Common Name: Hinamatsuri
Alternative Names: Hina Festival, Dolls' Day, Girls' Day
Score: 10/10, 4/5
Length: 12 Episodes
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Super Powers, Slice of Life, Isekai
Summary: Nitta Yoshifumi is a young, unambitious, but talented lieutenant in his local gang of yakuza. In other words, he is and has everything a man could ever want. Then, one day, all the stability of his bachelor's life and his incredible vase collection come crashing down around him when a young girl named Hina quite literally drops into his life. Had he the power to throw her out, he would, but unfortunately for Nitta, this girl is a super-powered psychic from another dimension that could kill him with a thought, so now he basically stuck with a daughter he never asked for. With Hina's arrival come a few more unexpected developments in Nitta's life. On top of the help she offers in his yakuza work and the constant threat of other psychics coming to kill or take Hina away, Nitta slowly comes to find that he truly cares for this strange, stoic, and lazy child, effectively making him the father and family Hina has always wanted and desperately needed.
Review: In the interest of avoiding just explaining all the jokes this show has to tell, I'm going to try to keep this review as objectively critical and spoiler-free as reasonably possible. Were I to be totally up front with you, I'd honestly just recommend you close this tab, open up Crunchyroll, and just binge the entirety of this series. Since it is my "job" to at least try to review the show's I watch, I suppose it'll be better if I expressed the gist of this show and elaborated on the finer points that make it one of the best comedies I have seen in years. So, let's just get right into this so you can have more time to watch the show itself.
Yup. That's how we're starting. This is the result of me anguishing for an hour over deciding
whether I should explain the jokes, like most comedy reviews, or just say "go watch it!"
Hinamatsuri basically exists as an uncomfortably awkward comedy that is centered on the lives of four young girls and their various family situations. While there is a supernatural element to the show, namely in that three of these four girls possess absurdly strong psychic abilities, it plays a relatively small roll in the story as a whole and is generally used as a means of offering cheap and easy gags to break up some of the show's long-form skits. What makes this show shine, however, is the mastery with which it balances its awkward comedy and the heartfelt dramatic moments, creating an overall product with the ability to have you laughing your ass off one minute and bawling your eyes out the next. Difficult as that concept might sound, Hinamatsuri does manage to pull this off as it changes between characters and the varying tones of their individual stories.
To be blunt, though, I'll just say not all these characters and stories were created equal.
The first of these stories is that of the titular character, Hina, and her sudden and forceful takeover of a young yakuza's time, attention, and considerable fortune. Easily the strangest of all the stories that make up Hinamatsuri, Hina's is a slow and gradual tale of her becoming a semi-functioning member of society and the legitimate daughter to the aforementioned yakuza, Nitta Yoshifumi. Though their relationship is, understandably, a troubled one full of arm-twisting, tantrums, and death threats, a kind of camaraderie eventually develops between them as they realize that both are doing their best to make their unconventional family work. Granted, it takes them a while to reach that level of understanding since both of them are terrible people in their own right that have no actual clue what they're doing, though neither of those issues is necessarily their fault. After all, Hina was initially raised as a killing machine with no clue how to function in society while Nita just has no idea how to be a father since his old man died when he was young. Still, weird and stilted as their relationship may be, it all manages to come around to being a reluctantly compelling story of making the best of an objectively terrible situation.
Until that accord is reached, however, Hina's story is mainly just Nitta dealing with
the fact that his adopted daughter is a lazy but all-powerful monster.
The second story that makes up the bulk of this show's runtime is that of Hina's friend, fellow psychic, and polar opposite, Anzu. Raised under similarly terrible conditions as Hina in their original world, Anzu's story follows a similar path to Hina's in which she learns to become a functioning member of society and a good daughter, just with a single twist that changes the entire nature of her situation--she didn't fall into the lap of luxury like Hina did. Following her failure to capture or kill Hina, Anzu is left without a home, family, or even a means to return to their original world. In other words, she's forced to find a way to survive on her own as a homeless child. This point in her life humbles her significantly as she struggles to get a meal and a place to sleep every day, as opposed to Hina who becomes so pampered under Nitta's care that she becomes the embodiment of sloth. Yet Anzu's story isn't one made up entirely of the tragedy of her new situation. While she's homeless, Anzu is taken in and instructed by various people exposing her to a part of society that just doesn't exist in Hina's world, creating a solid line of demarcation that defines the differences of those with privilege and those without. For example, while Hina can afford to go to school and learn like most kids, she refuses to learn and hardly ever interacts with her classmates as she just sleeps through the day. Meanwhile, Anzu directly interacts with the world around her and strives to learn everything she can since it would make her life and the lives of those that care for her that much easier. This level of difference between her and Hina, while vaguely comedic, adds a lot of heart and drama to the show. What makes Azu's story particularly interesting, however, is that her hard work earns her more than just the happiness she eventually attains. Her steady growth from the character she started as and the struggles of her journey earn the emotions they elicit. Unlike other shows where characters are just described as being "pure" and "innocent," Anzu legitimately earns the right be to the sweetest and most childishly innocent character to ever grace the anime world.
Anzu is best girl of this show and I will fight anyone that argues otherwise.
The third story of this show essentially functions as a kind of intersection between the worlds of Hina and Anzu, one in which a young girl works to succeed in this world but remains mired in darkness and cynicism due to her own powerlessness. This third story is that of Hina's non-psychic classmate, Hitomi, as she basically becomes a walking, talking lampoon of the insanity present in Japan's working world. Unlike the previous two, Hitomi's story is relatively simple in that it is almost entirely centered around the fact that she is a middle schooler that has been forced to become a bartender all because she cannot bring herself to turn other people down. Born to a similar level of complacent privilege, Hitomi's absurd situation, one that is equal parts comedic and abusive, is one that is entirely solvable but remains a constant in her life all because of how important other people's opinions are to her. In other words, because she was born and raised as a prim, proper, and responsible straight-A-getting student, she's been effectively rendered into the perfect yes-man, unable to turn people down regardless of how ridiculous the request might be. As much as she acknowledges the fact that her problems are born of her own weakness, Hitomi's situation eventually devolves to her cursing the world as a whole for inflicting all this nonsense on her, effectively becoming a jaded, cynical, Japanese office lady at the age of 11. All of this is, of course, played for comedy but it is an uncomfortable brand of comedy that is clearly meant to criticize an absurd aspect of Japanese society, rather than just be comedic for comedy's own sake. I'm equal parts happy and regretful to say that Hitomi's story does a fairly decent job of getting all this across but it also, unfortunately, renders her into a fairly one-note character that lacks the growth seen in the rest of the cast.
Granted, that unfortunate fact is likely intentional since Hitomi's story is, from start to finish, a tragedy.
Lastly, there is the story of the final member of the psychic world to arrive in our world, Mao. Where Hina and Anzu's stories revolve around them growing into their families, Mao's story is closer to that of Hitomi's in that it revolves around the various misfortunes born of how she was raised and her own warped ideas of self and family. Like every other story, it possesses a unique shade of comedy wholly separate from the others. To be precise, Mao's story and comedy center around the unfortunate absurdity of watching this girl steadily grow less and less sane as she remains stranded on an island all because she was too sheltered to learn how to cope with such unfortunate situations. Rather than using her powers to seek out Hina and Anzu, as she was tasked, after getting stranded, though, her sudden freedom from the oppressive world they came from leads her to simply revel in her extended vacation on this island. Lacking any common sense or social skills, Mao's relatively short story mainly revolves around her finding strange and temporary balms to her situations on this island, only maintaining a modicum of sanity through creating and interacting with a couple of puppets she's created to look vaguely like Hina and Anzu, who she labels as something akin to family for her, due to their shared psychic abilities. On and on this absurd scenario goes until she ultimately ends up leaving the island, only to end up in yet another situation where she's being sheltered from the world by people who would use her for her abilities. In spite of this cycle, however, there is a certain level of growth to be noted on Mao's part as she endeavors to abandon her island of insanity and face the world.
It would figure, though, that the world would throw her right back into
her same old situation, just with a new coat of absurdist paint.
There is, of course, a fairly large and varied cast of characters beyond these girls and those who become part of their immediate family but they are mainly just vehicles for some of the show's absurd scenarios and jokes. Beyond the lives of these four girls, there's not all that much else to consider when it comes to the world of Hinamatsuri. The only character beyond them with any real relevance is that of Nitta as he goes through his daily life as a yakuza. That story is mainly the means through with the show tells Hina's story, though, since it shows how much the two of them are changing each other as the show goes on. As Nitta's flawed parenting helps Hina become more capable of empathy and thinking outside of her own benefit she helps him grow into a decent, if not outright admirable, character worthy of being considered a main character.
What a fine, upstanding member of a gangster society.
So, all in all, the show's main cast of characters is kept fairly small but remains focused and purposeful in both its comedy and messages. Through all of these silly and lovable characters, this whole absurd experience is made into a comedic masterpiece that is just as funny as it is heart-wrenching and beautiful. Were I to level a complaint against this show, it'd mainly be that the psychic abilities that pervaded the beginning of the show inexplicably vanish until the show is nearly over. While this might lend to the humanity of the show's psychic characters, it is an issue that is given no explanation or attention. As I understand it, though, most of the manga's skits featuring psychic abilities were cut from the show since they highly featured some of the more unsavory aspects of yakuza life, which would have only muddled the show's fairly wholesome through line. As another point of contention, it is just a point of fact that there is a certain level of inconsistency in the comedy, episode to episode and skit to skit, but that's an inevitability in almost all skit comedies, so it's fairly easy to forgive. Beyond those two things, though, this show is practically flawless. The comedy knows how to play it's awkward subject matter and effectively pauses to emphasize how uncomfortable the characters' situations are for them in each moment to drive the whole experience home. The art and animation are stellar, unique, and are so expressive that the characters' almost Cromartie High-like reactions perfectly present the almost slap-stick nature of this show's absurdity. The music is similar perfect in setting the tone in each and every moment as the OST swings between cheery, pop-y pieces you'd expect from a happy-go-lucky slice of life and some jazzy or sweeping orchestral numbers for the show's darker, more serious, and tense moments. In short, this show is masterfully executed in nearly every way and I cannot sing its praises enough.