Hinako Note

Born and raised in the countryside of Japan, Hinako "Hina" Sakuragi gets anxious easily when she talks to new people—so much so that she resembles a stiff scarecrow. To overcome this, Hina hopes to get involved in theater, inspired by a play she saw during her school's field trip. So, Hina moves into the Hitotose Manor in the bustling city of Tokyo to study at Fujiyama High School, aspiring to join the school's renowned theater club.

But to Hina's dismay, she learns that Fujiyama High's theater club has been on a lengthy hiatus. Having already come to Tokyo and enrolled in the school, Hina is at a loss for what to do next. Sensing her disappointment and eagerness to learn theater, Chiaki Hagino, the landlady of Hitotose Manor, encourages Hina to create a troupe with the residents of Hitotose Manor as its members.

Hinako Note follows Hina as she begins a new life in Tokyo attending Fujiyama High while learning the ropes of theater with the support of her friends along the way.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Hinako Note

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Characters & Voice Actors

Natsukawa, Kuina

Main

Tomita, Miyu
Japanese

Sakuragi, Hinako

Main

Ichimichi, Mao
Japanese

Hiiragi, Mayuki

Main

Ogura, Yui
Japanese

Nakajima, Yua

Main

Kouno, Marika
Japanese

Hagino, Chiaki

Main

Toujou, Hisako
Japanese

Kuroyanagi, Ruriko

Supporting

Yoshida, Yuuri
Japanese

Hinako's Mother

Supporting

Satou, Kanami
Japanese

Uncle

Supporting

Ruriko's Mother

Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko
Japanese

Chiaki no Chichi

Supporting

Sasa, Kenta
Japanese

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Staff

Tanaka, Shou

Producer

Isogai, Noritomo

Producer

Kurosaki, Yuuki

Producer

Hayashi, Eisuke

Producer

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Opening Theme

"A E I U E O Ao! (あ・え・い・う・え・お・あお!)" by Gekidan Hitotose (劇団ひととせ) [Hinako Sakuragi (Mao Ichimichi), Kuina Natsukawa (Miyu Tomita), Mayuki Hiiragi (Yui Ogura), Chiaki Ogino (Hisako Tojo), Yua Nakajima (Marika Kouno)]

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Ending Theme

"Curtain Call!!!!! (かーてんこーる!!!!!)" by Gekidan Hitotose (劇団ひととせ) [Hinako Sakuragi (Mao Ichimichi), Kuina Natsukawa (Miyu Tomita), Mayuki Hiiragi (Yui Ogura), Chiaki Ogino (Hisako Tojo), Yua Nakajima (Marika Kouno)]

Reviews

Jun 25, 2017

Gjrnm

Recommended

Are you having a bad week? Is school or work exhausting your life force? Do you want something at the end of the week to look forward to?
Hinako Note was just that thing. Spring season is at the end of the school year and a busy time for people who work. At the end of every week I sit down to enjoy this lovely show that whispers to my soul "everything is all right" and pumps me with energy for the coming week.
Why would anyone expect something other than light hearted comedy with very cute girls after reading the synopsis and looking at the ...

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Jun 23, 2017

Lancehot

Mixed Feelings

TL;DR – A cute girls show that is never quite sure what cute things they should be doing, Hinako Note feels unfocused whilst at the same time increasingly focusing on the characters bodies. The potential for a good cute girl show was there, but it really needed a redraft or more editorial oversight to achieve it.

It's not easy starting again in a new city. It's even harder for Hinako, a girl whose social anxiety makes her freeze like a scarecrow when approached by strangers. It wasn't as bad in the countryside, where having a human scarecrow to attract animals away from fields was useful. But ... it won't do her much good in Tokyo.

Yet that's partly what drew her there, because she has come up with a solution to overcoming her shyness: acting. After meeting her new house mates – the book-eating Kuina, maid dressing Mayuki & landlady Chiaki – they resolve to form an acting troupe to bring more customers to Chiaki's cafe & maybe even perform on a famous stage. That is if they can find time between all the other cute girl shenanigans they get up to.

At the start, Hinako Note seems like it will be a spin on the cute girls running a shop set-up that proved popular in Is This Order a Rabbit? There's both a bookshop & a café to split time between, as well as a high school & threatre club – where they meet the final main member of the group; the bratty Yua. However, it flits between settings with abandon, leaving things feeling unfocused & unconnected, particularly as it becomes increasingly episodic. It's almost as though the original author couldn't pick one cute girl location, so tried to have all of them.

It also has the effect of making Hinako's progression towards overcoming her shyness feel disjointed. The idea is that the acting will cause her to gradually gain in self-confidence so that she no longer freezes when talking to people, which is what happens – twice. While the show generally does a fine job showing her friendships develop over time, her own shyness increasingly seems to come & go when it's convenient.

One might expect it to have been structured such that, for example, she starts off barely able to talk & ends giving the leading performance on the big stage, symbolising her finally overcoming her anxiety. Alternatively, it could have gradually dropped the idea altogether, perhaps shifting the theme from overcoming your weaknesses to accepting them & finding people who accept you for who you are. Instead it peaks & troughs throughout the series, with apparent breakthroughs being followed by a return to the scarecrow pose the next time it's funny.

