#honestly realized i don’t actually have a neat sequence of events in line yet

[you-are-my-neverland]

guess who actually finished the prologue!

[mlpextremelover]

Haifuri

“Haifuri” aka “High School Fleet” aka “That One Show That’s Like ‘Girls und Panzer’ But Is Different From ‘Girls und Panzer’ Because They Operate Battleships Instead Of Tanks” has conquered every part of my brain. I find myself in the middle of the night thinking about Haifuri: Did I like it? Did I hate it? Remember when that thing happened? etc. This show has managed to occupy my every thought process and I need an outlet. Normally I like to keep reviews spoiler free but that simply cannot be the case this time. Get ready for my longest review yet.

I’m gonna start with what I enjoyed from the show. The animation is solid, each character is unique and recognizable, movements are fluid for the most part, the battleship design is cool, and the interior shots/settings are really neat. The battle scenes are surprisingly well done; we see each compartment of the ship performing their individual tasks and coming together to overcome hardships (pun intended). What I enjoyed even more was when battles aren't happening. Much like Girls and Panzer, the show excels in its amusing slice of life moments. Dealing with problems like running out of water and putting on festivals give depth to the show and personality to the crew. "That girl who fires the torpedo" "Those three that does the cooking" and "Trumpet player" start to have names that you remember, friends they hang with, emotions they express, hobbies they enjoy...etc. Whoever wrote the show understands that supporting characters with personality is the difference between a fictional world that's alive and one that's not.

Now on to the parts I didn’t particularly enjoy or is straight up confusing. Last night I compiled a list of things in Haifuri that bothered me, spoiler ahead.

1. Mike (me·keh) and Moka

       Mike(Misaki) is our main protagonist and captain of the ship, and Moka(Moeka) is her childhood friend and captain of another(much bigger) ship. The story mainly revolves around the fact that Moka’s ship is in distress and Mike wanting to save her friend. The premise is fine... Except I literately don’t give two shits about Moka. Moka is a prime example of why the “childhood friend” trope is one of the dumbest things in anime. In the first episode we have Mike and Moka as children and it shows the two of them sharing the dream of becoming “Blue Mermaids” who protect the sea. In subsequent episodes we get some flashbacks of Moka expressing her view that “everyone on the ocean is family”, an ideology in which Mike adopts. We get excessive shots of Mike looking worried about Moka. And that’s it. Moka literately have no personality other than “childhood friend of Mike”. Imagine being at a party and the people you talk to only talk about their other friends who isn’t at the party. That’s what it feels like when it comes to Mike and Moka. Mike on the other hand, does get some character development. That being said, out of every other character on the ship (there’s 32 total including the cat), Mike managed to be the most bland and brain dead of them all. She’s in the protagonist role simply because it’s easy for audiences to project onto her blank personality and insert themselves into the show instead. Her most notable trait is that she’s afraid of lightning due to a tragic event in the past. Luckily the show tend to give more screen time to more eccentric characters in the grand scheme of things. 

2. One-liners

       “The wind is blowing, the wind of hope” said Moka in a room with the windows closed and door barricaded. This line of dialog completely ruined what’s otherwise a decent action sequence. “Tama, fire with your soul” (it’s a pun when spoken in japaneses) and “With this shot, we’ll grab our chance” are just some other glorious eye-rolling one-liners in this show. Anyways, these really don’t detriment the show all that much but are still worth mentioning. 

3. Flashbacks

       Flashbacks, when used correctly is one of the best story telling mechanisms out there. Sadly, it’s been used much more frequently as a way to avoid actual good story telling. If something truly important had happened in the past then it’s almost always better to show it in the beginning rather than in the middle. If you did it correctly the audience wouldn’t even need a reminder in the form of a flashback. I’m referring to Mike afraid of lightning and her relationship with Moka. Instead of sprinkling bits of flashback throughout the series and frequent reminders of who Moka is; I truly believe the story would flow a lot better if we got the whole first episode dedicated to Mike’s past and Moka, where Haifuri begins in the present time should be mid-episode 2. This way I might connect better with Mike as a main character and give a damn about Moka. 

