Review of Horimiya

TDLR: Read the manga or watch the OVA This is the first, and probably the last, time I will ever write a review on MAL. The reason I decided to go out of my way to write this review is because I have a real long history with Horimiya. I bought the first volume of Horimiya in a Barnes & Noble in high school and I was instantly hooked. I completed the manga up to the most recent chapter at the time within a few days. My first personal purchase while at college was 6 volumes of Horimiya at a shop I had to go outof my way by train in order to get to. My intention with this opening isn't to bore you with my life story, but to show you that I am an avid fan of Horimiya who was very disappointed with this adaption and not just some Drama RomCom hater.

The amount of things cut from the manga for the sake of making a "cohesive" 13 episode series that covers most of the manga is frankly surreal. While a lot of the content that was cut was more light-hearted in nature, I would argue that these parts helped provide a respite from the drama and to allowed the reader to see the deepening relations between characters. The lack of these arcs makes the Horimiya anime adaptation seem hollow by comparison. Characters seem to become friends much more quickly and unnaturally than in the manga, mainly because the arcs where these characters were shown growing closer have been cut. Seeing the characters interact comedically in later episodes reminded me greatly of these chapters, but by that point it was far too late to establish the bonds between these characters. On the other hand, characters who have emotional arcs in the later half of the anime feel out of place because the build up of their characters has happened so rapidly that it honestly gave me whiplash. Even the earlier episodes with Hori and Miyamura building their relationship felt rushed because of this lack of content to build their characters as well as their friends' characters. Another result of this cutting of content is that characters have been written into the background in order to fit the main narrative. Shin (I bet no one who solely watched the anime even knows who that is) and Sawada are in my opinion the two biggest examples of characters who have been drastically neutered by the adaptation. The former shows up in about two scenes and the latter just kind of shows up once or twice without having much in terms of character development. The end result of all of this is that due to cutting content, Horimiya is left with a lot of bland characters that act as if they have development and strong relationships even though they really don't.

Most of Horimiya's the art looks pleasing to the eye and really only takes a nose dive when they're trying to be funny or have an emotional moment. During emotional moments they hit you over the head with what I would like to describe as, for lack of a better term, artsy particles and colored silhouettes common in shoujo manga. However, these direction choices really felt like the director trying to cover-up the lack of build-up for these moments so that they could still stand out. Comedic moments have chibis that also look a little weird, but when you have such a stylized art style there's no real way to get around that. All in all, while disappointing at times the art is good to look at and accurate to the manga while the directing is overall worse but still serviceable in most situations.

The soundtrack in this show is standard enough. There is no track that plays during the runtime of the show that's really memorable, but none that I found to be too terrible either. The opening and ending are pretty good, but each have their own problems. The opening is good on its own, but it feels like a drastic departure from my internal image of Horimiya. The ending is more in-line with this image, but suffers from some sub-par 3D animation.

My main problem with this adaptation is that it decided to be 90% drama and 10% comedy. You can tell this very clearly from the opening, where the show tries to present you with a "deep, introspective teen drama" vibe from the characters. I'm not saying the source material never gets to these points, but the showrunners did not understand that there are more parts to it than just the drama aspects. The clear focus on drama is probably what led to the cutting of most of the comedic parts of Horimiya. With 24 episodes I'm sure they could have spent the time to build the relations between characters and not rush through most of the manga, but even then I don't know if this adaption would have succeeded. The Director and Script/Series Composer have some real red flags on their resumes so in all honesty without a drastic change in staff I don't think the production would have done anything great with the source material.

Even with the shoddy directing, the cutting of necessary character-building, and the whiplash pacing, I still set my personal enjoyment score as an 8. This is because I firmly believe that my experience with the manga versions of the characters allowed me to understand the motivations of the shallow anime characters fairly well. I understand the backstories of these characters, so I can fill in the gaps that the showrunners left out. In my opinion, this is why the average score for this show is as high as it is. Being the twelfth most popular manga on MAL, Horimiya has a lot of people coming in with knowledge of the property already and thus has a lot of people who made the same allowances I did. But in reality, I didn't like the anime, I was just convincing myself that I liked the anime because the manga was such an integral part of my life. I honestly hope that one day Horimiya gets another chance at an anime adaptation with some more competent people behind it.