Applied Animation: Taking Inspiration from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

I don't know why I failed to mention this earlier but at the start of the project once we as a group had figured what idea we wanted to do for our animation I knew exactly the sort of tone I wanted to create. I felt like if the other two in my group understood this tone I wanted to go for they would be as enthusiastic about pursuing it as I was.

I took inspiration from an excellent episode of the anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya that essentially is very different in tone to the rest of the series but acts as a gateway to the movie. Unlike the rest f the series that is very upbeat and fast moving, this episode takes a very slow, real tome approach. And the episode is literally that.

A lot of it is animated in real time. There is this one shot that the episode keeps going back to which is a high angle shot of a classroom with no one in it, apart from one of the main protagonists that is seen simply reading a book. This is shot in real time so there is hardly any movement in the shot, and all we can hear is the occasional turning of a page and weird slightly distorted noise coming from outside. We as the viewer cannot quite figure out what this noise is exactly and even if we can it doesn't really matter anyway. Nothing major at all happens in the episode and it is very easy to see it as just boring.

But I personally love the episode because not only does it dare to be different and show that not everything needs to be conventional and have some sort of plot or characters learning anything, but also because of the tone. The tone is oddly unsettling, nothing ever happens, yet as the viewer you are slightly on edge while you're watching it, like something very bad is ABOUT to happen, yet never does.