When I hear that Bones are making a new anime, I sit up and pay attention. However, when I heard that the famous shounen studio (responsible for animating, amongst others, Fullmetal Alchemist and Wolf’s Rain) are trying their hand at a light shoujo comedy, I just had to see how they fared. As a matter of fact, they managed to make one of the biggest shows of the last season, and win the affection of many a young female viewer – and a fair few male ones, too.
Ouran revolves around a girl of average income named Haruhi at a school for the incredibly rich. Some of the prettiest boys in this school have formed a ‘host club’, whose modus operandi is to charm the female contingent of the school and profit from their custom. When Haruhi stumbles across the club and ends up breaking a valuable vase, they coerce her into joining, believing her to be a pretty boy. She soon gets to know the club members, who are well aware that they fit neatly into typical shoujo archetypes (a handsome leader, a quiet bespectacled academic type, a tall silent one, an adorable chibi who looks about 7 and two very close identical twins) and most of them soon become enamoured with her. But beneath the dressing-up games, the whacky adventures and the cheerful quests to help others who have found themselves in predicaments, each of the original host club members has problems of his own.
The show has the comfortable situation of being ostensibly a comedy, so its over-obvious premise can be accepted as a parody of the genre – indeed, it’s quite fun to watch this alongside Meine Lieber, which is a serious shoujo drama with many of the same clichés sent up by Ouran (more on that when I finish ML series 2) – and yet the writers can turn things serious and angsty and still be taken seriously because of the comedy base. Anime creators like even their cutest shows to be bittersweet, so it’s a formula that works well. While Ouran didn’t always hit the mark, and had a fair few boring, pretentious or just plain forgettable episodes focusing on secondary or peripheral characters, it was always a show worth watching, because almost every episode had some great laughs, some cute moments and some pure joyful randomness. The ending, while very open, was both serious and silly enough to work well, and ended with a clever juxtaposition of characters and settings. Will there be a series two? Very possible, since the series was a hit in Japan and there’s more manga source material to go on. Possibly why few series-long loose ends were never really tied up.
Fun, cute, vibrant, well-acted, well-animated and genuinely funny character-driven comedy. Not the funniest show I’ve ever seen, nor the most moving, sweet or clever. But always a joy to watch, and thus recommended.
(originally written 10.2.06)
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