Rascal's avatar

Rascal

  • At the Edge of a Universe, Humming a Tune
  • Joined Dec 24, 2016
  • 25

Hinamatsuri

Jun 22, 2018

AITAAA!

Hinamatsuri is a very pretty Slice of Life Comedy, or as I like to call it, a SolCom, about a girl with psychic powers named Hina, and a yakuza boss name Nitta, as well as their relationship.

To start off the review of this disappointment I'll admit my biases: i fully expected this anime to be primarily comedy at the beginning and make good use of psychic powers in both its presentation, and story, as well as its comedy that I hoped would be frequent and well-done. But this is not that. If you're expecting a good comedy with a quirky premise and a great story and real vision behind it, go watch something like Gintama. 2017 or Assassination Classroom. This anime is primarily a slice-of-life, and it's important to know that going into it. 

The first two episodes made me laugh pretty hard, introducing the deadpan comedy and reaction faces, and silly antics between hina and nitta, as well as anzu and the group. The first episode also has some pretty amazing action which is ingeniously dealt with at the end of the series.

Those are all the really good parts.

The story: hina and nitta are instantly put into this situation where they have to live together in a bizarre turn of events that doesn't get explained in detail for a while, and just have to deal with it. Along the show we take a 10 episode break from this continuity and get thrust into the exciting world of the slice of life genre, involving a girl named hitomi who's in middle school but works at a bar, another psychic named anzu who gets dropped in and instantly integrates herself into the homeless community, and the episodes follow their antics which usually lead to heartwarming moments. Each girl has an "arc" with the relationships they form.

I don't have a problem with that, the problem I have is that the psychic powers hina and anzu have are ALMOST NEVER taken advantage of in the comedy! They have so much opportunity for slapstick but only use it on episode 1 and episode 12, a majority of which were scenes from episode 1! It's rediculous how much potential there is wasted.

The comedy: the funny moments of Hinamatsuri are sparse for me. There have been a few moments where I giggled, such as the godlike Mao segements, a few great Yakuza segments, and the famous "girly club" episode. The rest gets old fast. The reaction faces and deadpan comedy become mundane and expected as they're repeated again and again. At least the gags arent annoying. Hina's straight faced dry humor is sometimes funny, and so are nitta's reactions to things. Hitomi's reaction faces can also be great.

The characters: Anzu is your sweet blonde haired girl who gets a lot of heartwarming moments, but not a lot of actual entertaining moments. So I never cared much about her. Hina is cute and funny sometimes as I said but her character arcs revolve around failing to do anything normal. Nitta is the more interesting one, as he is a member of the Yakuza, and his segments are always the coolest... of which there are about 2. For some reason although there were plenty of yakuza sequences in the manga that would have been hilarious, they decided to focus on hitomi and anzu more, anzu whose stuff is boring and hitomi whose only thing is that she's a middle school bartender. Utako is also there allegedly.

The animation and sound: feel. does a brilliant job animating the characters, putting comedic emphasis on certain moments and adapting the manga's reaction faces fantastically. I loved the way this anime looked and sounded. The comedic timing was great but timing has to have some good comedy writing behind it, so timing isnt everything. It hardly ever made me laugh but this wasn't really feel.'s fault. The episode choices and the way the comedy is most of the time were to blame.

Now I get to talk about Mao.

*spoilers*

Mao is the best character and best part of hinamatsuri for me. She appears in episodes 9 and 12 as the best girl. Her part on the island is hilarious, talking to coconuts of hina and anzu. It's tragic but great, and her arc as a member of some superhuman martial arts movement, pretending to be amazing at martial arts but really just having psychic powers is hilarious, set up well by the guitar guy early on. If they make a sequel I want it to be centered around mao. She is just charming.

overall: it's a slice of life with very little comedic value unless you love deadpan comedy. If that's for you this may be worth it, but it wasn't for me, and was a bit of a disappointment.

4/10 story
8/10 animation
6/10 sound
5/10 characters
6/10 overall

You must be logged in to leave comments. or

There are no comments - leave one to be the first!