Review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

This covers both seasons TLDR: Don't judge this series too early, watch the movie and read the novels too. My first impression of this anime after I finished it was terrible, and it's understandable, the series can be easily misinterpreted as your normal, garden variety school anime out there. But in actuality, it's a big f--- you to every anime, to anime fans, and to itself in general. Who in their sane mind would do anything like this in such a superb way? The story of this anime is more of what happens behind-the-scene rather than you see on screen, as someone that read the novels, the fidelityto them is incredible, yes, even the "filler" episodes are actually canonical, and things that in first glance seemed trivial might be actual key points to the story, and it's that when one pays attention to the dialogue one can discern what happened or what could happen but without telling you explicitly. I am glad that nothing was skipped from the novels in order to make this anime unlike a good number of anime adapted from Light Novels.

Despite its apparently tasteless and cliché setting, I dare to say it is actually a deconstruction of school anime, and one can even call it a deconstruction of anime itself: Endless Eight, Someday in the Rain and the episode order are good examples of something could happen only in this series.

The art is somewhat dated, but still stands strong, the camera angles, color palettes and fluid movements are strong points in favor of this anime, just being limited to technical limitations of the mid-late 2000s era, one can notice a moderate change in style with both seasons, but it is still consistent and recognizable, not to mention the good adaptation from real place imagery to animation. A downside, the lines on the characters seem thick in the 1st season episodes due to being produced in SD resolution, and that the color palette really screams TWO THOUSAND AND SIX.