Hinamatsuri

Just so that we are clear: Nitta thought Hina was a dude, even though he had a full-frontal look at her unclothed body.

……seems legit.

Anime comedies never seem to tickle my “funny bone” the way The Simpsons did in its heyday (circa 1991-1999). While there are notable exceptions (i.e. One Punch Man and Gintama), the vast majority fall under the zany category of school-aged hijinks. To distinguish itself from the heard, Hinamatsuri throws in girls with psychic powers, who, for the most part, use them to generate obscure situations for the purposes of setting up the proverbial punch line. And while a handful ... of the joke’s secure a half-smile-to-a-grin, nothing resonates enough with the viewer to burst out into laughter over. In fact, I would wager that my expression resembled Hina’s blank face when I watch this particular anime.

The funniest jokes, in my estimation, are the one’s that have a modicum of relevance to one’s own life experiences. In animation, this begins by creating a character that embodies a distinguishable characteristic that is shared by most people (e.g. laziness), allowing the audience to live vicariously through them. If the audience feels disconnected from the experiences of the character’s on the screen, their actions come off as being ridiculous, and, god forbid, “cartoonish.” To exemplify this point, juxtapose a typical Adam Sandler movie with a comedy classic, The Big Lebowski. In the former’s case, we have situational character’s who fit a particular mold to tell a particular joke, usually to the point of exhaustion. Whereas, with Lebowski, we have three character’s who epitomize the human condition, that being: laziness, anger, and awkwardness. Thus, allowing the comedy to sprout naturally from the essence of the character’s themselves, rather than being forced through nonsensical happenstances — as is the case for Hinamatsuri.

Hina, to the detriment of the series, is a vacuous character with little-to-no remorse for her discourteousness, and only the slightest inclination of empathy. She doesn’t sound like a typical school girl to me, she sounds more like a sociopath, but that’s none of my business (slurps Lipton tea). Her unassuming lifestyle parallels that of an annoying, adolescent child, making her behavior all the more irksome; consequently, her immaturity extinguishes the impact of her “comedic” moments. The singular moment where her deadpan personality did serve a purpose, was to set up the final joke in episode 8 (when Nitta celebrates being a “free” man again — now that was hilarious!). That aside, her monotonous, imbecilic behavior was simply excessive to the point of infuriating the viewer. We get it, she’s ceaselessly hungry, it’s not cute when a three-year-old says it, and it’s certainly not cute or funny when Hina says it.

I’m not really sure what to make of the homeless scenes with Anzu (there’s some feels there, I suppose) and the bar scenes with Hitomi. They, you know, happen, because……the anime staff’s gotta fill 12 episodes? Also, how come Anzu’s hair/appearance never looked disheveled when she was homeless? It literally takes a day for anyone to look like utter garbage without the proper bathroom “essentials.” Just saying.

Despite my “harsh” criticisms, its not an awful anime, its just not really good, either. It offers a specific brand of comedy that may appeal to a cohort of the anime community; nevertheless, its staying power is substantially limited, due to the inane nature of the show. If you have roughly 4.5 hours to kill (who am I kidding, I know you do) then give it a go, it may be a source of great enjoyment and copious laughter — but, if you’re like me, it will be fairly jejune.

Hinamatsuri comes off as a jumbled mess that doesn't really know what it wants to be.

the first episode set me up to this action, sci-fi, adventure to find out the origins of Hina and what she wanted with Earth and how her being under the care of this Yakuza member would change both of their lives, and it all went down hill from there.

as the show progresses, it seems like more of those initial characteristics drop off in favor or a vanilla, saccharine slice of life with one dimensional characters. all the characters lack meaningful depth and replaced it with one noted shticks, ... which made it hard to really connect to anyone. the only arc that actually caught some of my attention was Anzu's homelessness arc, because at least that added to motivation for her character.

a lot of the jokes were a miss for me, but there was an effort to entertain the viewer through the wacky hijinks that everyone experiences.

overall, I was really disappointed with the show and I feel like it would've benefitted from another draft to square away what kind of show it wanted to be.

I dropped it once and gave it a 5. I thought it just wasn't interesting.

Then I decided to give it another try and was even more disappointed.

What really bothers me is that the story is nonconsequential. Anything could happen (you have 2 girls with superpowers to begin with), but only something does, and in the next episode half of it is forgotten. Characters disappear, on to the next (forced) joke.

Superpowers. Hina has to use them because if she doesn't, it could get out of control. Anzu has similar powers, but doesn't have the same problem. Anyway, don't worry, neither Hina nor Anzu will use any ... of their powers after the first few episodes.

The story doesn't follow a path, but just goes from A to B, then forgets about half of that, starts again at some point between A and B, and proceeds in a whole different direction for some time.

Character development seems to be random. As if the author had no long-term plan for the development, and just hrew in some new element along the way to see if it sticks. Any long-running show can have this problem, but we are talking about a single 12-episodes season.

I had to watch it until the end thinking "there is no way it can get worse than this". But it regularly did. The only good point is that it's quite original, but that's it.

I was absolutely down to invest in the anime the first episode set up. Strange exceedingly powerful young girl that doesn't understand human interactions being dropped in to learn just that from a Yakuza (hilarious blind-leading-the-blind set up) while i assumed part of what would form their bond is protecting each other from the dangers each of their lives are rife with.

And then that just didn't happen. It was like they got a new showrunner for episode 2 that came in blind and just made it up as they went along. It was incoherent, disjointed and downright irritating because i wanted very much to ... continue watching the anime i started.

I will say there were animes within this anime that could be pulled out and given their own storyline that i would watch in a heartbeat. Anzu doesn't need to be a powerful girl from ... uh... where? who knows really but the story arc about a group of these old, weary homeless men imparting values to this little street urchin trying to survive and forming a familial bond with her would be an instant watch for me. I am sad that Anzu's anime doesn't exist.

Likewise a comedy about Hitomi would be hilarious.

But all of it together was a jumbled mess and it's just proof that while I rely heavily on reviews for recommendations, once in a while I will just not get what all the hype is about.

What an overrated mess of an anime. A comedy where almost all jokes rely entirely on wit with no satisfying punchline. A touching slice of life which is usually compromised by tasteless jokes that ruin the emotional moments with a big middle finger to its audience. A gimmicky psyche powers anime which said gimmick's only purpose for existing is to serve occasional jokes which almost never impact the overall story whatsoever, seriously, you could have taken out the powers aspect and had the kids be orphans who never knew their parents and little would change regarding the character arcs we see. This series tried to ... be so many things and couldn't handle them all at once.

Main character green-haired psyche girl's a useless kid, her yakusa caretaker really only cares about her because no one else will take her in, red-haired psyche girl comes out of nowhere near the end of the series and serves no purpose but pointless unfunny filler, and everyone else besides blonde-hair girl and bartender school girl are either unfunny smart asses or boring assholes.

And it bothers me. Because the animation is really good. And the music's nice. And there are semblances of funny well-paced jokes and genuinely emotional moments in there. It feels like the writer and director of this series had different visions of what this series was supposed to be and worked separately from each other.

This is a badly-directed series with a lot of wasted potential.