Good afternoon. It’s time for another Rising Sun, and today’s show is… pretty strange to say the least.

The show in question is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, adapted from a series of light novels written by Nagaru Tanigawa. It’s a high school comedy, and it’s one of the more unusual ones.

The series revolves around Kyon, a young high school freshman who doesn’t believe in strange things. Of course, that’s before he meets Haruhi Suzumiya, who is more interested in the strange than the mundane. Haruhi pressures Kyon into helping her set up a new club dedicated to the unusual called the SOS Brigade, and proceeds to do the same with three more members: level-headed Yuki, painfully shy Mikuru and overtly friendly Itsuki. As it turns out, Kyon is the only normal one in the Brigade. Yuki is an alien, Mikuru is a time-traveler, and Itsuki is an esper. And Haruhi seems to be the show’s equivalent to a god. Confused yet?

As you can see, the show is meant to be weird. Being narrated from Kyon’s perspective, the show could be seen as a parody or deconstruction of the “straight man in a group of nutcases” scenario. It’s pretty funny, but can be seen in poor tastes at times, since Haruhi is the type of person that can resort to underhanded tactics to get what she wants.

The narrative is very interesting, but what of the aesthetics? The character designs are unique and memorable, and I like to sum up the animation this way: Kyoto Animation, the studio that made the show, is the closest any Japanese studio has ever come to Disney in animation quality (not counting Studio Ghibli). That should say a lot about what the show looks like. The music sounds really nice and fits each situation the characters get into appropriately.

For some odd reason, Funimation isn’t doing anything with this license, so the only ways to watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya are to watch it on YouTube, buy the Bandai Entertainment DVDs, or import the Japanese Blu-Rays (which conveniently include the English dub). However, it’s an entertaining show that will suit the average anime fan. That is assuming the idea that a teenager has the ability to reset the universe doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies.