Hyouka

Spoiler warning for Hyouka as well as slightly for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006)

Hyouka - 6.5-7/10

About a year ago in early 2020 I tried to watch Hyouka on the heels of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.  I had never really been interested in KyoAni works before, viewing them as something of a specialist in high school SoL that offered little interest to me.  But in the wake of the head-over-heels experience that was the first season of Haruhi (broadcast order or bust) I thought I ought to try a few more.  It didn't work out.  With Hyouka I felt like I was watching a worse version of that famous series, just played straight.  A few episodes in it was abandoned until about a month ago when at the urging of a friend and armed with the blog of an enthusiast I set about it once again.  Having finished I am left with the peculiar sense that I just enjoyed the most remarkable tribute of a show to itself I have ever seen.

Pretty Without Being Beautiful

KyoAni knows how to make anime.  More specifically, KyoAni knows how to make series that are at home in the animated medium.  The studio has a special touch when it comes to ensuring that their productions are more than just manga in motion set to a bit of music; they turn them into an actual form of cinema.  Hyouka in particular is a tour de force of the use of the "camera" as both a window into another world as well as encapsulating that of a single person's perspective: the viewer's.  The way they have it flick from detail to detail has the element of an eye saccade, and it is done so naturally that we easily forget that it is we that are being guided by it.  It is why when we occasionally have a fast one pulled on us, such as the conclusion to the festival arc, where we could have seen everything that was happening but didn't, it is so surprising.  It is like having our own eyes betray us.

 

Beyond this the quality of Hyouka's art and direction are quite high.  At its worst some of the episodes are average to above average, and at its best it approaches movie quality in its detail and flow.  Some of the visuals surrounding the mysteries and internal thoughts in particular stuck in my memory as embodiments of playful imagination.  Nobody could mistake this show as one just being done by the numbers.

 

Which brings me to the themes themselves: they are remarkably appropriate.  Perhaps I am not used to such low-stakes series, but to have adolescent characters develop by small, invisible steps episode after episode, not screaming and crying all the time but rather experiencing the sort of tremendous-yet-tedious transitions that happen over the course of the first year of high school was... surprising in its realism.  Anime doesn't usually have such restraint, and it is just the sort of downplayed emotionality that I live for in many of my favorites.

So why did Hyouka not move me?

Throughout the series I kept expecting for it to sink in and it never did.  It was a mystery.  At first I ran through the usual suspects (preference, lack of empathy, an over-inflated sense of superiority to the subject, being grouchy, etc.) but none of them held water.  They didn't fit either the facts or the characters involved.  After a while I came to another explanation, and to do it justice I want to step through the stages of my deduction.

 

The first observation concerns the fan service I early on noticed being lavished on Chitanda.  I do not mean fan service of the vulgar, ecchi sort, but rather the fine-tuning of her total character design.  She is precision-engineered to be a perfect waifu: intelligent, but innocent so not threatening; vivacious, but appropriately demure and gets embarrassed by the right things; puppy-like in her curiosity, but armed with canine senses that allow her to contribute rather than just be needy; and mysterious without having even a hint of danger.  She even cooks like a champ (while looking fabulous in her ponytail and apron).  

I say none of the above with distaste; Chitanda is assuredly cute.  It is rather with a sort of strange admiration that I regard the high level of craftsmanship that went into balancing all these factors.  She's not your run-of-the-mill moe bait, but a fine porcelain doll who has been imbued with appeal by not-inconsiderable artistic talent.  The only thing that I can easily point to as a flaw is her lack of flaws; unlike her co-damsel Mayaka, the expressions of Chitanda's personality are never presented as having a problematic side.  Even the resolution to her character dilemma during the festival arc is to realize that she just needs to be herself rather than try to copy Irisu's methods.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

The second major clue came with the movie arc, for it was here that I felt more than ever I was watching the show that Haruhi was a parody of... before it even existed.  Well, this is perhaps not true, as Hyouka's source material did exist before Haruhi's, meaning the latter was likely a true parody of the former, but to have them both expressed through the lens of KyoAni make the comparison truly striking.

Aside from shots that shocked me in their similarity, there was the issue of the trick.  The twist behind the Hyouka movie is that the characters are actually part of the script, as it were; if not directly, then involved in writing it, and so caught up in a web of machinations that is the true nature of the situation.  Similarly, the "solution" inside the movie itself is to turn something that ought to be out of bounds, the cameraman, into part of the story, namely the murderer.  In both cases it is a mystery that is only solvable if you step outside the bounds that have tacitly been set for you.  It was genuinely clever, and would have been really rather impressive... if I had never seen Haruhi.  

 

I'm not here to sell Haruhi, but its ability to take self-reference up to the next level makes it the undisputed master of this approach in anime.  There it is not just the characters who are unwittingly part of the mystery, it is the viewers as well; we are the essential ingredient of the show, and it is only through abusing our own attempts to figure it out that it is able to trick us.  The result is not just to produce mysteries that go more than three stories deep, nestling mysteries within mysteries, but to teach us just a little bit about ourselves if we care to listen.  It is a type of heartfelt cleverness that I have never experienced before or since.

 

Now it may not seem fair to compare Hyouka to Haruhi and then conclude something is lacking in the former just because the latter does some aspects better.  After all, we could never enjoy anything ever again since no work is the best in every category.  But that is not the purpose of my comparison.  Rather, it is to emphasize that the trick in Haruhi had purpose.  By bringing the tools of KyoAni's cinemagraphic artistry to bear on the problem of fooling us it aligned the structure with the message: we overlook the obvious and underappreciate the atypical in favor of our own egotism.  That it was made seamlessly engaging through the use of all that KyoAni had to offer was what elevated Haruhi to masterpiece.  

