The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is a movie that takes place directly after the TV series, so anyone out of the loop and interested in this film would have to watch 28 episodes of anime before watching it. This is not an indictment, since a lot of my favorite anime films are continuations of anime series that preceded it, but it was a hurdle that kept expectations about this film high. I was thoroughly interested in how this film would go. Well to the inattentive or others, I'll make myself clear.

This movie is fucking ass.

I'm actually pissed off I wasted my time on this trash, and I wholeheartedly, with all intentions of just cause, urge the uninitiated to stay as far away from this film as possible.

Spoilers below

Disappearance is a movie that consists of hours (plural) of dreary snooze inducing suburbs, painfully walking from one classroom to another instead of actually cutting to important scenes of relevance, a time travel story that actually doesn't involve time travel and "just don't think about it too much" reality warping and other jargon, facsimiles of characters from the TV show pretending to act out of character except for that one, which also makes the mystery of the film extremely fucking obvious, and Tomokazu Sugita prattling in my ear constantly.

I honestly don't understand how Yasuhiro Takemoto used every strength he has as a director to create one of the most obnoxious movies ever. How this got green lit to be quite literally one of the longest animated films ever made is like a smite on my existence, do we live in a denpa dystopia where people love god awful films? Have the radiowaves finally gotten to me? Well I owe it to everyone to explain what the fuck is going on here.

This film is unoriginal. The TV series, despite my issues with it, at least did interesting stuff. The entire concept of the SOS brigade essentially having to please this tyrannical school girl was at points funny and/or horrifying, but it always kept even the more boring arcs slightly interesting. This was expressed clearly when they made that movie and it essentially proved that Kyon was being used as a bargaining chip, and that Koizumi had much deeper intentions that lent credence to his character. Also the part that adapted the first novel that kinda spelt out the themes of the show in plain text was also good. And people complain about endless eight but at the very least I think it captured Nagato's state of mind better than this film did, even if it tried to build off of that.

My point is that Haruhi (the tv show) was doing interesting stuff, even if I could do with less Asahina bullying and Kyon mumbling, but it's like, good for it's time. However this movie being somehow "better" as a narrative, it's just ludicrous. Let's see, so Nagato apparently went against her programming to create an alternate reality where Haruhi never formed the SOS brigade. Kyon of course, freaks the fuck out and is forced to piece the club back together and make the choice to return back to his own reality.

I'm not one to typically point out missed opportunities but this would have been better in almost every way if he choose Nagato over Haruhi (as in her reality). Of course it was never gonna happen because this film was intended to be more Haruhi propaganda despite her barely being in it, but I think I should lay out things logically so I can explain my thought process.

First off I think we all know that Haruhi is a massive asshole. It's kind of the whole point and theres a whole overused gag of her groping Asahina and being like "lol check out our very own OPPAI LOLI XD!!!" and they do it like almost every episode during the TV series. Aside from verbally abusing all of the clubmates, forcing them to do slave labor (for a frog suit?), going on random escapades that everyone has to agree to or reality will be at stake, as well as the movie which was just the Asahina bullying simulator, destroying public property and other shit. This was part of the humor but it was often hard to laugh at, and there was always a certain awareness that everyone in the club had a certain role to play that often superseded their actual persons.

Well inadvertently or not, we can at least see how everyone else is doing with her out of the picture, Asahina is fine I think but I want to address Koizumi, who I felt was freed in someway. He was essentially turned into an esper spy by his kin and forced to play a mediator, and I always felt kinda sad for him since he always is forced to perform the role that was given to him. There was a small interaction where he said he had a crush on Haruhi, and like, he quite literally could not act like this in the TV series because of the "pretty boy" archetype he exudes, he of course knows Haruhi doesn't like him but it's a childish feeling he gets to have, because that's what he is.