4. Why things went wrong

       This is a major spoiler point. This whole mess is due to some magical virus carried by rats that infected the instructor’s ship and surrounding ships. A zombie-like virus that controls the host to be hostile against the uninfected. The doctor on board, due to her character trait as a genius found the antibody/cure. Oh, and in early stages of infection spraying the infected with sea water would also do the trick. Like... wtf. It’s not how viruses, geniuses, antibodies or seawater work. But, whatever, it’s a show that’s meant to be entertaining so this is just me nitpicking. Still... Wouldn’t the instructor purposefully sabotaging the students in hopes of framing the principal to gain power made for a more logical and dramatic plot? 

5. Logic

     If you have any common sense then there are points in the show where you’ll go “Why?”, “How?”, “What??”, “k, that just happened.” or a mixture of those reactions. The most notable one is in episode 4 when a crew member got infected and is going crazy so the German deputy captain straight up throws her into the ocean. Ok... the impact should’ve killed her. However not only did it not kill her, she just magically gets shot back up onto the ship by the ocean “Moana” style and is no longer infected due to being in contact with saltwater. (O.O) HOW??? That sequence of events has kept me up at night, I’m so baffled by it that I’m losing sleep. Another lesser wtf anime moment is one of the Blue Mermaid captain got these robotic looking cat ears on her head. Like, why does she have those? Nobody else in the entire show is wearing robotic cat ears. Is it a fashion statement? Do those serve a purpose? The show doesn’t even acknowledge them once but they’re there!! Again, I’m left wondering.

6. Marketing/Other

       This anime is so poorly and confusingly marketed. It’s initially called “Haifuri” but on MAL it’s “High School Fleet”. It was released last year and i somehow completely missed it. It’s a ghost of an anime. Several sources have conflicting information as to if it’s an anime original or based off of a manga. The VA for the main German character that threw the indestructible girl off the boat has voiced several characters in hentai. <--This isn’t a negative point, just something interesting I wanted to mention.

7. Right things at the wrong time

       There were several instances of this in the show but I’ll only mention the most aggravating one here: So the Blue Mermaids has this oath that they chant which goes “Live on the sea. Protect the sea. Sail the sea”. It’s honestly kinda cool. Anyways, Mike and Moka always say this to each other as kids and it’s real sweet and cute and stuff. At one point mid-battle Mike and the other main characters each say a part of the oath and it actually sent a chill down my spine. This was such a cool/symbolic moment for these characters. Mike only ever said the oath with Moka but in that moment you realize she’s no longer  saying to herself but with h̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶w̶  her new family. This fantastic moment only happened once, and it wasn’t even that big of a battle. Instead of something like this during the finally we instead get Moka’s “The wind is blowing, the wind of hope”: a shitty one-liner from a character with no development. 

8. German

       I don’t speak German, and I don’t need to in order to wince at the German spoken in this anime. I can’t really fault anybody here since it’s probably asking too much for native Japanese speakers to nail German lines. 

9. No introduction

       Out of the 32 characters on the main ship in Haifuri, only like 8 of them got somewhat proper introductions. This is not an objectively negative point toward Haifuri but I can easily see how it might agitate viewers. I personally found it neat that I got to know side characters over time through familiarity, but for others this may be a hassle. At some points I had to pull up the wiki after seeing a character and wondering “what do you do here again?”. For me this is actually a positive trait, the show wasn’t going to introduce 32 characters one by one so it instead did something neat and gave you the “first day in a classroom” feeling. 

10. Exposition

       The world setting of Haifuri is given through exposition. However it was a neat moment I had upon realizing that the city beneath the ocean at the coast is the sunken remains of modern day Japan and not Rapture.     

You might think that  with all these negative points I must have had a terrible time with Haifuri, but it’s quite the opposite. I for the most part very much enjoyed watching Haifuri. It’s madly entertaining compared to the majority of animes out there. These negative points are more so pet peeves of mine than real negatives that truly ruins a show. And to be honest, I derived quite a bit of enjoyment from these nitpicks. In the end the ship crew of Haifuri really made an impact to me and it’s an anime that I’m unlikely to forget. 7.5/10