n. Not to mention the legions of cosplayers at cons, all before official English DVDs had made it over here (in an era when that could sometimes take years even for more popular shows).

Every time I reflect on Haruhi, which comes often with being a weeb of my age, I come to the question about its adaptation and release decisions. We can get to the anime itself and how it arguably put Kyoto Animation on the map. But back at the beginning, before any of us knew the studio or this story, it's incredibly attention-grabbing to kick off the way The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya did. Over the years, I've heard people argue that starting off with The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru is too jarring and you should skip it to better get new audiences into the series, and those people I rebuke as utter cowards. Winter won't survive, etc.

I'm glad your assessment of it was almost identical to mine, and now I wonder if this isn't another generational thing. Kids These Days, as it were, are regularly filming themselves and producing videos with way more sophisticated software than we ever used for constant upload. Perhaps the art of the janky school project video really is lost.

Regardless, it's still, as you said, a brilliant introduction that speaks to the broader effectiveness of the holy Broadcast Order text. This first episode, bereft of context as it is, still has just enough clues about the deeper superreal things going on underneath the mundane filmed surface (to say nothing of cheekily revealing the fantastical quirks of all the characters before the actual plot would). It fits with the broadcast order's general idea of asking the audience to piece together the mystery for themselves through the act of watching the series as it was presented.

A recurrent theme for the show, actually.

Meanwhile, I'll admit that I've always had a ponytail fascination, and I never related to Kyon harder than in that moment. I'm sad that look for Haruhi didn't show up more, but I'm keeping it as a symbol of this season one climax. Like we're talking about, this is all deliberately structured. Speaking of, I do find it pretty funny that one of the earlier progenitors of the modern light-novel anime-adaptation movement had already figured out the solution to the pacing problem so many of these shows encounter: "Reach the climax of the first volume halfway through the season, then putter around with follow-up stories afterwards." Just space it out so the proper climax is at the end of the season anyway! The intended order is built around conscious little call-backs and forwards that get to function as fourth-dimensional foreshadowing. It's not random, it's genuinely well thought-out.

It's funny to think about how the way they sprung "Season 2" on us ever managed to be a surprise. As we'd covered, Haruhi was a certifiable worldwide phenomenon still going strong two years later. Of course, a "rebroadcast" of the series in chronological order wasn't just a victory lap. And still I was blown away waking up on May 22 of 2009 to everyone losing their mind over the dealers having shuffled a brand-new Haruhi into the stack of Tanabata slips.

As we're detailing here, Haruhi's dedication to screwing with its audience was a key part of its identity.

It burns me that "Endless Eight" went over the way it did to the point that it's one of the only things anyone (both those who watched it and those who never did) knows and wants to discuss about Haruhi. As we've reminisced here, there's so much else to love about the series!

And also because said reaction is... reductive? Like in terms of those aforementioned wild swings, "Endless Eight" is a monumental accomplishment. And I feel like the people reflexively put off by it aren't paying the production enough respect for what it pulls off.

It's true that being able to just brute-force through the entire block in less than four hours blunts the exhausting experience. But it also feeds into the inherent appeal of watching the story as it's adapted here. KyoAni didn't just switch some bits around each time like in Pop Team Epic halves. They boarded, directed, and animated unique episodes for each week's version! They even recorded different takes for all the voice acting! Watching them back-to-back makes for some fascinating games of comparing and contrasting takes. Sometimes the direction is more lackadaisical. Sometimes it cranks up the oppressive suspense of the situation. Sometimes you get to see Itsuki in a Speedo. It's a treasure trove of riches for those interested in picking apart production and direction in anime like this. But of course it was probably not going to land for an audience that had been fiending for More Haruhi for the past two years and was now not getting any "real" advancement on the story and characters therein for eight weeks straight.

It, perhaps ironically, makes this string of repeat episodes even more ripe for rewatching! Why stop at eight? You could make an Endless 80 if you were really dedicated to the cycle.

Your accolades are as good a place as any, though, to take a moment to talk about how this return reminded just how dynamite Haruhi's direction is overall. KyoAni's handling of the material was essential to the way the show stood out at the time. We talked about them finding eight different ways to remix some summer time-killing, but it was arguably foretold before when they famously turned scenes like Kyon and Itsuki chatting in a car into something engaging purely through simply effective blocking, cuts, and compositions. Ishihara and other members of this crew would go on to power future exemplary KyoAni entries like Sound! Euphonium and you can absolutely see that base talent on display in Haruhi.

They uploaded these as part of this month's 20-year celebration. My favorite part is the OP with the bit that still crumbles under YouTube's bitrate all these decades later.

It's like I really never left.

For as memetically big as "Hare Hare Yukai* got I was always torn on whether I liked it or the OP more. It's just such a vibe, particularly in how it sells the cool hang-out-able allure of Haruhi (which might not be entirely accurate to her as a person).

Also, Crunchyroll sticking their new big stupid Skip buttons on an intro and outro as legendary as these oughta constitute some kind of generational vandalism. But as long as we're talking chill-inducing memorable musical moments in the series, we've got to at least take a second for the other big memorable one.

It really is a goddamn tragedy that a drummed-up idol culture shouldn't have been a scandal scuppered Hirano's career the way it did, and it's been nice to see her find her way back into anime voice acting in more recent years. She's a phenomenal talent, and she carries that through this anime. "God Knows," and everything that follows in the episode is a sterling example of her embracing and embodying the complicated edges that make Haruhi such a compelling character. It intersects with the criss-crossing storytelling of the series, the way the second-season airing of this episode shows how Haruhi's feelings here come after seeing her at arguably her worst and most selfish.

I'll even take visiting it as an out-of-season Christmas movie, it's just that potent a piece of the Haruhi puzzle.

Seriously, though, I basically agree with everything you said about it. Disappearance feels like KyoAni putting their whole ass into Haruhi as the studio they'd fully emerged as by 2010.

My main addition is that, after this anniversary watch-through made properly apparent to me that Yuki is, in fact, arguably the best (and funniest!) member of the SOS Brigade, making the movie largely dedicated to her was a great call.

The latter Haruhi material was a cornucopia of getting to watch this cool-ass alien robot girl bite folks.

Maybe it's a disappointment that they never made more after that, but as you said, it's an incredible send-off in its own right.

I mean, there was still "more," of course. The chibi Haruhi-Chan shorts. And Yuki got her own Angelic Days-ass spin-off from the movie's alternate universe in The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan. It was animated by our pals at Satelight rather than KyoAni, and I don't know that I ever got over its frankly uncanny Kyon redesign.

Revisiting and discussing it for this anniversary might ultimately have been for the best that Haruhi remained its own particular period piece. I know the novels are still going, but the anime, like so many of the classics, is now counted alongside and embodies its era. That means it never really had to chafe under being a once-popular series forced to run well beyond its glory years. And it means it's absolutely worth watching as a classic. Especially with all those curiosities around it that those who missed the zeitgeist might still be wondering about twenty years later.

Just be sure you ignore Crunchyroll's second-season-only listing, pull up a reference, and watch it in the correct original broadcast order! And no skipping "Endless Eight" either, I'm serious! These are holy texts we're talking about!