(This review covers seasons 1 and 2 of Hibike Euphonium. I mention a handful of things that happen in the story to bolster a couple of arguments, though anything spoilery is anonymised and decontextualised.)
Hello reader! I only recently watched Hibike Euphonium but it almost immediately catapulted itself into my all time favourite shows. This review basically is an attempt to put the emotions it deluged me in into words, and in effect spread the love and get the word out, hopefully getting others to give this little masterpiece a try. I entered it seeing a discourse that it was a pretty middling project in kyoani's output and something moderately well liked but something largely forgotten and considered 'inessential' (outside of a few content creators who thought it was underrated). I came out baffled that that's what's become common sentiment. It was an incredibly emotional experience and something I'd consider essential not just for anyone who digs Kyoani's work, but to fans of animation and fans of damn good filmmaking in general!
There are 4 Kyoani things in my Top 10 favourite anime list- A Silent Voice, K-ON, Dragon Maid and, now, Hibike! Euphonium- though they're all incredibly fluid in order, and picking favourites to me is like choosing a favourite child. The fact I can't bring myself to order it against these better known widely beloved giants as opposed to just putting it at the bottom is evidence in itself that Hibike is something deserving of more than a bit of respect and time, let alone some respect on its name as an all-time great to come out of anime as a medium.
What's so special about slice of life?
Slice of life is not about actions themselves, it's about the feeling behind them. It's about using the mundane to capture something beyond words. It's why it can be so irritating to discuss, because the critique is at the same time correct and entirely false. "the story is dull/haha grocery store arc funny" is inherently correct- it's about the mundane, and attempts to draw an audience not through intricate politics, a twisty, turny rollercoaster of a plotline, nor a creative setting. Yes, most slice of life fiction (outside of arguably sci-fi iyashikei) will fail to scratch the itch of a gripping premise. But the point is that that's irrelevant. The very essence of slice of life, and what makes or breaks one, is in using the mundane as a vehicle to carry to its audience a deep understanding or exploration of something beyond words. Will you choose to actually make a story conveying 'nothing' with your mundane like an Azumanga Daioh (sorry~) or will you attempt to grasp something usually beyond the reach of storytelling (at least for the anime medium) in like how an Aoi Hana gives form to the emotional experience and mundane realities of growing up lesbian and how confusing sexuality is, or how Dragon Maid gives form to the unspoken bonds stringing together found family?
The best example to illustrate my point is perhaps K-ON - 'they don’t even play much music, they just drink tea and chat shit, it’s not even really a music anime!' ignores that that's... kind of the point. K-ON was never really trying to be a 'music anime'. What it was trying to do was use a slice of life framework to seep its audience in an audiovisual experience conveying, in its purest form, what friendship means. Grasping those invisible bonds that entangle the five protagonists in such a richly profound and physically felt way, K-ON succeeds in bottling what the very phenomenon of friendship is in the flesh of its myriad nuances in a more affective and genuinely educational way than I've ever run into elsewhere in fiction. A common complaint against slice of life as a genre is that it 'has no story' because of its mundanity- i think that at the very least the existence of shows of K-ON's ilk prompts a redefinition of how that term "story" is understood, if not a complete abandonment of the argument.
This isn't a love letter to K-ON though- it's a love letter to its distant cousin. I mention K-ON not just because they share seats in the pantheon of all time greats to come out of anime as a medium, the fact they are made by the same studio, and the handful of creative staff shared between the productions. I bring it up because in many ways, though it dodges most of the 'it's not really about music' non-critique, Hibike brings the aforementioned genre discussion sharply to mind. As a slice of life, what are you using the mundane to explore? And where K-ON bottles up friendship, I feel Hibike! Euphonium does something similar with its sense of community.
