The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi

So I just watched this Disappearance of Haruhi movie (that's what it says up there)

Haruhi as a series has gone through an interesting arc. When I first watched the series, my only reaction was 'wow fucking awesome'. There you had this really weird and meta series, told out of order with quirky characters. Sure a lot of its ideas were lifted from some of the pillars of western science fiction, but it's okay to take ideas and recontextualize them. As far as I was concerned, that was a great series.

After that I hit the novels and discovered the uncomfortable fact that they were awful. The majority of the Haruhi novels, regardless of translation quality, are absolute unfiltered shit and the author is a talentless hack. The author tells obscure time travel stories and has characters say things like 'you wouldn't really understand' to paper over the glaring plot holes he introduces. Rather than exploring concepts he introduces, he leaves them half baked and starts throwing in new ones. The whole series is a complete fucking mess and was only made presentable by a really savvy director who knew how to spin lead into gold.

But the one time I would say that the guy almost got it right was in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. After watching the movie version, I am reminded of what the key word in that statement is: Almost.


So the basic plot of Disappearance is that someone (guess who?) has modified the universe so that Haruhi's disappeared and the rest of the SOS Brigade are all normal. Everyone's lost all memory of how things were except for Kyon, who is doing his best to restore the universe to the way it used to be somehow, though as he does so he's confronted by a 'normal' Nagato who quite obviously likes him.

So let's be clear: there's only one genuinely good character in Haruhi.


Mikuru is always just Mikuru, Koizumi never breaks out of his basic 'fruity esper-with-no-real-powers exposition boy' role and Kyon is just an (extra whiny) everyman. Haruhi herself is often described as being an unpredictable eccentric, but she's so predictably and unchangingly eccentric that to me she's just really a brat that's used to always getting her way without fail.

Nagato on the other hand is a character that actually has had some development as a character, or so I thought. She's this alien robot superlady that's confronted with human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon) for the first time and having trouble dealing with them. Recipe for success right there. So Disappearance, which is about her, should have been a winner.

It's not. At least not mostly.

The problem with Disappearance is that it's fucking terribly written. The first Haruhi season prospered because for the most part the author's storytelling style was set aside in favour of a more meta approach. This movie was basically a one to one conversion of the novel to the big screen and as a result it is absolutely terrible.


The pacing is a mess. The movie will move between Kyon wallowing in self pity, not knowing what to do, before arbitrarily stumbling on a clue and springing awkwardly into action. A good 30 minutes of the movie is dedicated to Kyon agonizing over whether or not he wants to stay in the peaceful 'normal' universe or go back to the crazy Haruhi universe and each moaning session comes to the exact same conclusion (he wants to go back to Haruhi world, I fucking get it).


The plot is incoherent. So much of the time travel mumbo jumbo is explained away with 'you wouldn't understand' that it just pisses me off. How did the time travelers even remain unaffected by Nagato's time warp? Why does Mikuru Senior know to expect Kyon?

But even beyond that, there's little dramatic unity in Disappearance. Sometimes it's a Nagato love story, sometimes it's about Haruhi and sometimes (when it gets really bad) it plays at being a sci fi thriller. All the disparate elements don't jive together at all and considering that literally nothing is resolved in the story (this is only novel 4 of 10 after all) it's really not a very satisfying film to watch.


Don't get me wrong, there are some great scenes in there. I'll be honest: I really do adore Nagato. The idea of an alien artificial intelligence going through Data's classic struggle to attain humanity (except with the romance angle thrown in) appeals to me greatly. Her character design is spot on and the voice of Chihara Minori is as powerful as it's always been.



Seeing those ideas explored thoroughly, even if it's only for about fifteen minutes in a 180 minute movie, was worth it I think. All of it is sloppily stuffed back into an arbitrary status quo shortly after that, but for that one shining moment Disappearance becomes a good movie.


