Review of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2009)

For the whole Haruhi series, I just had a general feeling while watching this anime that not much really happened. I feel like there isn't much that's special about it. Sure I may get a few chuckles out of some silly situations the characters get themselves into and I enjoy some of Kyon's dialogues, but beside those things the show just feels like a very typical high school life/comedy show despite the reputation that it has garnered from fans over the years. The show tries to make an interesting twist on the daily lives of high schoolers by having a few of the main castcharacters posses interesting abilities and mostly hinted at backgrounds, but I feel like they are not fleshed out well enough for me to really care that much about them. Neither are their abilities/powers themselves explored that much either, which was a let down to me. I often found myself feeling listless or bored when this show settles into its usual dry formula of : haruhi gets them into some situation to ease her boredom, she picked on mikuru for the umpteenth time, kozumi offers his crackpot theory, kyon makes snarky comment/ wisecrack joke/complains about situation/fantasizes about mikuru.

For the 2nd season in particular, it was almost completely dominated by the endless 8 arc and the movie/school festival arc (the sigh arc), and neither really stood out to me besides two moments in the movie arc. I thought the first season had a lot more variety in things that happened and I feel was a bit better but is still plagued by many of the same problems the 2nd season has.

The artwork and music were really nice in my opinion, for both seasons. I really enjoyed the openings and endings, and the animation was fluid and very nice to look at for the whole show.

The two high points I mentioned of this second season that really came out of nowhere . I can't talk about them much because I want to avoid spoiling them . Lets just say that there was an excellent performance at one point, and at another point for a very brief period a certain character gets a very well deserved verbal dressing down , even though this is sadly diluted very shortly afterwards when the accuser starts to feel sorry for the accused.

The only character in Haruhi season 2 that really stands out to me, again like the first season, is Kyon because you actually get to hear some of his inner thoughts , sort of like you would from a character of a visual novel which is a nice, and they were usually either chuckle worthy and/or had very good points about what was going on at that moment in the anime.

The most important character of the show, Haruhi, annoyed the living daylights out of me in both seasons because she seems to bully the other club members around all the time and she doesn't even have anything special about her personality other than that she's very aggressive and likes to keep doing things to keep her from being bored. The other club members are fairly boring and don't have much to them that keep me interested in them. Koizumi offers some interesting theories about haruhi but he otherwise feels like a very typical non nonchalant "nice guy" character. Mikurku is always the easily flustered damsel in distress that was never interesting to me even with that scenario they tried to work for her in the beginning of season 2. Like I said before they all had some serious potential with their abilities to make the show a lot more interesting but this was not the case, other than possibly Nagato with her interesting abilities but this was shown a lot better in season 1.

I'm not going to rant about the endless 8 because there's plenty of opinions about this already and its a well known phenomenon in the world of anime. I'll just say that I watched every second of them, and they weren't as bad as I originally expected. But this series of episodes could have easily been reduced to 2 episodes, or 4 episodes maximum and still got the same point across without the totally unnecessary level of repetition the viewer is put through.

So overall this anime felt very "average" to me. I never really thought that any of it was particularly bad besides the fact that the endless 8 went on so long, but almost none of the show stands out much either so maybe that in of itself is problem for this show. After watching it I will currently say that I would not recommend this anime based on my subjective opinion anyway. Some people say even though the anime isn't great the movie is awesome, but I disagree. I don't believe it's worth it to watch this series (if you don't enjoy it like me), just to get to that movie.