Community as a theme and conveying a felt affect of experiencing being enveloped in that emotional structure like its characters (family too)
Community is in the silences and moods in the room at practice time, the gossiping and the drama; it's in understanding a group not just as a collection of individuals but itself its own structure and own emotional web, with its own breakages and sub-sectional groupings and more intimate interpersonal relationships branching from it; it's the long fraught histories of the group at large (how the existing second years and the third years clam up at the first years' question of 'why are there so few second years?'); how surprisingly political it is based around year groups and age and those in charge and their conflicting perspectives on issues the band faces, and how those actions and decisions are provoked and shaped by the often silent but always felt rumblings from below (including in one of the most deft and believable and densely constructed uses of rumour-mongering in a school context i've run into in anime, making great use of those webs to organically create cracks in the group dynamic); but also in how it deconstructs the philosophies and reasonings of why people are here and the shifting collective desires and character of the group as a whole after the newly-hired rude genius of a conductor holds their feet to the fire after the band decides to aim for Nationals.
It's also certainly helped by a number of other factors- primarily the production values that produce such colourful and nuanced expressions on such a consistent basis and allow a whole brass band to be drawn in a single shot in enough detail to capture expression and their distinct personality-filled character designs to the point even unnamed characters can feel like living personalities as part of a wider social organism in a way I haven't seen anything come close to outside of Little Witch Academia. But it's also in that it somehow never feels rushed yet finds the time to construct a hugely compelling wide yet deceptively deep consortium of lovable side characters even beyond the core of the show, which also does much to create a believable sense of community. It's also brought together by how uniquely it understands the social ties of music in a band context, which I'll get to later.
It's not just the bonds that bind a community it brings under the microscope but the bonds of family too. The chemistry and sheer… realism of the disconnects between Kumiko and her sister are just so fucking nuanced and real and natural that their dynamic I cannot do justice to in words. It's an utterly outstanding piece of character writing also conveyed which says so much in such a minimalistic but simultaneously so rich 'show don't tell' fashion, fleshing out so much in season one alone in spite of precious little screentime. Storytelling so good it finna make me bust out the FLCL comparison, coz how much it did with so little and the surgical subtlety and emotional affect of it all is right up there with how that did Naota and his big brother. Thankfully it swivels its attention directly to the relationship of the two in the second season, and god does it do an amazing job at it! It's something I'll get into sporadically as examples I'll delve into in the process of making other arguments in the rest of the review- put a pin in this thought.
Hibike and its fluency in emotion as a language and insight on how emotions, and the people that feel them, operate and 'work' at a fundamentally almost unparalleled level
I think what anchors and mobilises the whole project, and corrals together and enhances the masterstrokes of various facets of the project is how deeply and amazingly Hibike understands emotion. I'm currently studying a History module about the History of Emotions and funnily enough I feel most of the insights I've learned from Actual Emotions Academia just come naturally to Hibike's scriptwriters and animators in a way that genuinely leaves me scratching my head and kind of awed.
It gets that emotion is something constructed in its performance - recontextualised and understood and processed with its 'doing', and also something you can't disentangle from the physicality and bodied nature of how it is felt. It's an approach that Hibike uniquely seems to wholeheartedly 'get' in a way most anime just doesn't and applies it to its storytelling to great effect. It's an approach most immediately reflected in the imaginative storyboarding, with shots often captured in an intimately close fashion gazing at a small portion of the body- Tatsuya Ishihara takes Yamada's famous principle that “eyes may be the window to the soul, but I think our legs are like that too” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13va_lArzLA&list=WL&index=3&ab_channel=SubtitledAnime) when it portrays how Reina is at risk of being physically whisked off her feet like being faced with a gale force wind simply by being in conversation with the guy she's in love with, or how Hazuki fidgets her legs and awkwardly wraps her feet around one another under the desk as she lets on to her friends she's got a crush on a bandmate. As such, it's as much anchored in the emotionally charged and deeply nuanced, physically kinaesthetic and richly detailed character animation of Kyoani's supremely talented animators as in the studio's similarly industry-leading storyboard artists and directors.
Another emotion thing Hibike loves to explore is how we reflect and reshape our understanding of emotion in the act of its release, and how that reforms and reshapes not just the emotion but often the very notion of the self- capturing too how identity is a particularly visceral personal emotional experience. You see it in an argument where you almost sleepwalk into words or a position you didn't even realise you felt- ambushed by a self you didn't know you'd metamorphosed into. You see it when a character realises just how much something means to them when they find themselves confused about the floods of tears suddenly pouring from their eyes on the train to school. Hibike also has a wise understanding of the self as something inescapably relational- that is, formed from the context of the society and emotional communities from which it resides and frames itself with. A character only realises and understands what an emotion means after finding themselves running across a bridge in fits of tears and screaming at the river below, then catching themselves saying the same words spoken by a friend years ago, words that until now had seemed almost a foreign emotional language, a curiosity. That's the eureka moment- not only 'so that's how she felt!' but also 'oh. So this is how I feel?' and crystallizes that emotional experience in a way I don't think I've seen captured so well in any piece of fiction I can remember.
