Himawari! ep.2

April 15, 2006 | 4 Comments

Opening Theme: 「太陽のかけら」 Taiyou no Kakera by Shiraishi Ryouko (16.6MB, for PSP/Quicktime)

This is not bad at all. While I don't really like the animation, I think the storyline is quite interesting and the conclusion of this particular episode has a sombre mood to it. I thought this would be one of those happy-go-lucky series but the writers decide to hammer down the fact that ninjas do need to make some difficult choices in their life and the girls are immediately presented with those choices in this episode. I'm pretty surprised at the turn that they decide to take. The best thing about this series, however, is the soundtrack. While the opening is nothing stellar, the ending sounds good and the background music is the most impressive of them all. Some of the background music used in this remind me of Fruits Basket's background music. It's unfortunate that the animation and the character design doesn't have the same charm as that other series.

Himawari starts her first field lesson with Hayato but instead of learning properly, she blushes around. But as it turns out the school has a rule that love is prohibited to Ninja. The girls are not allowed to contact or even meet the boys from another ninja school in the mountain. At the same time, another female ninja student called Shikimi, finds a male ninja student called Nanafushi injured inside a hole in the mountain. She decides to help him and after talking to the boy, it appears that the two ninjas share the same interest in medicinal herbs. Elsewhere, Himawari and Hayato end up blushing when they hold hand just a tad longer while attempting to climb a mountain. They, however, are startled when they realised that there is a person nearby enjoying her breakfast. The person turns out to be Tsukio-Hime, the same person who show Hayato a vision of Himawari in her Miso soup from last week's episode.

She does the same thing again this time around and show the two how different girl seems to have fallen in love with different people. Later on Himawari learns from Asami that when she was a kid, Shikimi was brought up by a rather strict and cruel teacher who poisoned Shikimi to teach her to be careful of this ninja tactic in the future. In the present time, rumour about Shikimi and Nanafushi's relationship spread through the entire school. Shikimi promises to erase any trace of her relationship with Nanafushi so one night, she brings steam dumplings that have been laced with medicine to erase memory for Nanafushi. For Shikimi, Nanafushi has brought a head pin that has been dipped in similar medicinal herb. The two, however, can see the leftover herb on both items when the moon shines on them. In the end, Nanafushi decides not to eat the dumpling while Shikimi decides to apply the herb on Himawari instead. Despite this, the two ninjas still end up going their own seperate way.

Impression:

I was quite surprised to see the ending. I thought it'll end happily with love conquers all as in typical comedy series like this. So it was rather surprising to see the series taking a slightly different path and ends up emphasising the sacrifice that a Ninja like Himawari and Shikimi need to take in order to devote their time to their profession. I think in the future this will become a major obstacle should Himawari and Hayato end up falling for each other. I am not sure why that lately many anime have featured profession versus love as a theme and make it seem as if you can't have both. Moreover, this kind of theme has been thread upon so many times by other series so I hope Himawari will actually focus on other part of its story such as the mystery of Himawari's past as well as Hayato's connection to the Ninja that saved Himawari when she was a little kid.

Ending Theme: 「ぐるぐる - Himawari version」 - Guru Guru - Himawari version by eufonius (13.3MB for PSP/Quicktime)

© memento 2003