That moment, however, is fleeting. Every character in Haruhi is stagnant and the story as a whole doesn't go anywhere. Six novels from now, Yuki will still be an android alien intelligence struggling with her human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon), with no real progression. Everyone else stays as everyone else. More bullshit is introduced, but the status quo remains uncontested.

And that just isn't good enough. There's more ...

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Season 2 Episode 1 - "Sorry to be late!"

So they aired a new Haruhi episode.

For the longest time, I really thought that Haruhi had some of the most ruthless capitalist minds Japan had to offer at its helm. The massive amounts of Haruhi figmas, crappy video games and merch they released coupled with things like Lucky Star (which is basically a giant commercial for Haruhi merchandise) made me conclude that these people were out to cut the purses of every hapless young man who has ever had a positive thought towards Haruhi.

Recent events have made me reconsider this...

Haruhi appears to be airing in this manner: They're showing reruns of the original series in chronological (ew) order. When they come to a part of the series where there's a story from the original novels to insert, they put in a new episode. Without warning. So last week's episode was the baseball episode. This week's was Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody... and then next week will be that episode where the Computer Society President is possessed by that giant bug. The next new episode will probably be in a month. And then there's another month of reruns between that new episode and the next.

The only reasoning I can think of for this is that kind of schedule is that someone at the studio doesn't actually want anyone to see the new episodes.

Say it with me now: What the fuck.

Anyhow, that aside, let's talk about the episode...



I read Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody over a year ago It's a nice little story that does the rare thing of bringing in all of the characters at the same time smoothly. So often Haruhi storylines will be segregated. There'll be a Nagato story and then a Mikuru story and then a Koizumi story. They don't really overlap in a significant way. What I like about Bamboo is that it manages to do character development for everyone (except maybe Koizumi) with one continuous story.


I've always been of the opinion that Haruhi works a lot better as an anime than it does as a novel. A character like Nagato, whose main feature is pregnant silences, just doesn't work very well when said pause is just the author writing 'and then she was quiet. And without a visual presence, Mikuru doesn't really work either. She's just the annoying useless ditz that Kyon pays WAY too much attention to for some inexplicable reason. Ditzy cutesy chicks are a lot easier to accept with an image than it is through text (which is something the author would do well to learn).



But a lot of other things come across a lot better visually... Nagato mouthing something before closing the door. The novel didn't dwell on her doing that at all, which is a crying shame. That's the kind of scene that you can interpret a couple of different ways and it is left nicely ambiguous.


So all in all, I think I feel comfortable saying that I enjoyed seeing Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody a lot more than I enjoyed reading, which is about the best you can ask for from an adaptation.

Still... Haruhi has some fundamental problems. Mainly: Balance of characters.


The author treats his main characters as equals (sorta... Koizumi certainly doesn't get as much screentime as everyone else). That's a good idea on paper, but it actually turns out to be a really bad one in practice. The reason for this is simple: No matter which way you shake it, an alien cyborg intelligence that has come to Earth to act as an observer does not weigh evenly with a ditzy redhead from the future.

So even though this episode integrated all the characters in a nice and unified way, it only really got good when Haruhi and Nagato had their scenes. Mikuru's scenes were mildly cute but wore thin after a little while. Then Haruhi's bit was great and Nagato's was fantastic. But the problem is they all had more or less equal time.



There's a reason why Lieutenant Barcley was never a regular member of the TNG cast. He's a fun guy and I love his episodes, but if he had as many episodes dedicated to him as, say, Data he would quickly lose his charm. Mikuru hasn't got half of Broccoli's charm and yet she gets put on even footing with Nagato and Haruhi both.

This is why for much as I love Haruhi, I don't have a very high opinion of the author. To be frank: he's a fucking amateur. He has good ideas and bad ideas and doesn't have a damn clue how to tell the two apart and just throws them all at the canvass in a big mess. Occasionally, when he's throwing the right ones, he'll manage to write something completely brilliant. But for a fair chunk of the time, he's just embarrassing himself. There's more ...