Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Ouran High School Host Club – episode 1

April 9, 2006 on 10:37 pm | In Ouran High School Host Club | 11 Comments

“You are a host starting today”

 

I’m a guy. That didn’t stop me from fangirling all over this episode. I got so worked up about it just by watching it, with the atmosphere, that I got sick to my stomach. I haven’t seen something like this for a long time and it’s likely to be my pick of the season.
Ouran High School Host Club is ridiculously, outrageously good and I can almost guarantee that all of the female anime fans I personally know would be in love at first sight.

Fujioka Haruhi has entered the illustrious Ouran High School on scholarship. Everyone else there is filthy rich and, in Haruhi’s opinion, only interested in having good times. Looking for a quiet place to study, Haruhi arrives in an “abandoned” music room. Unfortunately the music room is the base of the Ouran High School Host Club – essentially a group of male students who take money to entertain female students – and Haruhi breaks a vase in a desperate to escape.
The vase was ridiculously expensive – and Haruhi is famously the poorest student at the school – and so Haruhi is made the club’s running dog. When Haruhi’s glasses are removed, however, the club realises they’ve got a potential new host on their hands. Their clientele are inclined to agree.

AND THUS A LEGEND IS BORN.

From the moment I started on the OP I got the idea that Ouran High School Host Club had the potential to be very, very wrong. And I was right. But so too is the show. So very, very right.

I really don’t know what to say without sounding like a dribbling idiot (or, depending on your estimation of me, more of a dribbling idiot). To say anything about comedy that comes this thick and fast would be to spoil a hell of a lot of the fun of this show. It’s not something that needs any level of deconstruction like The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi: this can be enjoyed on face value.

The whole club is just about the gayest thing ever, despite the fact that its clientele are entirely women. Each of the members meet a certain type that greatly appeal to high school girls, and you’ve got everyone here … and they’re always touching.
You’ve got your twincest, you’ve got your silent type, you’ve got your “cool” one (I think “cool” in this instance is Japanese for “wears glasses”), you’ve got the King, and you’ve got your shouta. Yep. This show has freaking everything.

Haruhi is good because the character is a distinctly down-to-Earth student in a school full of the vain and the posing. Haruhi has a cutting insight that some may confuse for tactlessness, but it’s simply a pure expression of internal thought in an external environment. The statement “the end of the world is near, isn’t it?” when Haruhi discovers the sort of activities that makes one an idol of the host club are distinctly insightful into the whole sordid system.

The show is very distinctly orange and pink, but I can forgive it these background trespasses because the characters are illustrated and animated in the bold and colourful manner that seems tragically infrequent in anime of late. I can’t really say I remember the OP’s music because I was too busy marvelling at the animation that warned me of what was to come (“Pink OP in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Pink OP at night, shepherd’s delight”).
Oh, and how could I forget? Sakamoto Maaya as you’ve never heard her before! My head is exploding over here!

I’m really not sure if you’re supposed to pick the ending of this episode; I certainly didn’t. But heck, I was having so much fun I simply don’t care that I had to have it spelled out for me. A true highlight in what I was expecting to be a dreary season.