I've found religion

Monday, June 25, 2007

I'm not a big believer in using statistics as a source of optimism. One of the materials I read while selling books with the Southwestern Company was The Greatest Salesman in the World. It talks about how every unsuccessful prospect brings you closer to your real sale. Now, I'll certainly agree that when you fail at something you can learn from your mistakes and get better, but the the world does not magically grant you things if you just keep going. When you flip a coin it has a 50% chance of landing heads up. Same as the next time, and the time after that. If you flip a coin ten thousand times and it always comes up tails, you're no closer to heads than someone who has never flipped a coin before. Though you'll have to forgive me if I don't ask you for lottery numbers.

Even still, for every thirty episodes of Jinki Extend or Desert Punk I suffer through, I will usually stumble upon a brilliant show like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Here is a show that is so well made, so cool, and so intelligent that they can take the most uninteresting setting and make it more compelling than the possibility of dating your sister. The Melancholy (as it will hereafter be referred to) takes place in your typical Japanese high school (the abysmal Jinki Extend does get credit for placing their giant fighting robots in Venezuela). Haruhi Suzumiya looks like your normal beautiful girl on the surface, but she's been bored silly for the last three years.

"I'm not interested in normal humans," she announces on the first day of class. "If any of you are aliens, time travelers, espers or otherworlders: come see me. That's all."

It turns out Haruhi is dead serious. And extremely aggressive, energetic, jealous and downright angry most of the time. She joins a number of school clubs looking for these X-Files types of encounters and finds nothing but normal humans. Her solution is to create her own club, the Spreading Excitement All Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade, or the SOS Brigade for short. After recruiting / kidnapping four other members, her immobile mystery machine can begin.

The entire story is narrated by Kyon, the "straight man" of the group. As he is the first person to successfully hold a conversation with Haruhi, she forces him to do her bidding and drags him along whenever she can. Other people pulled into Haruhi's wake are the cute, petite and well-endowed Mikuru; the stoic and ever-reading Yuki; and Itsuki the pretty-boy. They don't seem to mind going along with Haruhi's schemes for a remarkably important reason.

Haruhi is the God of this world.

Much as The Matrix posed the question, "what if we were all just brains in jars," the Melancholy wonders "what if this world was someone's dream?" When she gets bored, Haruhi has the unconscious supernatural ability to create a new universe, step into it, and destroy the old one. As you can imagine, this would be a bad thing. The people in the SOS Brigade except for Kyon are there to keep Haruhi entertained so she does not become, yes, melancholy. Kyon's there for the ride, I think.

I discovered this show through a video on YouTube. The ending of each episode features an elaborate dance routine drawn at a full 30 frames per second. You simply have never seen animation this smooth or with this level of attention to detail. You have also never seen such embarrassing imitations, both animated and (God help us) live action. Here's a hint, folks: a great looking dance in an anime turns into a third rate J-Pop stage routine when you do it in the real world.

The real quality of the Melancholy is not just in the ending song: the whole show is drawn very well, animated well, with snappy writing and precise directing. During all of Kyon's many monologues the camera will flick to different angles rather than sitting in place showing his mouth moving. They'll apply visual filters, simulate a fisheye lens and slow time for dramatic effect. You will not be bored (although you might be rather confused).

What's more, the characters don't talk in idiot-speak. When you say, "I'm going to the movies tonight," someone else doesn't say, "The movies?" and then you say, "Yes, the movies. I'm going to see [movie name]." In the real world the other person, understanding the noun "movies," might reasonably ask "Which movie are you going to see?" There are lots of nouns tossed about in the Melancholy, but you won't hear them repeated very often. Hearing anime characters talk like real people is a novel experience.

A hidden reason I love Haruhi so much is that she's the most perfect recreation of Savannah Vice from my long-delayed comic. It's an archetype I've never really seen done well: the intelligent angry woman who doesn't show her affections in the same way the other doe-eyed females do. It's clear Haruhi likes Kyon, but she doesn't stand at corners with her eyes pulsing at him. She pouts, demolishes innocent soft drink cups, and stalks away with her arms bent in the classic Japanese angry walk pose. If I knew she wouldn't find me unworthy I'd join her and be a Harhuiist.