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I really enjoyed Hyouka, and consider it one of the best anime I’ve ever seen. From the first episode, I was pretty much captivated, first by the beautiful art, and then by the fairly “ordinary person” characterizations of the main cast. Near the beginning of the show, I was racking my brain to try to come up with a comparison for the levels of ‘mystery’ that the show had in it. I know the show talks a lot about Holmes, and references these big mysteries, but I was really more interested because they *aren’t* big mysteries. They’re really minor things, and almost always things that make no difference whatsoever except if you’re “kininarimasu!” about that specific thing. The closest things I could come up with were that they were kind of between Encyclopedia Brown and Scooby Doo mysteries. But that really doesn’t matter, because the depth of the mystery is only a minimal part of the charm of the show. It’s really a show about four people who manage to end up together in a supportive group: two who were friends before, two who were cool on each other before, two who were connected by a one-sided romantic history, two who ended up as good friends, and two pairs that ended up as likely future couples. And those couples are where the main charm of the show lies.
And supporting this story was tremendous art and production. KyoAni found a perfect style for this storytelling. The settings, backgrounds, and details are amazing, but you never lose sight of the characters of the story. The major arc of the series, the Kanya Festa, made it a place you ached to be in, because the setting of this high school in a small city in rural Japan was still the most interesting place you’ve seen for those two days.