For Kumiko especially, the interweaving of insights drawn from various overlapping character arcs she finds herself increasingly tangled in informs her outlooks on life at large and her understandings of herself, but also comes together to nudge her into quintessential actions and decisions she takes in her relationships with other central characters in her other close relationships. It creates a near perfect sense of flow across the run of both seasons' arcs, as arcs bleed into other arcs in such an effortlessly natural way. I can't obviously go into any detail but this is best seen in two central character arcs to the second season that temporally overlap, and insights from both foundationally shape Kumiko's action towards the other as they unwind simultaneously - it really is some hella smart storytelling.
Hibike's deeply layered selves are shaped in conversations that can threaten to puncture the barriers and faces people put up in a very very believably human way. Once again carried by industry-topping nuance in character animation it conveys the conscious and unconscious workings of lowering and raising one's guard, and how those defences function. This is shown no more handily than in the example of Asuka - the outwardly capable, at once affectionate and expressive, goofy and loud vice president of the club whose perception of which the audience radically shifts multiple times in the course of the runtime as Kumiko strains to peek behind the (multiple) curtains of her consistently bafflingly opaque actions and thought processes.
All this interesting messaging about selfhood also does wonders to land its very coming-of-age ponderations on maturity- in regards to finding place and purpose, and in perceptions of adulthood. In a philosophically FLCL-esque way, it punctures the ideal of an adult as someone who simply has regulated their self-control, who has learned to be stoic, unfeeling, detached and uncaring. Instead by exploring one character's example it argues a sharp reformulation of the idea, let alone the reformulation of the common dogged necessity kids and teens often feel towards chasing that imagined ideal. It does wonders for what was already one of the most fascinating character dynamics in the show. These are selves not just wonderfully thought through in the abstract but also in the execution of the story. The show's use of narrative perspective is nothing short of ingenious, helped in part by how thoughtful and rich Kumiko's insights on her own experiences, her own selfhood and social situations she’s faced with often are. Similarly to how the narrative perspective of FLCL filters the world through Naota's unaware eyes and doesn't lean into explaining what he doesn't see, or leaves him to ponder things he sees in part or is too young or naive to process fully as a clue in and of itself for the viewer to put two and two together for ourselves, we genuinely see the world as if it's through Kumiko's eyes in a profound way. Hibike respects the audience's intelligence by letting you know something might be wrong, someone might be bottling something up, or a character might be experiencing any sort of emotion by teaching you (as Kumiko) of it the way any usual kid in school would find out about it- not through the eyes of a see-all omnipotent narrator but through the mundane gestures and physical expression of emotion which we might catch glimpses of out of the corner of our eyes- or, in the rare cases we accidentally see the masks slip or are trusted with being let in on that internality, it's often in chunks or pieces maybe that other character themselves haven't yet made much sense of. It works wonderfully to sell the layered, internal worlds and protective nature of much of its cast - once again, amazingly captured in the awkward, palpable silences, half glances, grimaces and body language conveyed in its stunningly choreographed, sumptuous character animation.
It's not even a mystery anime but how the characters' multifaceted and complex personalities are revealed and elaborated via the smartly weaponized usage of narrative perspective is better than many actual mystery anime I've seen. Mysteries almost always feel like things we peek around the curtain tentatively as a band in rumour-work and gossip and loaded looks and ruminate on as a community rather than the artificially created wrinkles of a written story, as things that you impulsively just believe rather than things you're consciously aware are just the penstrokes by a writer in real life trying to write something. Particularly in the second season it can often feel as if we're entering a danger zone of sorts, prying into a wilderness we don't belong, as part of Kumiko increasingly breaking out of her cynical and somewhat distant shell, asserting herself to help resolve certain members struggles and this sense of danger intensifies in a really palpable way.