It was through this sort of double-vision in the movie arc, one eye for each series, that I gained binocular vision, and as I gazed I could not see a similar depth in Hyouka.  The movie was just a smooth slight-of-hand in the show itself, accompanying and providing an arena for Oreki's character development.  Which once again, I both enjoyed and appreciated; these were some of my favorite episodes of the whole series.  Like all things Hyouka the whole thing was immaculately crafted.  So why did it not feel substantive? 

What gave me the final hint, though, was the school festival.  On one hand, it isn't possible to give enough credit to KyoAni's detailed, frenetic, and yet happily youthful exposition of that event; from early rumblings to exhausted take down it was alive.  It was also a great arc for letting the characters other than Oreki breathe, getting us out from under the mop-top cloud of his psyche to experience life at Kamiyama High to its fullest.  And it was during the central show piece of all of this, the cook-off, where Chitanda once again dons her apron and flexes to show her elan, that I realized: this was for me, the viewer.  

Perhaps this seems like a silly observation.  Of course anime is made for viewers; who else would it be made for?  But this is precisely the problem: catering to the audience makes it impossible to really hold true to an artistic vision.  What I was watching, despite the pretense otherwise, was not a story about talent and the growth pains of adolescence but KyoAni's demonstration of its own prowess.  In other words, Hyouka isn't burning with a desire to say anything in particular, but it is passionate about saying it well.  

One of the most genuine portions of the entire series, after all, is Mayaka's manga arc, that paean to the value of quality in art and expressions of frustration that we often fall short of lofty aspirations.  That was one of the times when I truly felt the show.  Hyouka was KyoAni's self-declared A Corpse By Morning, a production of raw skill that would wow its consumers and in the process prove that good series were worth making.

 

In this light, then, several other pieces which had puzzled me fell into place.  Why does Hyouka so love its classical music, its poetry quotations in the eye catches, and its repeated references to the giants of mystery literature despite not really being a mystery itself?  Because it admires their quality and adorns itself with them in association.  Pretentious?  A little, perhaps, but also a sincere form of flattery.  Similarly it helped me put a finger on why the visual metaphors and vignettes often felt tiresome even when inventive: their sheer density went beyond elegance into self-celebration.  Without the need to convey another message there was nothing to direct, and so reign in, these demonstrations of skill.  Good taste is foiled just as easily by doing too much as doing too little.

 

Which brings us back to the fan service and the flex that caused this all to crystalize.  The answer as to why the show could pander so seamlessly without breaking form was because selling Chitanda was part of the form.  Unlike most series where the appeal to the audience is inserted with an awkward obviousness, KyoAni did it with high ability.  The virtuosos of high school anime were here to show us not just their superlative skill with art and animation and direction, but their ability to craft cute adolescent girls and have us enjoy them as well.  It's the whole package.  

So this is my final solution: Hyouka is a series undertaken with masterpiece capacity but held back by its lack of centerpiece.  It has all the parts in place, everything is arranged as it should be, but they ultimately serve no greater purpose than to assert their own individual attractiveness.  It is an answer that matches both the facts of the matter as well as the character of the whole, and I believe that the two protagonists would appreciate that though it was not quite the mystery the show wanted me to solve.  My curiosity, at last, was satisfied.

On Quality and Talent

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a major French artist of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries and is regarded by many to be a great master.  Regardless of whether he deserves that status (I leave that to the art historians), he arouses in me a particular ambivalence of feeling.  While he did many wonderful paintings, he seems to me excessively given over to admiring the nude female form.  Physical sensuousness was his greatest wellspring of inspiration, and his impressive ability allowed him to make it visible and even artistic.  But ultimately that was also the limit of his imagination too, and I find myself in agreement with Delacroix when he says that Ingres' works were, "The complete expression of an incomplete mind." 

 

My thoughts with regards to KyoAni in Hyouka fall into a similar mold.  One of the best shots in the entire series was when Oreki's gaze was arrested by seeing Chitanda's nape at the festival.  I was struck by a sense that was unfalsifiably sincere.  Just a few stray tendrils of hair to accentuate it, and not too sensuous as a bare back would be, there is something hypnotic about the graceful curve of the neck of the girl you care about.  KyoAni knows and appreciates its females (perhaps a little too much if some of their EDs are anything to go by) and here, before trying to be beautiful could overwhelm it, was a genuine expression of that.  But to utilize yet another commentator's views on Ingres:

"[The reason for Ingres' artistic decline is] more closely connected to the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake.'  He had absolutely nothing to say about life - only about style; and the style that he had created with such pains was too limited and had become an end in itself."

 

There were a few things KyoAni really did feel strongly about, but none of them were broad or deep enough to make a truly great series of.  It makes me wonder if one of the other themes that came through strongly at times, that of talent, was haunting them; that just having some artistic skill and an ambition to create a masterpiece wasn't the same as having a soul that could actually make it so.  Hyouka in its better moments really is delightful and I wouldn't shrink from recommending it to somebody wants a high-definition, character-centric romantic drama.  But I also can't give it more than that, and as Oreki rode under the blossoming cherry tree in the final episode I could only think to myself, "Gee, isn't that pretty."