woensdag 3 april 2019

(Good) HINAMATSURI

Series in one sentence:
A lazy bitch forces herself into someone's life, and the victim ends up loving her for it.


Series in more sentences:

A selfish criminal is visited by a young girl stuck in a futuristic pod, who then refuses to leave when freed. Hina appears to have destructive psychic powers, urging the criminal to take on a cautious approach and allow her to stay.
While she's anything but the ideal daughter, he gradually takes on a father role and continues his old life while taking care of her.



Good, but could've been grand. I've never witnessed a show abandon its own plot this quickly.

Things starts out simple: a girl with psychic powers stuck in a metal pod falls into a criminal's living room and the guy has to deal with her from that moment on, but after 2 mere episodes, the psychic powers pretty much aren't mentioned or shown again and we get multiple stories that could've worked out using regular orphan girls.


Another psychic child gets transported to Earth to destroy Hina, but that conflict resolves itself in mere minutes. This poor blonde hitman enters an entirely different adventure of her own after that. Her whole meeting with Hina was unnecessary.
When this girl realizes she can't go back home, she feels forced to quit using her powers in order not to alarm Hina, and goes to live on the streets. She lets a well-meaning homeless man talk her into not stealing anymore, and while the girl enjoys the company of the other hobos and the anime treats the excruciating work she does as a good experience, you realize how traumatized she truly is when given the chance to stay with a normal family. Pretty messed up.
Why couldn't this girl stay with the dirty rich criminal, too? He really liked her.

The girl this man chose to call his daughter is an awful person, an absolute leech. You can say Hina's charm is her lacklustre personality, but without her psychic powers, she's useless to have around. When the anime decided to abandon the supernatural element, I didn't enjoy Hina that much. Some of her scenes are still cute, though.
The blonde girl also stopped using her powers and I have no idea why. In the episodes where she's a working homeless person, she was seen carrying heavy stuff all the time, and I kept wondering why she didn't slightly levitate her baggage to make the work easier for herself.

This anime is a mix of multiple stories and I can't say they fit well. If they had been picked out and cleaned up, they could've been their own anime and a good watch.
This could've been about a dangerous supernatural girl exiled to Earth and in need of rehabilitation that a criminal of all people decides to give, an illegitimate child forced to stay with her shady father, an orphan finding her place within the local homeless community and then given a foster family, a prestige student leading a double life as a talented bartender and quickly reaching the top class, or an orphan with psychic powers being taken in by fighting monks and becoming famous.
But the way things are now, I don't understand what the anime wants from me. What's the focus? Not the psychic powers, that's for sure.


The last episode shamelessly crams in a last-minute story as well, since the animators remembered they had introduced a 3rd psychic girl, who they'd given no further screen time to.



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