But in some ways that's to be expected, given how the show evolves over its runtime. While it starts out looking like an ensemble anime, all about the importance of friendship & the various relationships between the characters; by about episode six it increasingly seems more about waifu worship & how great Hinako is. Ditsy, vulnerable & air-headed yet also amazing & perfectly proportioned, Hinako quickly becomes the centre of almost everything happening around her. She may not be every viewers favourite character, but she clearly is the director's, it becoming rather eye-rolling by the time a clamshell pillow has been added to her bath scenes like she's some sort of discount Venus.

There is some indication that this is all meant to be presented from Hinako's point of view. A notebook, presumably Hinako's, is often used as the image to break up segments of the show, perhaps suggesting this is all being taken from her diary (clue is in the name, I suppose). But while that may somewhat explain why the show focuses on her, it doesn't explain the things about her it focuses on.

To be fair, all of them get a degree of back story & time to further distinguish themselves as characters, though it all feels a bit predictable. Yua has a girl crush on Chiaki that somehow seems to end up being directed, effectively if not explicitly, at Hinako. Mayuki is insecure about her height & being treated like a child while Chiaki is...attractive & responsible? Kuina, despite looking like Konata from Lucky Star, doesn't fill that or really any role. She eats paper & dresses in animal onesies, quirks compensating for lack of character.

As if wanting to visually parallel this shift, there is progressively more fan-service as the series goes on, particularly once it's revealed what a great body Hinako has. There are two or three of what might be charitably called dress-up episodes, with each one seeing characters striking progressively more risqué poses. The incidental pervy cuts become increasingly so, with body pans escalating to close-ups of T&A while the images used for the next episode previews become increasingly fetishistic - one being of Kuina licking Hinako's foot. A degree of this is to be expected in cute girl shows, but at times Hinako's Note ramps it up to sex comedy levels despite never being one; the lewd parts never feeling in character or particularly connected with what else is going on.

Oh & since important industry types undoubtedly read every MAL review, I have a request: Please stop using moo sounds to indicate big breasts are on screen. Please, just stop.

Of course, if this sounds like your kind of thing, then Hinako Note's production does a fine job presenting it. It looks & sounds pretty much as you'd expect, with suitably bright & colourful images, standard but appealing character designs & an upbeat, whimsical soundtrack. There were no notable dips in quality, though a minor but noticeable thing is the increasingly static background characters. By the same token, though, it never really excels, with no memorable animation sequences or the like. The OP & ED are somewhat notable for being the type of music that goes through multiple key & time signature changes, creating a sort of bubbly, schizophrenic mashup of cute girl sounds, unfortunately accompanied by some rather lacklustre dance routines.

There are some good things in Hinako Note. The characters are likeable, if not utilised to their full potential & some episodes deliver good enough cute girl antics. But it never manages to hold its focus on any one of its ideas for long, even as the camera increasingly focused on the characters vital assets. An okayish show that needed more editorial oversight to become a good one.

& I didn't even mention the busty 9 year old club advisor.

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Aug 15, 2017

HDTurtle

Not Recommended

What creates a successful Slice of Life(SoL) show? SoL shows generally don't have a proper story, most of the time it's there just for the sake of being there. SoL shows generally don't have proper characters either, or any character development. This doesn't mean that a SoL show can't have story or good characters, it just means that most shows out there choose not to include them. They use the SoL genre as an excuse for the lack of story or proper characters, these type of shows are all over the place, they don't have a proper goal that they are trying to achieve ... with the show and just put out random acts every episode. A show must know what its trying to achieve if it wants to succeed, I don't mean plot wise, what I mean is in a more broader sense, what is the director trying to convey with the show, what did he want to create here and so on.

When they fail this what we get is Hinako Note. A show that doesn't know what it is trying to be, a show that lacks good characters and character interactions, a show that is all over the place and feels fake.

One thing that annoyed me the most was how we could see the hands of the author trying to shove the story through our throats. The overall flow of the story should not be made obvious to the viewer - unless it is trying to achieve comedic effect, if it is made obvious then the viewer is going to loose its sympathy and attachment to the show as a whole. You can't immerse yourself in the story and will realize that everything the characters do are for the sake of the story and they themselves have no souls, only puppets moving attached to the strings of the author.

The show was trying to achieve cute girls doing cute things genre but with forced fan service that they throw on your face it sadly failed achieving it. It feels as the characters interacted the way they interacted because that was what they were suppose to do, the fan service was there for the sake of it and wasn't natural at all. Ironically it felt like everyone was reading off of a badly written script and there was no hint of anything real. Since the story was faulty the characters followed suit and ended up flat and shallow, without any hint of real emotions or anything similar. With the characters failing the humor and anything else that might had saved the show also failed and as a result we got in our hands a failure of a show that couldn't do one thing right.

Everything bad about it aside the show could still be watched if you just watch it for the sake of occasional fan service and pretty characters. I can't find any other redeeming feature about this show and would recommend against it. If you want to watch something familiar to it setting wise but much more better I would suggest "Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka?", which did everything much better and succeeded in being a good Slice of Life show.

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Sakuragi, Hinako

Hiiragi, Mayuki

Nakajima, Yua

Hagino, Chiaki

Kuroyanagi, Ruriko

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