Ah… what a refreshing anime this was :)

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a strange mix of various genres. Though I guess you could say it’s main focus is comedy, the randomness of the story proves that it exceeds at various other genres as well. Here is AniDB’s short introduction:

Based on Nagaru Tanigawa`s “Suzumiya Haruhi” series of novels.

A far from ordinary school story starts here!

This is a story of Suzumiya Haruhi, who upon enrollment at school announced “I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, beings from the future, or super-humans, come see me. That is all!”

Naturally, any normal person would think “What the…?”, but Haruhi is dead serious. Things get crazy when everyone realizes just how serious she is about it all and establishes the “SOS Dan”.

Suzumiya Haruhi is a good-looking high school girl who has a clear head, haughty personality and very egocentric thought. She has an unimaginably tremendous power to change the world, but she is totally unaware of her own power and so she is also unaware of the effect of her power on the outside world.

A delightfully strange, yet marvelously interesting story!

After watching Furi Kuri (aka FLCL) I thought I had seen it all, in terms of weirdness, however, this show demonstrated how you can create a really original and interesting anime even with one of the most typical anime settings: a high school, and various other cliche elements.

Even though it’s a very short anime (only 14 episodes), there is a great amount of character development throughout the episodes, and even though the episode line goes back and forth (the 1st episode, is actually episode 2, and the 3rd episode occurs after the last one) the way they organized the story sets it apart from any other anime, and manages to always keep it interesting, because you’re almost never watching the continuation of a mini-story in two episodes in a row.

When you complete the anime, you feel more or less like you did when you finished the second movie of “Back to the Future” (if you liked it) in which you fully understood every event and the story completely, and then you can’t help but think about how clever the story was put together.

This show stormed the AniDB top 10 from out of nowhere and even reached #1 spot for a while, and now I understand why (even though I think that the Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuiokuhen OVA a much better anime and my personal favorite out of all titles).

But still, this anime title can easily be placed highly ranked among my personal favorites, and I even dare to say that it is on the top 5 favorites. So if you’re an anime fan, and you’re looking for a different type of anime, I definitely recommend this one.

Related posts:

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya S2 Full OP
One Piece Review (Eps 1 – 130)
AnimeReactor Community Awards 2006
Honey & Clover II – Episodes 1 and 2 Review
Fullmetal Alchemist mini review

Hope you like that post!

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