Shelf Life

Time Detective

The hard-working and determined, but slightly useless protagonist is a young gal named Tamaki. During a visit to her grandmother, she discovers that she can see all sorts of non-human, supernatural creatures, and that she's in fact the next Tamayori Princess. There's some giant evil demon that's sealed away in the mountains, and it's up to the Tamayori Princess to make sure that it stays sealed. Luckily, she's assisted by five hot dudes, who are obligated to help her and protect her and walk her home from school thoroughly idyllic fields of poppies. But alas, there's some evil organization with members named after German numbers, because why not, who are very keen on destroying all the seals and obtaining the demon for themselves. This means that there are plenty of fights scattered throughout the series, but they are amongst the most static, most uninteresting fights to ever be animated. Because all the fighters can use magic, the vast majority of the battles just involve characters freezing into an action pose, screaming, and emitting CG energy beams from their palms. I'm fairly certain most of the actions scenes in Hiiro no Kakera are accomplished with no more than twenty drawn frames, with the rest just being pans of them shooting lightning bolts at each other. In fact, most of this series is pretty cheaply animated, so there's a disturbing amount of frozen faces that lifelessly gab at each other, eyes forced open to the world.

It doesn't help the monotony that every single character in Hiiro no Kakera is a walking cliché. At one point, perhaps to give fangirls more shipping fodder or to help fuel a daydream where Hunky Magic Dude #1 bakes her a cake or something, the primary characters spend five minutes talking about their hobbies. Tamaki literally does the thing where she pantomimes holding a microphone, and asks each boy, “So, what are your hobbies?” We learn that the sultry one actually likes crosswords, and the sweet healer boy likes to cook. One of the guys wants to ride across America on a motorcycle. Thrilling. Tamaki herself is cut from that cloth of anime heroines where she mostly gets in the way all the time so that she can be saved every five minutes from a soft-eyed hunk who chides her, “Don't make me worry about you.” At some point, someone on the writing staff must've said, “But isn't it really annoying how she just gets in the way all the time?” because halfway through the series, every time she does something annoying, another character will chime in, “It really shows your desire to help, though!” Lest you think the bad guys are saved from cliché, they're not. My favorite member of Evil Organization Logos is giant-breasted, minimally-clothed Vier, who mysteriously looks exactly the same as new English teacher Ms. Fiona, except with different colored hair. Uh-oh.

Needless to say, I didn't find Hiiro no Kakera to be terribly entertaining. It's not heinously bad, but it's certainly not interesting, nor suspenseful, nor funny, nor really any other adjective that can help time pass in a pleasing manner. Each scene felt like it dragged on for eternity, and there were times when I wanted to reach through the screen, shake the characters, and plead with them to either talk faster or stop dicking around. I won't hold my breath for the second season.[TOP]