Review of Horimiya

I was really looking forward to this anime, especially since it was so positively received by the anime community on TikTok, but unfortunately it falls short in critical areas, namely: pacing, storytelling, and the overall anime direction. I'm a big fan of the manga. That being said, I'm not usually one to tout the source material to say it's always better than the adaptation. In many cases, I actually prefer the anime over the manga because there are certain scenes that are just better animated, like fight scenes which can get pretty confusing in black and white panels. Animes also have the unique opportunity to fixissues that existed in the manga, such as pacing and transitions, or improve certain aspects to make scenes more impactful such as as adding character development or subtle visual elements. All of that to say--I came into this anime excited to see it translated into the anime medium.

Unfortunately, I think the director and storyboard staff misinterpreted Horimiya. The manga is a rom-com, with unique and funny characters, that occasionally have deep and moving interactions and backstories. Those serious moments are very much interspersed throughout the lighter, funnier, happier, and slice of life moments so it never felt too serious or dramatic. It made sure that you saw a lot of these fun, daily interactions not only to keep a lighter feel to the story, but to also better acquaint the reader with the characters, show in depth character development, and make readers feel a deeper connection to the characters. All of this groundwork and thoughtful pacing led to the serious climaxes being very impactful. If Hori was crying, I was crying, if Miyamura was in pain, I felt my stomach sinking.

From the opening to the very last episode, the anime skips all of this important groundwork, making Horimiya into an edgy drama that occasionally has funny moments instead of the mature rom-com it was written to be. The vibes are completely off. The opening song and animations are way too serious and depressing. The first episode cuts what feels like an entire volume of Hori and Miyamura getting to slowly know each other, and exposition about the characters, and jumps straight into internal conflict and deep relationship emotions. There's just no way I'm going to be connected enough to characters in the first episode to care about them crying, especially if it's pieced together in a way that makes it seem like they've only known each other for like a week.

This is a reoccurring issue throughout the anime, where they cut exposition and minor character development to quickly get to climatic moments. I guess the director didn't realize how important those small moments were, and how cutting them would lead to anticlimactic, confusing, and quite frankly jarring dramatic moments. The anime is faithful to the manga in that all of the content of the anime was technically in the manga. But the way they pieced it together and the elements they added to certain parts turns it into a very different story. It looks like they tried to make this into an edgy, we're-not-like-other-shoujo's anime by their sound choice, animation choices, and story choices, and then failed at even doing that.

Another side of the pacing issue aside from the selection and emphasis of certain scenes, is the transition between them. Some scenes lingered on screen for way too long, to the point we thought our TV was frozen, while others were cut so abruptly short I just couldn't help but wonder if they were having problems making it within the time allotment for the episode. It felt and looked clunky.

The order of the story clips did not aid in this. The manga is a collection of short stories, with longer ones requiring more exposition interspersed into the shorter stories. Which stories are where and the order of them in the manga is very international. I always thought that every story, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential, was absolutely necessary, and I had thought at the time that if you got rid of even one of them, the story overall just wouldn't be as good. And I was right. Whether for time purposes or drama purposes, the anime cut out almost EVERY single one of these smaller stories. Outside of ruining the exposition, connection to characters, and character development like I mentioned before, it makes the transition between stories so jarring. The smaller stories in the exact order they were in were necessary as buffers, as transitions, and as pieces of information for character development and for the bigger, more climatic stories to flow naturally, make sense, and be more impactful. Every single climatic scene (of which there were many crammed into each episode) in Horimiya felt anticlimactic at best and downright jarring and confusing at worst. So these scenes that are supposed to have high emotional impact just completely miss.

And then after one of these high tension scenes, without any warning, it cuts to a comedic moment. In the manga, it was clear when we were switching from one story to another. It's a lot clearer and easier to understand due to panel and page structure. In anime, if you want to keep this same structure, you have to do something similar to indicate to the viewer that we're switching to something else now or else it looks like you're just randomly cutting between seemingly unrelated scenes. A title/break card is sometimes used for that and I think would have worked well in this case. But no. One moment a character would be plagued by their past, and the next there would be a joke about Hori's kink, and the next would be a different scene of the same character being plagued by their past. If they didn't want to use title cards, they should have reordered the scenes so it made more sense as a comprehensive story. It makes more sense to have larger sections that tell a full story rather than trying to maintain chronological order when you've cut so many little pieces out.

That being said, there are some positives. The voice actors are great and so is the general animation. Unfortunately, even with good individual elements like voice acting, animation, and source material, the directing really fumbled this one. The director and storyboarding team misinterpreted the essence of this story, which turned it into an overdramatic mess.

With all of the great shoujos coming out now and getting anime adaptations, I would recommend skipping over this anime. If you'd like to see a proper adaptation where you can tell the director and studio not only loved the story, but really understood it, I'd recommend Skip to Loafer. It really does seem like a love letter to the Manga from the Studio. If you read and watch Horimiya and Skip to Loafer in a short time frame, you'll really see the difference a good director who understands the story and the mangakas intention makes.