I'm running out of positive adjectives, please send a thesaurus.
Speaking of Kumiko: deep breath
Hibike's main character Kumiko is fucking phenomenal. Kumiko is not only a breath of fresh air as a protagonist but one of the best characters to come out of the medium full stop. I quickly fell in love with her intimately personal internal monologue narrating the story, especially in how it comedically broke with her relatively apathetic, detached and aloof exterior face she wears (which is often broken as she accidentally speaks a thought out loud or makes a comment in a conversation stemming from her cynical outlook without thinking of its repercussions or rudeness). Her character development is a relatable exploration of her sense of apathy and detachment, her literacy as to her own emotions, and perhaps the most resonant argument thematically pertaining to what Hibike has to say about how we grow attached to our passions, artistic/competitive endeavour and why we bother with it in the first place. So it argues, Kumiko is detached and waywardly drifting through life searching for a personal direction not just because she’s lost track of what drew her to music as a youngun in the first place, but because of a subconscious understanding of how hard it is to fail. It’s easy to dodge that anguish by simply not baring yourself up to that pain by not giving things the power to shake you like that, not realising that that apathy is a slower and more painful killer than however difficult the mountain of challenge is. Like Eva argued with interpersonal relationships, avoidance of the pain of failure is the wrong response- pain and failure is itself a lesson to be learned about yourself and proof that you can also find happiness because you’ve allowed yourself to open yourself up to let yourself feel. Hibike makes a similar argument but in the context of competition and skill-based hobbies.
Particularly through Kumiko it had me really thinking about what exactly I want to do with my life - something that I had in my hobbies/my academic work that truly alights my interest and was something that I’d be glad to feel the anguish of failure in and be enough of an “idiot” to push past it and throw myself into completely again after. Do I actually have passions for competitive/artistic hobbies hot enough to not simply give up when I face adversity, when i’m ‘not good enough’, and feel dejected about it, or is this sort of rejection-sensitivity I’m bogged down with something I’m just saddled with by my own failure to properly explore and find my true calling? Do I really “want to improve?” Is History something I really, actually want to do - and am I even trying hard enough to know if it is? Do I even enjoy the games I spend half my life playing? I had an epiphany of ‘oh, i’m just dodging failure because I find it stressful, and it makes me stop trying and do the bare minimum’. Is there really something in my life I’d be happy being hurt by and still run back to to try to improve at?
I love Kumiko’s character design. I love her disheveled little curls and the little poofy bounce her hair has when it goes below her ears. It’s also clearly a character design that animators felt was adaptable enough they could go buck wild contorting to great comedic effect in the many hilarious expressions she makes. On the point of comedy, I’d also be remiss not to mention Kumiko’s voice actress Tomoyo Kurosawa, whose expressive, bonkers, over-the-top and often quite odd noises and sound effects do just as much as the animation and expressive character design to anchor what can be an unexpectedly kinda hilarious show at times (just search ‘Kumiko noises’ on youtube, it’s great). More on voice acting later.
In Hibike, character development is a genuinely fluid self in constant self-conversation or lack thereof that doesn't change in such seismic manners as many shows would lead you to think, but often shifts when you least expect it and in ways you might not be able to articulate, not only in sharp breaks but sometimes over months or years of time. As much as Kumiko realises things about herself in an unexpected emotion’s performance taking her by surprise, equally her withdrawn personality and her aloof public face is something that she consciously and unconsciously retools as she indelibly changes over the course of 26 episodes of anime in a way that makes you look back and go ‘huh she really has changed’ only when you stop for a moment, or see how she used to be. The self never changes when the plotline seems to mandate it - instead the self feels like the driving seat that the plot is simply filming in its natural habitat, rather than the show yanking its characters by their lead - it has a deep respect for the subjects it surveys. To take another example, Natsuki grows from being a quiet, apathetic slacker leaning out the window with her headphones in during practice to a trustworthy friend, community leader and someone who develops the bravery to really try and scale the wall of her own natural lack of skill at music and the anguish of failure at something you really care about by her own two hands, inspired by the work of the new generation of musicians in the club coming up behind her. It’s a change you can’t really pinpoint to one moment, or that happens overnight, but something that subtly but hugely shifts over the course of the entirety of the show’s runtime. This is a relatively small side character in the scheme of things, and I could go into similar depth (in a way that would probably be more spoilery than this example) for the other dozen or so other important characters in the cast too.
