Friday 16 June 2006

Pic of the day: "I have no interest in ordinary humans" says Suzumiya. Way to go to win friends and influence people!

Suzumiya anime

I recently mentioned that my fiction tend to be about the meeting between the mundane and the magical. For the last several years it has been so, and I also tend to describe it from the mundane point of view, even when the main character really is the one with unusual gifts. So it is not surprising that I become intrigued when this exact formula is used to create an anime. The anime in question is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

The narrator is a high school boy, a rather ordinary guy. One of his classmates however is not exactly normal. Haruhi Suzumiya introduces herself on the first day by saying that she has no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders or psychics, however, they are welcome to contact her.

Unsurprisingly, Suzumiya becomes rather socially isolated. This boy however keeps trying to talk to her, since he sits right in front of her in class and also thinks she is pretty. Eventually she decides that he might be a useful servant, and enrolls him in her club, the SOS Brigade, which proceeds to get three more members: An alien, a time traveler and a psychic. One by one they reveal their true identities to the boy, not to Suzumiya. Comedy and drama ensue. I won't spoil it all for you... not that I could, since I have only seen the first 11 episodes.

To further confuse things, the episodes are not in chronological order. This probably causes a lot of viewers to leave in episode 1, which is an amateur video made by the team. The actual story starts in episode 2, as should you. But even after that, the episodes are scattered across the time stream, with a dramatic cliffhanger in one of the episodes cheerfully ignored for another episode before it is continued.

The art style is unusual. It is well drawn and smooth, but lacks the happy colorful cheer that is found in most comedies. Rather it is indeed melancholy, with muted colors and quite a bit of gray. I call this style "dystopian" as it seems to be popular in shows about the future gone wrong. Perhaps Suzumiya is not so much comic as absurd. The contrast between the perfectly normal and somewhat resigned narrator and a cast of unpredictable characters certainly is humorous to me, but I cannot answer for everybody. You should probably watch at least episode 2 before deciding for yourself.

***

My long-time readers probably think that I identify more with Suzumiya than with the utterly normal guy who narrates the story. Well, perhaps a little. But in truth Suzumiya reminds me more of how I was when I was much, much younger. In the anime, she comes across as seeing everybody else as non-player characters who exist for her sake. Normals are bad because they fail to entertain her. The things they do may be fun for them, but not for her, and this is "bad". She lacks not only the ability to reach out to others, but also the ability to be satisfied alone. Thus the melancholy.

All in all, Suzumiya comes across as an unsympathetic person. And at least in the episodes I have seen, she becomes more of an NPC herself: An agent for change, a source of strange events, but not someone we get under the skin of. This anime is definitely not a psychological drama. Of the characters, only the narrator comes across as realistic. Still, I found it somewhat entertaining. If this had been a series of DVDs rather than a TV series, I would not have bought it. But I would have rented it.