Anime: Hanamonogatari: Suruga Devil

The first thing to say about this season is that it’s best not to watch it unless one is at their 100% ‘cause I was kind of sleepy when I watched it and boy was it tough.

In terms of visuals and sound I didn’t find much differences from the previous season so I don’t bother much with it. The opening has Kanbaru and some other girl acting as friends even when they are enemies, though there’s a part where the vocals change completely and it is nice. The ending has a very creepy and completely different art style so it was cool to watch even though the song itself was more of the same. Some recurring characters has different designs which are good but the most important one isn’t permanent so fuck it.

This season takes two risks. One, coming out at this point even though chronologically is the last, at least when it comes to the anime up until this point, since the novels kept going, as far as I know. This will make any possible tension from future entries to lack any real impact since this one already confirms the outcome.

The second is having Suruga Kanbaru as the protagonist, as was built up in Second Season, since for plot reasons many characters are not around. Up until this point she was a comical type of secondary character, and as previous examples have proven, it’s very rare for a type of spin off or sequel like that to be good or successful or even not ruin the character.

So, is Kanbaru a good enough main character to take the place from the previous ones? Not in the least, or maybe she is, she could be, perhaps, if this anime was about her, but it really isn’t, since for a big portion it focuses on another girl whose name I didn’t bother to learn and who has a very simple and boring backstory compared to the previous main cast.

Said backstory takes one and a half episode to be presented and said presentation is kind of a mixed bag. First, like with Shinobu’s in the previous season, it is told instead of shown, and this time around there aren’t even some cool visuals along with it for its first half, all that’s shown is the character talking and Kanbaru looking at her with a straight face from time to time. Ok, there are some visual metaphors with floating objects but that’s it. The second half goes for something completely different and far more interesting looking for some reason, so it balances out.

As for Kanbaru herself, something important happens to her character wise, but not because of her, it’s something that someone else does for her, without her even noticing it at first. It’s not that she’s explored much either, some backstory of her is told, and she has some conversations with old time characters where she tells them about some of her doubts, they encourage her, and she gets over it rather easily and quickly, that’s it. Plus, it is weird to see her all serious like this, she doesn’t really feel like the character that was shown so far.

Ok, I’m not dumb nor uninterested enough to not notice that the series explicitly draws some parallelisms between the two girls but, Suruga, I don’t care about being TOLD about who you could have been, I want to SEE more of who you are, or how you came to be, or who you can be in the future, and you brought none of that in this show.

The more enjoyable scenes for me where the first and third out the four scenes where old time characters appeared, and even then, one of them undid a death from Second Season, and the other was kind of comical and didn’t have the same melancholic tone of the rest of the season. The second left me indifferent and the fourth was the same old pedophilic and incestuous humor that I made clear that I hate.

As a whole the season continues to have great visuals, serviceable sound, a welcomed different melancholic tone to the most part, and it isn’t really bad to be honest, but also feels like it has very little content and very little or very uninteresting characterization in it. A very passable one and I would say the second worst after Nisemonogatari so far, which doesn’t leaves me wanting to watch any possible sequel.

Hanamonogatari is chronologically the latest story (as of 2020) of the aptly named Monogatari series. This story follows an arc fairly divorced from previous themes and arcs, mainly because it devotes itself to a side character (so to speak) from Bakemonogatari, Kanbaru Suruga.

The story shows very well how Kanbaru Suruga becomes decisive and confronts her fears and misgivings that takes on the form of her old nemesis, once again going into the theme of adolescence. One of the main themes of Monogatari in general is that "People cannot help other people, people help themselves". Hanamonogatari has a slightly different angle on this. The main theme here is "Schadenfreude" (this word is shown in the last episode of the arc) or the feeling of pleasure from the pain of of someone else. The way this theme is used here reaffirms the aforementioned main theme of Monogatari and shows that Schadenfreude is not exempt from that thesis, though it may seem like it and is something the nemesis is tempted to use and justify.

