Review of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya
Out of 100 Nobles watching… 68 were impressed! 15 died of old age 10 fell asleep during exposition 7 thought the story was weak overall The Haruhi series is an endless font of entertainment. Every time I think I’ve finished this potato chip anime MAL sneaks in the room and switches out my trash with a fresh opened bag of chips. To be clear I keep thinking I’ve finished all there is but it turns out I missed something and more Haruhi crawls out of the woodwork that I didn’t know about. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is a movie follow up to the (in my opinion) legendarily mediocre KyoAniseries “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”. I thought the movie was pretty okay and enjoyed it a healthy measure more than the anime series, however I did find the movie to be about an hour longer than it should have been and the pacing is that same snails crawl from the anime.
The plot revolves around our main protagonist Kyon waking up to find that the entire world seems to have forgotten the existence of Haruhi Suzumiya effectively resetting his life by like a year. The mysterious supernatural forces that in Kyons opinion plagued his life are now completely mundane. Everyone he knew to have super powers or be an otherworldly being is just a regular person, and worst of all this all happened a week before the Christmas party whoaaaah *pblbt*. It’s up to Kyon to figure out the mystery of what’s going on and set the world back to “normal” again.
I’ll say outright I liked the premise of the movie and the plot was fairly engaging and fun to follow. While I have a lot to complain about, the story was something fresh and different for Haruhi and it’s presented in the same package as the original anime, for better or for worse.
The soundtrack didn’t particularly stick out to me other than being a little over dramatic in places. Character reactions were pretty over the top and that rustles my immersion jimmies. It’s good timing that Re:Zero is getting its second season around this time as I’ve been thinking a lot about that series lately. The Haruhi anime had what I previously dubbed the worst time loop I’ve ever seen in any media and I stand by that. The Haruhi movie has less of a time loop and more of what could be compared with a kind of Isekai start. The protagonist is dropped into a different version of their own world. It’s not quite the same, but the general beats are there. “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya” maintains the tradition of the anime by hamfisting the drama a good bit with Kyon absolutely losing his shit everywhere he went as people told him they didn’t know who Haruhi Suzumiya was. It was more than a little frustrating to me watching all semblance of rational thought be thrown out the window by the protagonist especially when I’ve seen plenty examples of reality shattering realizations done better in other shows.
I don’t want to harp much more on the film because there’s not much more to knock it for. Haruhi’s attempts at serious tone and believable drama fall flat and the plots of both the show and this movie have a fair share of convoluted non-explanations. The movie has the exact same pacing as the show with completely static exposition for long lengths of time stretching things out to an unnecessarily long 2 hrs 42 min. With that out of the way we can enjoy the good provided in the film.
The film had an oddly centered focus around the Alien Android Thought Entity and resident best girl of the series Nagato Yuki. With the absence of Haruhi Suzumiya in the film Yuki naturally had more room for screen time, and narratively due to that aforementioned Suzumiya absence was now a normal girl. The anime’s monotone robotic bookworm with the movie becomes a now less robotic monotone bookworm… with emotions! Most of the film looked great because it’s animated by KyoAni so of course it does, but the extra work the animators put in to little details and movements of Yuki’s character as well as visual additions like having her ears blush red when she’s stumbling on her words are some of the best work expressing subtle character details I’ve ever seen. Every Yuki scene was an absolute delight except for when Kyon makes her cry which had the Nobles about ready to burn the amphitheater down for such a transgression.
The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya was an acceptable film which puts itself above its anime series predecessor with a large factor being likely due to the lack of Suzumiya’s presence herself... That’s perhaps too mean as I don’t mind Haruhi, and really her role in the film was enjoyable and I liked even her characterization more here than in the anime. The movie stumbles with its hallmark slow pacing and an obscenely long runtime for what it is, but Yuki Nagato carries the film on her back to the finish line for a more or less passing score. The director still clearly doesn’t respect my time, but I came back for more so apparently, I don’t either.
**Spoiler Plot Note** - The apex of the film comes when Kyon must choose between the mundane world he’s been put in or the world he’s from with supernatural happenings always causing him trouble. The tradeoff comes with the reversion of Nagato Yuki from a normal girl to her android self, and Kyon decides to go back. It’s ultimately shown Yuki has developed emotions as an android and keeps them. While reverting back to normal she has a minor amount of growth and expresses herself a bit at the end in her own way. This is all well and good, but the decision Kyon made was ultimately completely pointless. After he’s made his decision it’s revealed that Psycho Android Thought Entity Asakura was still a psycho android in the alternate world anyway and would likely totally have killed Kyon eventually if he stuck around to be cute with human Yuki. This reduces Kyon’s tough decision to go back to the way things were as the objectively correct choice. Like the anime we are once again robbed of a meaningful decision with consequences.