I guess as the final main argument to be made about Hibike’s emotions is in the emotionality of its spaces. A rule about fiction I still stand by is "the litmus test for a great show is a great bedroom", and it's a test Hibike passes with flying colours. It's a deeply thought out, emotionally mapped space that's a clearly lived-in reflection of Kumiko as a character, her personality, and serves to bring to the surface her interior emotions and how she behaves and acts once you can drop your public face, talk to yourself, collapse onto your bed, look yourself in the mirror, or have a heart to heart with a pet cactus. It's also worth mentioning how the emotional mapping of the space shifts with the presence of her older sister (with her penchant for butting into the space uninvited) and how it visibly portrays a sense of discomfort and defensiveness using smart shot composition to make scenes where she enters Kumiko's bedroom (usually as part of an argument) visibly claustrophobic, tight and close.
As a brief tangent- this also applies to her home at large! There's this shot about two or three episodes into the first season where Kumiko gets some juice or milk or something from the fridge in the kitchen, and the way in which that was animated and the languid way in which she reached and grabbed for it and walked back to her bedroom is a peak collaboration of god-tier environmental storytelling and character acting to create such a characterful moment acted in such a way that conveys the emotional importance of the space to Kumiko and how profoundly differently she acts in the comfort of a domestic sphere rather than in the public where she has to wear her ‘public face’. Another shot where Kumiko commutes home from school on the train similarly blew me away with the most minute bit of spatial/character-animation storytelling- as her friend gets off a couple stops before her, she takes the opportunity to stretch, lean back, yawn, flop in her seat and slink out of her shoes in a clatter, not noticing an old, distant acquaintance in the next car behind her through the window seeing all of it- then catching her gaze and jolting back to attention, realising she's let her public guard down and showed a little bit of a private self she didn't mean to. I think this too really serves to show both how Kumiko carries herself as a person in different contexts but also how Kumiko experiences this mundane train commute in an incredibly emotional fashion. I've never seen anything outside of Aoi Hana really get close to capturing this quite as well as Hibike did.
I’d be dumb to talk about emotional space without also touching upon how gorgeous the artistic vision executing this in a visual sense unceasingly is. The visual temperature and the warmth and colour of it all is vividly striking. I could lavish praise on its gorgeous backgrounds and rich colour palette for days- both always miraculously seem perfectly on the same wavelength and produce exactly the emotional temperature the music and script and acting and cinematography desires a scene to take. To just pull one example, check this out - and look how its use of saturation really conveys not just the heat but the emotional space and closeness of the scene and produces a landscape of colour with so much welly you can basically taste it: https://youtu.be/xbbYuZebVeM
Music and sound things: music and space, music and genre, sound design and acoustic diegetics, voice acting, attention to detail in its performances, and its soundtrack
It's not only Kumiko's house, bedroom and train journeys that are deeply thought out and carry weight as relatable emotionally mapped spaces its characters experience. What gives the school its rich sense of space isn't only the painstaking detail, meticulous use of real life reference material and its striking use of colour but in its similarly outstanding sound design. Every single scene in the show has its dialogue (and any live musical performance) recorded with the acoustics of the space in mind, a nuance that does much to give space its wideness or closeness. I think one thing that Hibike just gets, connecting to an earlier point, about emotion is just how intensely it is mapped and invested into space. This is especially the case for Liz and the Blue Bird, which is slightly out of the frame for my review/ramble here which is mostly keeping to both seasons of the TV show, but is worth discussing in brief. It makes a conscious decision to never leave the confines of the Kitauji High School school grounds in attempt to obsessively, intimately map and flesh it out as lived in, organic, felt space. It also goes one step further from diegetic acoustics to using on-site recordings for its soundtrack, for example using objects hit into the walls and floors as percussion to give it an authentic aural feeling of space in its sound design.
