[Hyouka] - 12
I stopped watching this show somewhere around episode five because it was boring me to tears. Well, actually it was making me really drowsy, which makes it hard to watch anything. So, predictably, I dropped like a rock.
I am just getting this out of the way so you know where I am coming from when I say that this is the best episode of
Hyouka and it's the only episode that I've enjoyed watching. It helps that KyoAni are showing off their mad skills throughout the episode, with background art approaching movie levels of detail, but great art and animation alone don't make a show interesting as this series has already shown. It's characters who you are interested in doing interesting things
plus all the excellent visual stuff that they were already pulling off.
Everyone has already given examples of great shots/moments from this episode so I'll just pick up on something that no-one has mentioned yet. It's an extremely irrelevant an easy to miss element of the opening sequence. Oreki is sitting by his computer and we get a shot looking straight into his eyes where we can see his computer monitor being reflected back at us. They actually bothered to animate some flicker from the monitor, even though it's only onscreen for a second and you're probably going to ignore it anyway. That's dedication.
So yeah, everyone should watch this episode, even people like me who found the entire series to be extremely tedious.
Also I take it firehawk12 or whoever didn't talk about his sequence because it's already been covered in the show or something:
Or is that no-one around here has seen/read
They Were Eleven? I find it extremely interesting that Ibara chooses to cosplay as Frol. I suppose it could have no wider meaning but as Frol is such a hugely loaded character in terms of what they represent you would assume the reference has some further meaning. However, it doesn't really seem to tie into anything else I've seen so far.