‘Sometimes, Special Powers Are A Curse...’

Mai Tokiha and her younger brother Takumi are settling into their new life at Fuuka Academy. They have made friends, despite Mai’s discovery that she is a HiME, a girl gifted with special powers that enable her to summon a CHILD (a creature that helps her fight the monsters called Orphans). Now she has encountered several other HiMEs at the Academy but she is still ambivalent about her gift. A new arrival at the Academy is the golden-haired, golden-voiced child Alyssa Searrs – but does her angelic face and shy manner conceal a quite different agenda? And what precisely is Father Joseph Greer up to in the secret vaults beneath the school chapel?

Summer vacation at Fuuka Academy, means a swimsuit episode! Yes, Volume 3 begins with that classic anime standby: the beach. While Mai earns money as a lifeguard and her classmates slap on the sun oil, fellow HiME Natsuki is out investigating an abandoned District 1 laboratory which has a direct and tragic link to her own past. Romantic complications increase as Mai finds herself in the company of handsome Vice President Reito Kanzaki, while jealous Shiho refuses to let Mai anywhere near classmate Yuichi Tate, sensing that their constant sparring hides deeper feelings. This intercutting between light-hearted high school frolics and the darker elements is My-HiME’s strongest selling-point, as well as the rock on which it might founder. There are tantalising hints of a cataclysmic conflict to come (why else would all the HiMEs have been gathered together?) and a shadowy enemy. As Mai says, ‘All this talk about the fate of the world, District 1, and enemies, and whether to fight or not…’ which just about sums up this viewer’s reaction at the end of the twelfth episode.

At the end of Volume 2 we learned that the HiMEs pay a very high price if their CHILD is destroyed in battle: the one most precious to them is destroyed too. Yet the ORPHAN that interrupts the baking contest in Episode 11, ‘Cake Wars’, seems more keen on eating gateaux than testing the HiMEs to their limits. Matters take a darker turn when a girl is attacked by a vampire in the academy grounds.

It would be churlish of me not to mention the soundtrack by Yuki Kajiura which, although very much in the same vein as her score for ‘Madlax’ (indeed, I could swear that one of the themes also appears in that series) adds greatly to the charm and the drama. She is capable of racking up the tension by creating one of her pounding rhythmic riffs for a battle, or enhancing a quieter moment with her subtly-scored melodies.

I came to My-HiME thinking that it would be just another Girls with (Magical) Weapons series. It’s also a High School Romance and there is plenty of fan service to add icing to the cake. I can’t remember seeing another anime which contains so many ‘moe’ characters (check out bespectacled Yukino, for example) and even feisty Mai is often shown misty-eyed, index finger resting cutely on her lower lip. Even the older women, from Sister Yukariko to the headmaster’s maid, Fumi, (nun, maid, get the picture?) are fan service stereotypes. But to my surprise, I genuinely enjoyed My-HiME, largely down to the lively pace, slick animation, and warm interaction between the characters. Sometimes, though, it feels as if the writers are withholding a little too much information about the dramatic events at Fuuka Academy to allow the story to unfold satisfactorily. They have also introduced too large a cast to develop any one of them in significant depth. Every character we meet in My-HiME has a secret, whether it be archaeologist Midori (now working as a substitute teacher) or Akira, Takumi’s enigmatic room-mate. Too many secrets, perhaps.

‘This DVD contains exclusive shorts’ proclaims the case, ‘that will show you everything about the hidden layers of the series.’ And that’s all you get except for trailers and production sketches by way of extras. The exclusive shorts are character vignettes, strongly angled toward the fan service aspects of the series.

In Summary

This volume of ‘My-HiME’ is always watchable and entertaining, even if not as nearly taut on the dramatic front as I would have wished. Nevertheless there are enough unsolved mysteries to keep me wanting to see where this is all leading.