The story resembles the later arcs of Monogatari more than arcs before Nekomonogatari (Shiro) I think. It's structure is akin to a detective novel with a couple of twists in certain places that gradually unravel and come to fruition fully at the final episode, although the main revelation is not as surprising, because all the previous pieces of the puzzle, so to speak, kinda pointed that way. In short, it is a fairly strong story, but it is further augmented by other arcs of Monogatari as well as the themes, direction, and dialogue that make the story probably the best possible with that kind of structure.

The characters and the dialogue are pretty good. A lot of people generally dislike the character of Numachi Rouka, mainly because her motivations are somewhat banal and she is only mentioned in other parts of Monogatari, but I think that she is more interesting than that because she can be looked as not as a character but as something else. Her character design literally has these two hair locks that look almost like horns. She is also often shown from far away, from the point of view of Kanbaru, almost to the point that the animation begins to degrade, which kind of adds to the surreality and at the same time realism, since the viewer is looking through Kanbaru's eyes. I think that Numachi Rouka is not exactly a character in the traditional sense of Monogatari due to the surreality of her existence and how Kanbaru alludes to her situation. Rather she is a symbol of Kanbaru's past/youth that seem ephemeral and that she is leaving behind. It appears that the only real weak point was the dialogue between Araragi and Kanbaru, since a fair amount of it very vaguely alluded to Kanbaru's situation and feelings.

The visuals are good. By 2014, Shaft have improved immensely in animation and CGI as compared to Bakemonogatari, although that may just be a matter of opinion. Objectively, the colours are more vibrant than ever, animation is sharp, although can be lax at times, and 3D modelling is well made, although it seems that they were mostly experimenting with it here, seeing as it was mostly static CGI except for the end. The first 2 episodes have stunning ending scenes with beautiful skies in nice colours. The way the meat was drawn in the second episode makes me hungry to say the least. The final "battle" was purely beautiful. It was symmetric, had many different moving parts in it for a seemingly brief action, and was not overly convoluted or stretched in terms of time.

The direction is on another level compared to even other Monogatari parts. POV is as was intended by the creators. I should say that perhaps there is too much "fan-service" (would call it that were it not so abstract in the case of Monogatari) even in scenes where serious thoughts are being divulged, but unless you are watching Hanamonogatari without watching anything previously (what are you doing then?) then that should not be surprising whatsoever, both because of Kanbaru's character traits and the fact that similar "fan-service" is used throughout the series anyway.

I would like to say that this story, like a couple of others from the series, had a weird release as a TV special, and because of that it may be harder to access for some services. It is beyond me why would Shaft release major parts of Monogatari as almost OVAs not to mention apparently that the original release was a movie and not multiple series as is most common now. I think that this inconsistency is a slight smudge on the excellent work done by Shaft.

The audio is, as always, top notch. Like in other parts of Monogatari, the OST of Hanamonogatari sets it apart from other anime, though it elicits completely different themes as opposed to the OST of other arcs. The opening is very emotional and powerful. It is in deep contrast with even the Bakemonogatari opening for Suruga's chapter, to which it should logically have a deep connection, though I would probably be correct in saying that I prefer "the last day of my adolescence" (Hanamonogatari) to "Ambivalent World" (Bakemonogatari). The parts of the soundtrack that were original to Hanamonogatari together with the scenes and context create a very mystical and almost forbidding theme for the anime, whereby the viewer feels the unknown and a danger exceeding from it as Suruga does her cloak and dagger investigation. This feeling only really lets up at the end.

When I first watched this part, right after watching Koimonogatari, I was rather confused as I tried to work out in my head how did the events of the final season, which were unknown to me at the time, influence the events here. Needless to say that I failed. At the time I just thought it was above all a nice story and I did get a feeling of satisfaction at the way it ended. I have now rewatched Monogatari in the chronological order by events, so I finished my rewatch with Hanamonogatari, and I think that while Owarimonogatari and Zoku-Owarimonogatari do well to bring the story to its logical conclusion, Hanamonogatari carries on with the same spirit and culminates the themes of Monogatari, where many of the themes and axioms from chronologically earlier parts evolved and were concluded. I think that it is a very good way to end the series.