Ouran High School Host Club

The boys of the music room three

When I first heard about Ouran High School Host Club (Ouran Koukou Host Club) anime, I decided that even though it was animated by my favourite studio Bones I wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with it. The premise is rich kid's "host club" where the boys entertain the girls for money, and into this club by accident is brought a poor girl who becomes a servant for the boys after breaking a valuable item she can't possibly repay. I was thoroughly disgusted even though I knew series was really popular and was supposed to be really funny.

Haruhi

Then came Anime Evolution and Chu fell in love with the Ouran cosplayers and in the post-con afterglow I downloaded few episodes to make her happy. First episode took me by surprise - although the premise was more or less what I had understood, the characters against my expectations were not mean but completely sweet and sympathetic. Haruhi - the girl - is an asexual, independent and strong character who can stand on her own with the boys, and the boys on the other hand are silly rich kids that are constantly made fun of.

Hunny-sempai and Mori-sempai

Flat-chested Haruhi has had to cut her hair short due to an unfortunate accident and looks like a boy - so to repay her debt to the club she starts work as a host pretending to be a boy. Most of the gags in this truly gender-blending series have to do with gender and misunderstandings due to it in a way that would make Shakespeare proud, and it's very light and indeed very funny. All the boys are very fond of Haruhi, and slowly some of them start to fall in love with her. For the first 15 episodes it was purely a guilty pleasure: we had a good giggle while eating sushi and watching it. Chu had fallen in love with the series by then, but I only liked it and couldn't really watch more than few episodes at the time before getting a sugar overload. All this changed in episode 16 where character development really kicks in. Suddenly it wasn't just a bit of silly fun, but the characters become real and touching and I started caring about them.

Kyoya does what Kyoya knows best - shenanigans at the club room

Plot doesn't really matter in Ouran High School Host Club - as a typical shoujo product it's all about characters and relationships. And due to the subject matter it caters for everyone - the host club has to offer all stereotypical men for it's clientele. There's the host club leader and self-proclaimed "king" Tamaki who's the blond prince type, dark-haired Kyoya as the "shadow king" is the cool and calculating type with glasses, there are incestuous identical twins Hikaru and Kaoru who are the devil types with an added taboo, Mori is the wild type with a big-brother personality and Hunny is the childish shota type and acts as a little brother to Mori. For the ladies watching the series the question of course is - who would you designate to serve you today? For me the answer was from the get go the twins and Mori, and by the middle of the series Mori took a back seat while I swooned over Hikaru and especially Kaoru, but by the end and totally against my initial reaction Kyoya won my heart (OMG Kyoya and Haruhi FTW!!!!11!! LOL).

Sweet Tamaki

So, the fan girl that am, I had to go and buy Bisco Hatori's original manga the series is based on. Anime follows the manga extremely faithfully until the last few episodes - whereas the manga is still ongoing in Japan, Bones animated 26 episodes and the series needed an (open) conclusion to satisfy viewers (and I'm not ashamed to say I cried like a big girl for the last 10 minutes of it). As always, the manga has a lot more material and it just isn't possible to put everything into animation that you can put on a page. Bisco Hatori (not her real name) is an insanely funny mangaka, she has a superb sense of comedy and her few page bonus Ouran stories and tales about her life are some of the funniest manga I've ever read. The series is full of extremely clever word-play and cultural references that are very well handled and explained in the manga, in the anime many of these will just escape you despite Lunar's dedicated fansubbers. If I had to pick a negative I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of Hatori's style of drawing, it's far too big-eyed, frilly and shoujo for my taste - Bones did an excellent job in toning it down a notch. Not to say characters are not big-eyed and frilly in the anime too - especially Haruhi's eyes defy laws of physics - but oh man you should see the manga. Another thing I wish they had done in the manga translation are the honorifics - for example it's just not the same when they don't call the eldest students Hunny and Mori Hunny-sempai and Mori-sempai. if I had to criticize the anime I would say that 26 episodes was maybe not the ideal number - while I loved every single one of them (except maybe the second Zuka club and Haruhi in Wonderland - much better in manga) I think there was a lot of fluff and it would have been more perfect with less episodes. (But I'm not going to answer the "manga or anime" question either, it's just not fair comparing apples to oranges, no matter what fruit you like more.)

Twins cashing in on the forbidden brotherly love

Because of that, and the fact that I've already proclaimed the other Haruhi, Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, as the best anime of the year, Ouran High School Host Club must take the well earned second seat in the competition. It's not just for girls either - when Dragon gets stressed he enjoys a little bit of shoujo to make him laugh, and he read the manga and then watched the anime too. If you like well-written light-hearted cute comedy you're bound to like Ouran, and if you like cute boys and relationship fluff you're going to love it. The series is not licensed yet in US (although I'd say it's only a matter of time) so you'll have to get you hands on a fansub, but the first seven volumes of the manga are available from Viz in their Shojo Beat lineup. There are nine volumes out in Japan so far, and as the series is ongoing there is still a lot of Ouran goodness coming my way.

There's so much to this series I don't have time or the space to get in to, and so much I love about it - I can only scratch the surface tiny little bit hoping you'll be tempted.

Posted by kolibri at 10 October 20:32, 2006

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