Tea Shop BeLoved

My Haruhiism comes and goes depending on what is going on. Right now, the knob is turned all the way to the right. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, but I was thinking about Disappearance/Vanishment (which is it actually?) and December 18 while zoning out at work today. Amazing how the mind wanders at work…

“Did I shut of my car’s lights?” “I hope that delivery notice from the mailman doesn’t get messed up by the rain.” “I’ll put that Maison Ikkoku post off for yet another day…” “Ugh is it lunch time yet?” “Hinamori Amu-chan~” “If I angle my chair this way, they won’t notice if I doze off.” “Hey, today is December 17… Disappearance of Haruhi!” “FINALLY! Lunch time! Time for a Clif Bar and Tetris DS.”

Being that it’s December 17 in California, it’s great to know that this is happening on the Haruhi webpage on December 18 in Japan right now. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by all this. After all, season 2 was first officially announced on July 7. I’ll just let ANN do all the work for me.

New Haruhi Suzumiya Anime Series Details Revealed
posted on 2007-12-17 23:16 EST

The official Japanese website for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya television anime series has announced further details about the franchise’s next anime project. In the spirit of the first anime series and the Haruhi Suzumiya science fiction comedy light novels that spawned the franchise, the announcement was made in a roundabout, cryptic manner.

On Tuesday, the site “disappeared” and began displaying a false error message that read, “The page cannot be found.” A second message then appears over the first message; it states that a computer program is starting up and prompts the user for a password. If the user enters “K,” “N,” “S,” “A,” and “K” (the initials of the family names of the members of SOS brigade, the main characters in the series) into the password fields and selects the radio button to the right, a fake xterm terminal session opens. A series of messages from “YUKI.N” confirms that the key to the “emergency escape program” has been found and asks for a final confirmation before starting the program. If the user hits the enter key, a new page opens that shows the character Yuki and lists the production credits of the new series.

The page reveals that the previously announced second anime season of Haruhi Suzumiya has been “cancelled” and replaced with a new animation project. Yasuhiro Takemoto (Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Lucky Star) will direct the new project, and Kyoto Animation will still be animating as it did for the first anime project. As in the previous anime project, the fictional “leader” of the new anime project is the character Haruhi Suzumiya herself. The “disappearance” of the website on December 18 at 4:00 a.m. (Japan Standard Time) is a reference to the pivotal date in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, the fourth volume in the light novel series and an apparent indication of which novel plot the anime project will adapt. Bandai Entertainment finished its English-language release of the first anime project in November.

Source: Moon Phase

And here we go again. Takemoto Yutaka will be directing and KyoAni (of course) will be animating, but what I want to know is when is this coming out and how many episodes are there going to be. More importantly, what else is going to be animated. Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody would be a given, but curious as to what else will be done. I’ll we all just have to sit around and wait for more information, but it’s good to know things are progressing along. I guess one could speculate that the soonest this new season airs would be spring, but I’m not really anticipating that. To be honest, I don’t care when it airs. I’m just excited it’s on it’s way.

Crafty way of announcing all this Haruhi news. I was talking to Dancing Queen earlier and something about season 2 came up. One thing that does concern me about season 2 is all the current hype and what will be a crazy amount of hype the closer we get to the actual airing. Considering what a bulldozer the first series was, it’s going to be hard to top that first impression that most of us had. Haruhi not only hit a 1998 HGH-ladden home run, it hit one with a corked bat at Coors Field during a day game with Mihashi Ren throwing nothing but straights right now the middle. One has to wonder… even if Disappearance turns out to be amazing, will all the hype dampen it? I doubt it will happen to this degree, but I hope a StrikerS effect doesn’t happen. Yes, StrikerS was sub par, but it wasn’t as bad as many (myself included) made out to be. Nanoha A’s was awesome beyond belief, so it was hard not to set the bar high for StrikerS. However, by doing so, StrikerS was doomed to fall flat regardless of what happened. The same could be said about Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger, as well as Xenogears and Xenosaga. I hope Disappearance continues whatever made Melancholy so entertaining. I’m not expecting the same home run, but I do hope for something good.

Now if only that 4th season of Full Metal Panic would suddenly jump back into KyoAni’s collective heads…