My-Hime

By Andrew Osmond.

My-HiME, released by Anime Limited as a Collector’s Blu-ray, is a combo of post-Evangelion drama and school comedy. Most though not all of the characters are girls, and My-HiME has been also called a magic girl show, though these girls wield mecha monsters.

It starts with the heroine, the very normal-seeming schoolgirl Mai, on a ferry with her frail little brother, Takumi. They’re both going to enrol at an academy on a small Japanese island – the location of the setting isn’t given, but perhaps it’s in Japan’s Inland Sea. However, Mai hasn’t even reached the island when she witnesses a spectacular fight between two girls on the ferry. One girl has a giant robot hound which fights alongside her. Her rival favours a mighty sword that slices the whole ferry in half. Even Goemon in the Lupin franchise would be impressed by that.

Mai is caught up in the conflict and seemingly drowns… only to wake unharmed on the grounds of her new school. It turns out both girls in the fight are also students at Fuma Academy, though they have intense private agendas which don’t include schoolwork. Mai is soon enticed to unlock her own unsuspected potential, getting firework fighting powers and a mecha that’s a huge toothy dragon. Meanwhile, the school is threatened by strange creatures which Mai and her fellow powered-up girls are told to fight. But how many of these “HiME” girls are there?

The cast includes a secretly smiling headmistress, and black-ops types keeping tabs on the school. If that all sounds very Evangelion, then the early episodes are actually very goofy – think of things like the giant pizza nonsense in Code Geass or Asuka’s super-silly intro in the original TV Eva. The girl with the ferry-slicing sword turns out to be almost feral, bounding round like a cat and attaching herself to a baffled Mai. The other girl is tough and ominous, but she loses her dignity in scenes out of a fanservice comedy – you can either see this as horribly sexist, or a funny upending of expectations.

Seasoned anime watchers won’t be surprised that My-HiME doesn’t stay light, although the silly episodes are very effective in getting you to like the characters before things go darker – a benefit of the 26-episode length. Certain elements of My-HiME feel interestingly close to a dark anime series made years later – I’ll say no more. There are intense love rivalries – the Academy is mixed, though the boys seem oblivious to what their girl classmates are up to. Mai herself is caught between a “prince” type and a rough-spoken bumpkin.

The girls with HiME powers each have a distinctive birthmark that gives away what they are. That’s a nod back to the nineteenth century Japanese novel Hakkenden, where the magic male warriors all had flower-marks on their skin. I wrote more about Hakkenden in connection with Fuse: Memoirs of the Hunter Girl and Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers.

Debuting on Japanese television in September 2004, My-HiME joins the many Sunrise series from past decades reissued by Anime Limited. Many of the others are Gundams, of course, but don’t forget that Sunrise also made Cowboy Bebop and InuYasha. If you’re fitting My-HiME into a Sunrise timeline, then the series began four months after the end of the studio’s hard SF space drama, Planetes.

Also, My-HiME’s lead writer was Hiroyuki Yoshino, who’d become assistant lead writer on Sunrise’s Code Geass a couple of years after, working with Ichiro Ikouchi. Actually, Yoshino’s a very prolific anime writer, and perhaps the biggest name on My-HiME. His previous credits included fourteen episodes of Sunrise’s Gundam Seed and nine of its sequel Gundam Seed Destiny – the latter overlapped with My-HiME on Japanese TV.

Following My-HiME, Yoshino would be the lead writer on such anime shows as Macross Frontier, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Guilty Crown, Heavy Object, Magi, Izetta: The Last Witch and much of the World Trigger franchise. In addition, Yoshino reteamed with My-HiME director Masakazu Obara in 2012, when they created the TV version of Reki Kawahara’s Accel World books.

Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films. My-HiME is released in the UK by Anime Limited.