The diegetic acoustics of the sound gives noticeable flavour to its musical performances- which is just a cherry on top to something already mind-blowing. I found myself repeatedly blown away by the slavish attention to detail in conveying those musical performances. When Taki-sensei critiques a member's/section's playing, if you pay enough attention you can hear exactly what he's on about - not just in the simple way of the first episode where the band is audibly unpracticed, out of time, out of sync and out of tune, but as in: one member of a section flubs a stretch; an individual rushes or drags; even the shape and extent of raw emotion invested by a character into their performance- the difference between a really good soloist and a virtuosic one, or the difference between, say, Reina's anxious but defiant, spirited trumpet rendition of Dvorak's 'New World Symphony' as opposed to Mizore's robotic, technically talented but emotionally stilted by-the-numbers oboe.
The series does amazingly to portray these musical performances as believably amateurishly rough, earnest, imperfect, whilst still capturing the wonder of the stage experience. It's conducted in a way you wouldn't think it's a professional orchestra performing but the noise produced by the kids themselves- that's difficult and worthy of massive praise just from a technical perspective!
One part of this really struck me- as a character struggles deeply with one particularly fiendish stretch of the band's concert piece, how the show audibly portrayed their progress over the course of numerous episodes in slowly becoming able to play it was so perfectly believable in a way I can't really explain. As a very amateur guitarist that dropped the instrument half a decade ago, it conveyed the frustration at the inability to transform the music of your brain into the output of your fingers (and mouth in this case) into audible music in a way I didn't really think possible whilst still translating the script's narrative of slow, slow, aggravatingly too slow improvement against the clock leading up to showtime and the forcefully powerful emotional impetus to want to be better.
Overall, the strenuous detail applied to sound design and insert musical performance really cements Hibike as a music anime without many peers in its genre space. I've talked for this long about sound and music in the show without even gushing about its soundtrack! The shows employ the same sound director as the Monogatari series and has a couple pieces that are really reminiscent of some of the pensive, mundane pieces in the Bakemonogatari soundtrack in particular, which is always great. It's a really good soundtrack- it doesn't wrestle itself into forcing your attention blotting out other features of the production and each song seemed thoughtfully employed as to always fit the emotional vision of a scene, which is perhaps why it often goes unnoticed - it doesn't jut out like a sore thumb. It's one of those soundtracks you don't really consciously realise is really good because you don't consciously pick up on it easily, but it's something you listen to separately and realise you really like. It’s something that basically bled into the fabric of what Hibike! Euphonium was to me in a really cool way.
Originally I wasn't a huge fan of the OPs, but slowly the OP for the first season in particular grew on me, even though I'm not personally that partial to TRUE's voice (sorry Violet Evergarden stans). To some extent it's carried by the energetic, rambunctious orchestra plumbing away in the background, but also what gives it a lot of personality is its video (one that clearly borrows a lot of influence from Yamada's OPs and EDs in terms of its visual language). This is also true for the EDs, both of which I vastly prefer the songs for, and both of which are visually even more Yamada-esque (for season 1’s this makes a lot of sense because she storyboarded it. lol). Alternate dream worlds, placing her characters in funky costumes like a fashion show, collage imagery placing seemingly random items as held objects for its characters to ‘improvise’ around, lots of cake, pastel imagery, etc. It's usually pretty understated how important the emotional experience of a good OP/ED is- combined with how naturally the 'to be continued' endcard would flow into the EDs, I'd always end every episode on a high note, hyped and ready to watch more and more. It definitely made the show feel more bingeable- I'd always be subconsciously hyped for my next play of Tutti or Vivace (and after that, hyped to see the super visually-personality-filled OPs again soon after clicking next episode).
I also want to talk a bit about the stellar Japanese dub on this show. "I want to improve" are words I don't think anyone who watches the first season of Hibike will forget in a hurry. That borderline perfect scene, among many other things, cemented an already nagging perspective in me that Tomoyo Kurosawa's raw, rousing verbalisation of Kumiko's many, many coursing, overwhelming feelings was something really quite special. But it's not only Kumiko's acting that's wormed its way into my memory. Minako Kotobuki proves she's an utter GOAT in her portrayal of the multifaceted charismatic mystique of Asuka, Chika Anzai knocks it out the park in her curt, stubborn, defiant, and confidently driven Reina, and Takahiro Sakurai's outwardly polite and warm yet searingly blunt Taki-sensei brings the character to life perfectly. Other voices I adored that I can picture in my head include those of Konomi Fujiwara's increasingly warming, soft, originally somewhat distant and detached but increasingly assertive, comfortable and upbeat ray of sunlight Natsuki (how the fuck has she only been cast in two roles?? She's so talented!), the emotionally layered, repressive emotional language of Yoko Hikasa as Aoi, as well as the stilted, sharp and jagged emotional outbursts of Atsumi Tanezaki as Mizore. Even voices that seemed a little too put on, ‘animeish’, or gratingly cutesy at first- particular the classmates and band friends of Kumiko's, Midori and Hazuki- I grew from ambivalence and distaste to genuinely liking, particularly in Hazuki's case, as the first season stretched onwards. All across the breadth of its now (though not always at the moment of release) somewhat star-studded lineup are stellar casting decisions and are telling of a clearly contemplative, visionary dub direction perfectly in tune with the psychological headspace of its characters and the emotional temperature of each scene. Both elements really combine to elevate an already industry-leading script into something, like everything audio in Hibike, you need to really hear to believe.
For a moment I want to talk about genre. I think Hibike is a music anime in the way that March Comes In Like a Lion is a 'sports anime'. In fact to some extent Hibike probably can be considered a sports anime- it's as much about the competitive nature of striving for a national stage against the rest of the country, and the 'team' drive and dynamic, and the strains, bumps and bruises gathered in the journey of sailing the ship to its destination as it is about the music being made to do it. It invests you with its symbolic rivalries and narratives, and the emotions and philosophies that drive its competitors, instead of being based around teaching you the nuances of how to play an instrument in the way, say, something like Yuru Camp will teach you how to camp or Dumbbell will teach you how to do strength training. I think March and Hibike have more of a closeness of theme than they're often given credit for. (Sidenote: if you haven't picked up how much I adore this show from me speaking for nearly six thousand words at this point and having maybe a single paragraph that wasn’t utterly glowing in praise, then me leaping from making comparisons between Hibike and my second favourite TV show to making comparisons between Hibike and my favourite TV show should make it obvious ?)
As Subtitled Anime argues so well in his video essay reflecting on the series (https://youtu.be/HlgJCAnSlyI - it’s easily the best written Hibike retrospective I’ve found on the platform- do check it out if you wanna read further. It’s brill and not even 10 minutes long) what I think most of all elevates Hibike as a masterpiece of a music anime is how it understands music as an inherently socially interwoven act defined by the connections that bind that sound. It understands music as an act of emotion and act of community rather than a simple act of playing an instrument. It informs a major throughline of its thematic metanarrative in the show's second season, one asking 'who do you play for?' But it also shapes most of its musical moments, if not the emotional undercurrent for every single one of the heartrendingly emotive musical performances in the show's run. Reina's spirited drive to reach for the heavens and work her ass off to become the very best trumpet player she can be - to "become special" - itself is core to Kumiko's own complex, messy process of growing up, reconnecting with both music and a profound sense of purpose in her life. Kumiko’s reasons for playing are entangled with her complicated, fraught relationship with her older sister. Asuka and Taki play for similarly dense and deeply affective reasons that I won't do the disservice of spoiling. Rather than a series of abstracted notes on a page Hibike understands music as much more than that- as a voice, an emotional cipher and unique language of self-expression inseparable from the tangle of deep emotional bonds that produce it. Hibike doesn't sound beautiful simply because of its wonderful sound design, soundtrack and considered use and placing of all the above to fit the right emotion in the right moment, and it's not even through the talent of the real life orchestra who performed this music so ably, but in its perception and grasp of such an emotional language it speaks in utter fluency. Hibike's music is so powerful because it is shaped in the social- not just in the meanings inspiring such deeply emotive performances, but in how music is a gift to be shared. Hibike doesn't need words, just the power of that shared fleeting moment of beauty as breath turns to wind. It's no surprise that retrospectives and reviews of the show I've found unfailingly seemed to hold its most subdued, wordless moments of musical intimacy that conveyed so much in so little to be its most resonant notes in both seasons, in two scenes in particular you'll probably know when you get there respectively.
