Salvaged by the final two episodes, I thought I was for sure giving this anime a thumbs down just because of how it tends to create drama out of nothing.
For a manga I've read for years since it's serialization, I surprisingly found myself being frustrated at the show at many points rather than just enjoying it as I usually do with most anime I watch. The rather episodic story and development is the main problem I have with Horimiya, it is all too casual and bland. In regards to Miyamura, I understand how people can be shy and just not want to associate with
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others, but there is little to no backstory as to why or how that happens. Even the more anti-social viewers themselves may find a lack of personal connection to the main character because Miyamura's behavior stems from literally nothing. The same can go for many other instances where characters just act differently for the sake of creating something worth paying attention to. Horimiya also tries to forcibly make the relationships between each of the characters seem more casual than they should be. Ironic for a show centered around emotion and connection, it all seems hollow and could've at least been more fleshed out through more intense and realistic backstories or transpiring events. I don't really see how people can thoroughly appreciate Horimiya's characters when every character seems so one-dimensional. Well, maybe they can enjoy them at face value because they are at least pleasing to the eye?
What I'm trying to say is that there is a lack of expressiveness, when Horimiya is just a show involving high school students and their interactions with each other in their daily lives. Kaguya-sama does everything this show does but better. It can be a nice change of pace as overly emotional characters tend to ruin my experiences with a lot of other shows, but there needs to be an appropriate balance. Whether the setting is more exciting and the characters more realistic, or the setting is more realistic and the characters more exciting, balance plays an important role in drawing in the audience without pushing them away. This is not to say balance always needs to exist, or ideas and stories may feel regurgitated, as luckily enough for anime, animation, art-style, and music still command viewership. There are a few shows that play out well one sidedly whether being too real or too imaginary (Real: San-gatsu no lion, Imaginary: Gurren Lagann), but there are commendable amounts of creativity included in the how these anime were constructed that I will not get into in this review. The creativity in this show? Maybe the visuals in the opening and the eye-catching hair and eye colors of the cast to make them seem more exciting with their robot-like personalities.
Disregarding the "story" and the "characters", I feel like I owe it to the show to acknowledge the audio and the visuals. The voice acting was decent at best and in fact was a big part in how I viewed the cast as being uninteresting, but the music did assist a lot in providing glimpses into what emotions could have been invoked in viewers if what was happening was just more interesting. This can also be said for the panning angles of the "colorful shadows" when a character felt something notable. I would have dropped this show a while ago had it not been for the consistent art direction in character design and fluidity. The same could be said for the manga. What kept me in both the anime and manga versions were more of the art rather than any of the story or even the characters themselves. The first episode and the final scenes of the show were especially splendid and command a lot of respect from myself even as someone who tends to strongly gravitate towards the visually appealing.
TL;DR Moral of this review, art and music good, story and characters boring and bad.
6/10
(This is my first written review and randomly felt the need to pump this out in an hour. I'm not re-reading and editing this so sorry for the errors or contradictory statements. It seems like I shit on this show a lot and people reading this review may expect a lower rating, but I honestly don't really rate shows I complete below a 5. I wouldn't finish it if I didn't have some enjoyment in watching it. I mean why do people finish shows they think are bad anyway? Literally wasting time just for the sole purpose of shitting on it in a MAL review and seeming tasteful? XD)
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Apr 5, 2021
Salvaged by the final two episodes, I thought I was for sure giving this anime a thumbs down just because of how it tends to create drama out of nothing.
For a manga I've read for years since it's serialization, I surprisingly found myself being frustrated at the show at many points rather than just enjoying it as I usually do with most anime I watch. The rather episodic story and development is the main problem I have with Horimiya, it is all too casual and bland. In regards to Miyamura, I understand how people can be shy and just not want to associate with ... |
