Animation Quick Look: Ouran High School Host Club

Welcome to animation quick look, where I watch a few episodes of something animated be it anime, Saturday morning cartoon or something more along the lines of Archer or Family guy and tell you if it’s worth your time.

Ouran High School Host Club is honestly what would probably happen if someone from Japan watched Three’s Company and tried to make a cartoon roughly based on that idea. The prestigious Ouran Academy is only attended by insanely rich or incredibly smart people The Host Club is essentially a bunch of pretty boys from the school whose mission in life is to “make girls happy”. Haruhi Fujioka, a poor student at the academy on scholarship, accidentally breaks a very expensive base on her first day their owned by the club, and they decide she can pay off the debt by working for them a “Host”(what that really means I have no idea, it’s pretty vague). But due to her short hair, clothing, slightly deep voice (and tiny tits), she’s mistaken for a guy. Let the cross-dressing hijinks ensue!

Admittedly it’s an easy mistake to make, as Haruhi is far more masculine than anybody in the host club, and that’s not really an insult to her as this is the usual farce of suspended belief of a show like Three’s Company or Bosom Buddies where nobody would buy this for a second in real life. And that’s essentially what this is, a comedy farce that comes up with increasingly ridiculous situations along with the usual members of the opposite sex being extremely attracted to the girl pretending to be a guy although again since most of the guys are extremely feminine it sort of works.

This particular review is more akin to a Shit My Wife watches column. My wife is a huge nerd like myself. She watches a ton of anime. There’s plenty of good ones we both enjoy. But there’s also ones she watches that frankly cannot be classified as anything other than girly as fuck and something no straight man should ever watch. Ouran High School Host Club pretty much fits that definition to a T as I sat through seven episodes with her and immediately wanted to kill stuff in a grisly violent manner afterwards. I’m completely serious, I played about an hour of the latest Devil May Cry almost right after.

I do really like Haruhi as a character, she takes a very Daria-esque approach to this universe she’s blundered into of the insanely rich and usually calls people on their bullshit and sums people up really well and is amusingly blunt. It’s the rest of the characters I have issues with, like the two main male leads who call each other “Mother/Father” constantly, the twins, who as part of their act to attract girls, act very incestuous (and apparently this works as girls fawn over them whenever they do an act of “forbidden love” towards each other, and is it “acting” if they are doing everything short of fucking each other?). And then there’s Honey. Honey is a 3rd year (so at least 16) who looks like he’s six. Sure he’s tiny, but he acts like he’s six too, constantly going on about how cute he is and basically acting like a an obnoxious brat. I want to punch Honey in the face over and over again.

Also, the whole concept is ridiculously convoluted, the entire club knows within the first episode that Haruhi is a girl, so why keep up the farce? There’s not much reason to it. Sure there’s the really flimsy reason of her not being able to work as a Host to pay off the debt because Hosts must be male, but it’s extremely flimsy and leads to stupid stuff like her school physical being faked by the other members so she can stay as a Host. What? Why? If she had to come up with a clever way to get around it that’s one thing, but a lot of plot threads are basically resolved by the fact that all the other characters are super rich and just happen to own someone/something that can solve the problem. It’s also trying to have a little meta humor, but that basically amounts to characters saying something that happened previously was in a past episode.

That being said if you can get past all that, there are some surprisingly clever jokes and Haruhi herself is pretty enjoyable. Clearly I’m not anywhere near the intended audience for this and while I do acknowledge that, it seems like lazy writing to me that its not even trying to appeal to any guys who might be having to sit through it with their significant others.

Rating: 2.5/5 Twins who act gay but aren’t gay who are still gay…