Comments on ‘My-HiME’

I think it may have been over a year ago that I said I was going to review My-HiME (2004). I haven’t watched it for a while and just now picked it up again; but in my defense, I have, in the last few years, gone back to school, changed careers, got married, had a baby, bought a house, and got three books ready for publication. I have not had as much time as I’d like to watch anime.

I still have a few episodes left to get through, so this is an off-the-cuff musing rather than a full review. It’s been an interesting series, drawing heavily from the magical-girl genre but veering into more shonen action-story territory.

It’s been extremely confusing, and though that may in part be because I’ve watched it sporadically, I don’t think that’s the only problem. It suffers from character glut, often introducing characters so abruptly that I’ve paused episodes to check the epsisode list and make sure I didn’t skip something.

The story focuses on these mysterious girls, all of whom happen to congregate at the same elite boarding school, who have the ability to conjur high-tech weapons and biomechanical monsters out of thin air. They’re known as HiME, which stands for “Highly-advanced Materializing Equipment,” complete with the ungrammatical hyphen. Why aren’t they called HAME, you ask? Because, of course, hime means “princess” in Japanese, so these girls are “battle princesses.”

The show follows a standard Japanese storytelling formula in which there are two arcs with a major plot change in the middle; at first, the HiME have to battle monsters called “Orphans” but later are forced to fight in a Battle Royale-type scenario, though the show fails to give them adequate motivation to turn on one another. Through it all, several powerful forces jostle to dominate the HiME, including a shadow government, a multinational corporation, the Catholic Church maybe, and a couple of reincarnated powers. It’s all very confusing.

Unless it really turns things around in the next few episodes, my overall impression, which I’ll discuss at greater length in my review, will be that this has a great concept and impressive production values but doesn’t quite nail the landing. Too much to keep track of and too little explanation make this a bewildering, if pretty, spectacle. Incidentally, there is a spinoff series called My-Otome, which uses similar ideas but is not a sequel. After poking around on the Internet, I get the impression taht My-Otome is a more popular show, and I speculate that it’s probably because it’s less confusing.

All that being said, I have to add that My-HiME has one of the strongest opening episodes I’ve ever seen. I was really excited after episode one, in which several mysteries get introduced and a knock-down, drag-out battle takes place on a ferry, fully utilizing the unusual environment.

Unfortunately, the show immediately fritters away that built-up good will with several filler episodes, including one in which the girls have to track down an Orphan that steals panties (yes, really). Never have I seen a show that starts so good and goes downhill so fast. It picks back up later, but nothing else in this series has, so far, managed to equal that flawless first episode.