Some miscellaneous thoughts that didn’t fit well elsewhere
Emotion doesn’t just worm itself into every space the show constructs but also into the objects its characters use. It’s so potent to see the band’s sheet music utterly covered with handwritten colourful scribbles, internalised feedback, encouraging messages from bandmates- ‘let’s go to nationals!’ and the like - and even sellotaped group photos. It’s such a smart and rich little touch to include that gives such a tactile indication of the emotional communal bonds that grow to wind around this lovable group so tightly and just indicates the level of thought the scriptwriters (or, I’d imagine, the original novelist Ayano Takeda) give to thinking of their world as their characters would and investing that into the things they own in addition to the spaces they occupy.
The sharpness of its wit and the concise insightful nature of its turn of phrase - or how the dialogue is in a symbiotic relationship to character animation to really sell what’s hidden in it’s silences - make this a really sick script. It does a lot to give Asuka her bite, as much as it gives Kumiko her endearing, pithy sense of humour that comes out most obviously in her playful banter with Reina.
Shots and scenes effortlessly bleed into one another in such an inspired and natural way. The show moves like how a fish swims, and even me with no experience of film academia or expertise in understanding cinematography and filmmaking at all can see that this is clearly something special, even amongst KyoAni projects.
I’d be wrong not to at least discuss Reina and Kumiko’s relationship in a review on this show. For myself and I think for many watchers of the show(s), one of the most engrossing aspects of the entire show is the pure feeling flowing from every pore of Kumiko and Reina’s relationship. I’m surely not alone in finding the feelings between the two more intense than even a lot of yuri I’ve read and watched. The flirting, the touchyfeelyness, the handholding, the face grabbing, the lip touching, the falling asleep on eachothers shoulders on the train commute to school-ing, the awkward glances at one another in practice, the gazing into eachothers eyes, their mountaintop date, how Kumiko talks of herself as “drawn in” by Reina, comparing her experience of being dazzled and engrossed to being bewitched by a siren… The pure intimacy of it - hell, the two phrase their loyalty to oneanother on multiple occasions as a “declaration of love” - has a romantic tension so thick and palpable you can cut through it with a knife. The bond between the two even beyond these incredibly romantic gestures is absolutely electric and more emotive and affectively gripping than most actual couples I’ve run into in fiction. If the show had decided to convey these feelings as romantic textually rather than subtextually I think any viewer would find it completely natural as a progression considering the utter depths of feeling expressed between the two. Which is why it’s quite baffling that it decides to play their ‘love’ as something platonic. It becomes clear, especially in Reina’s case, that it’s only interested in exploring her romantic feelings for a certain guy in the cast, and constructs that attraction as unambiguously romantic and/or sexual. Kumiko and Reina’s romantically-coded relationship seems something weird to call a ‘mistake’ - it so categorically and consistently captures a sheer depth of romantic feeling ‘by accident’ - it’s misconstructed as something easily misinterpreted as romantic as opposed to a simply intimate ‘more-than-best-friendship’ of platonic soulmates. Is it even a mistake if it’s one of the accidentally best bits of the show, even if it is emblematic of a rare failure in judging emotional temperature and nuance in script and in storyboarding and in voice acting in conveying the ‘right’ emotions between the two?
Conclusion
I could talk a lot more about this show, to be honest. I didn’t really give many examples for a lot of claims, and I wish I had more filmy/animationy expertise to make stronger arguments for how well put together it is at a technical, production level. There are a few Kumiko things, and a few very personal Kumiko things, I didn’t really find the place or the words or particularly want to talk about. I didn’t talk about Kumiko’s odd relationship with Shuuichi either - it’s something that I have many thoughts about but no idea how to express, either.
Even now I sort of just want to go back and rewatch it and experience all the feelings again. But I don’t have the time, and plenty more anime I’ve yet to see beg for my attention instead. So long Hibike, sweet prince! I’ll be back in a couple years.
So instead of rewatching it, I tried to convince you to watch it instead. I hope I succeeded. If this ramble has at all been informative or interesting to you, please toss it on your to watch list ❤️
(if you’re looking for a numerical score, I gave S1 a 10/10 and S2 a 9/10. Out of the two sequel films that I didn’t really talk about here (maybe another time), I gave Liz and the Blue Bird a 9/10 and Chikai no Finale a 6/10)~!!~
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