Regardless of the ethics, there is the tired umineko-esque spin to the whole mystery where Kyon is supposed to figure out Nagato in someway, but it hardly connects. I mean what was Nagato trying to say by having Kyon have to run to a completely different school and get cuffed by security, as well as open up a bunch of random books, only for le computer to somehow activate. He literally had that one NPC friend say Haruhi was at X marks the spot for him to go grab her, it's all so fucking contrived. And of course there's time travel, cause what we needed in this movie was more convoluted bloat, it doesn't matter how it's a red herring anyway since Nagato can just rewrite reality, except she only chooses NOT too because never in those 28 episodes did she spare the slightest drive to do so, it's all so forced.

The only narrative connections to the TV series feel like MCU inclusions that it only leans on to try and duct tape this horrible script into some level of coherency. Remember old Asahina? She's back to try and tie in that one episode when Kyon met loli Haruhi. What's the fucking point it's not even time travel, if the plot was more straight forward we could've shaved hours off this and got the original points across without this unnecessary fanservice. I feel like this movie could've done more esper stuff like in the first arc and it would've been a million times more interesting instead of retreading old ground. It's all such a waste.

If this film was trying to make me empathize with Kyon's plight, I never cared, not once. We needed him to run around screaming at people, grabbing them, doing an Okabe Rintaro and all for the sake of some cheap appeal to sentimentality. Cause why? He got what he was literally saying in his head for the ENTIRE TV series? Get the fuck out of here. I had to listen to this fucker monologue on and on and on about how he wants to live normally and for all of Haruhi's shenanigans to end and how he wants to bang Asahina and to have a normal school life and blah blah blah. It was all blowing gas cause once he gets what he wants he stockholm syndromes that shit backwards. It honestly wouldn't be that bad if this movie (and the show by extension) took some liberties to not adapt every god damn monologue in those books to screen. There's a reason why novel to movie adaptations aren't just audiobooks with moving pictures on the side.

It's compounded by the most phoned in Yasuhiro Takemoto job that rides entirely off the hype of Kyoto Animation as a studio. I loved Hyouka because it did interesting stuff, it had great colors and great demand over space and camera work, moments of levity and interesting visual metaphors. This film has none of that, and people praise it because it turns the saturation down during the winter time. Yeah no shit, it's cloudy as hell, that's literally what happens when there are clouds. And that fucking post time jump monologue, nothing spells self indulgent than literally having two versions of Kyon in frame. Why? Because... and let's see, a row of ticket gates in a white void? Christmas crap filling up the room? Stepping on his own head til he 3rd impacts himself? It's all so heavy handed.

And for the love of god, can we stop shoving Gymnopédie No. 1 and other classical pieces into anime when it doesn't fit at all. I know Erik Satie and Debussy and other late 1800s composers somehow captured late stage capitalism in compositions that fit adolescent japanese works particularly well, but it becomes annoying when I start to notice it as a trend. It's quite literally one of the only musical pieces in the film, why couldn't there be more original compositions or even reworking the original OST into the film in anyway? It's like the anime equivalent of those royalty free tunes you hear at the start of some youtube tech review. It's all so fucking lazy.

Whatever appeal Nagato had during the film is essentially flushed down the toilet to reinforce the same bullshit that happened in the TV series, praise Haruhi or whatever, and don't let any of the characters actually develop past their tropes because I guess that abusive status quo is heckin awesome. This is what I mean when I call the movie unoriginal, since it essentially lazily sits on it's ass, on top of an already pre built narrative and it's complementing themes. To actually disregard Haruhi and allow Nagato to live a quiet, possibly romantic school life, is essentially tossed away to say what has already been said by the show a million times. And I don't buy Kyon blowing more gas into Nagato's ears saying he's gonna protect her cause he has Haruhi or whatever, that was literally always the case and it was even addressed in the TV series before hand. I should also address how the ending fucking sucks, the yandere did yandere things (even though she was supposed to be different in this "timeline" but whatever) and Koizumi talk no-jutsus his way out of a satisfying conclusion to the mystery.

The only thing that saved this from being a 1/10 was a couple nice screencaps of Nagato and Haruhi.

Thanks for reading.