A Summer of Cute Girls: Hinako Note, Yuru Camp, and A Place Further Than the Universe

Last summer I watched like five cute girl shows in a row and also read some cute girl manga during the same period. I made some notes discussing and comparing them that I thought were worth writing up as part of my continuing obsession with story structure analysis on cute girl shows.

What makes these three shows worth discussing together, aside from the fact that I happened to watch them all within a short period of time, is that two of them are really good and one of them is pretty not good, and the two good ones illuminate the flaws of the one not good one in an interesting way.

Hinako Note: It’s Pretty Not Good

Hinako Note is a series with a lot of ups and downs. The first two episodes are extremely adorable, with cute characters and a lovely setting. It’s supposed to be in Tokyo, but the cozy little coffee shop / bookstore / girls dormitory where the characters live, and the beautiful green park with all sorts of trees and terraces and food stalls, don’t scream Tokyo to me at all. They actually look shockingly similar to the Swiss Japanese Italian village where Is the Order a Rabbit? takes place.

Hinako is a girl from the country who comes to the city to join a theater club for high school. She has acute social anxiety and whenever strangers talk to her, she freezes up and animals come and perch on her. She also has the ability to talk to animals somehow. She ends up rooming with Chiaki, a soft-voiced sempai who loves acting; Mayu, a tiny cute blond girl who wears a maid outfit and is in love with Chiaki; and Kuina, a laid back girl who likes both reading and eating books, like Bungaku Shoujo. Later, Yua, a semi-tsundere semi-rival for Hinako, comes in as a fifth member of the group.

Hinako Note is very confused about what it wants to be and flails around trying to find its feet for about six or seven episodes before it achieves any sort of consistency. It tries to do a plot in Episodes 3 – 6, but the plot is really bad and turns into a complete mess. Hinako left her home and came to start an unfamiliar life in the big city in order to join the theater club, but it turns out the theater club is on hiatus because the advisor left. So they decide to start up their own little private theater troupe, but then Chiaki’s theater club buddies make her a theater society at the end of an episode (Episode 4, I want to say?). Then in the next episode the theater club advisor is back so they can restart the regular theater club, and they do a play. It’s a complete mess. It continually sets up conflicts only to immediately shoot them down with easy solutions that require no effort on any of the main characters’ parts. You might have noticed from my plot summary that the show resolves the same conflict three times: first with the theater troupe, then with the theater society, then with Ruri, the advisor, coming back to restart the theater club. The second two times were just random happenstance that came out of the blue so something would happen.

Once the theater club resumes, the show focuses on the rivalry between Hinako and Yua a lot and how Yua comes to slowly accept Hinako by seeing how hard she works. This works a lot better. It has an actual dramatic arc where Yua starts out hating Hinako and being jealous of her, then comes to like her a little bit and feel sorry for some of her actions, but then her jealousy flares up again when Ruri casts Hinako as the lead in the play that Yua wanted to lead. But Yua finally sees Hinako working hard and decides to respect and support her. There’s also a nice little subplot about how Mayu dislikes theater because it takes Chiaki away from her, but in the end she uses her propensity for wearing a maid outfit to rescue the production by coming out of the audience to bring Yua a prop she forgot, using the maid outfit to blend in with the setting so it looks intentional.

The characters have their charms, but the character writing is also very confused and messy. Mayu and Yua both love Chiaki, which seems simply excessive, but so far they haven’t realized this about each other and it hasn’t been an issue. Kuina is supposed to be a book girl and a big eater as well as a laid back wacky character, which is just too many traits. And being a book girl is just a minor plot device to explain why she works in a bookstore and who writes the scripts for the theater troupe that they still do for some reason even though the theater society was formed an hour later and then the theater club was resumed the next day. Yua is your standard tsundere rival, but at least she’s consistent. Hinako is a pretty good, pretty consistent character, but she needed a better supporting cast to interact with, because she’s not interesting enough to sustain the show on her own. And Chiaki is pretty bland. She’s supposedly so cool that girls go gay for her—not just Mayu and Yua, but also a group of random girls we see in a flashback who switch from being gay for Mayu because she’s small and cute like a doll to being gay for Chiaki because she’s supposedly so cool.

The art and design are the bright spot of Hinako Note, but even this is marred by the fact that the show, especially in the later parts, throws in near constant and utterly gratuitous fan service, mostly of Hinako or Chiaki. The camera constantly focuses on their bouncing boobs or their butts when they’re laying down, or lovingly pans over their bodies as they’re changing clothes or in the bath, or takes cheap excuses to dress them up in bunny girl outfits like a harem show. Most of the episodes end with Hinako naked in the bath and us getting an eyeful. The next episode previews are all spoken over a piece of art of one of the characters that looks like it came from an eroge. These just get more and more gross and pervy as the series goes on (one towards the end has Hinako on her knees about to lick Kuina’s foot for some reason). What bothers me about this is less the presence of fan service and more the way it’s done. I’m old now and just a pan over a naked girl’s body isn’t going to do much for me; I want fan service to happen in ecchi situations. I want the entire show to be ecchi and sexual in nature if I’m going to enjoy that. The constant and gratuitous fan service also highlights even more how confused this show is about its identity.

A lot of the cute girl shows I haven’t enjoyed don’t pick the right subgenre of cute girls show, or they try to mix and match elements from too many subgenres in ways that conflict. Hinako Note is interesting because of just how badly the elements it chooses conflict. The characters, setting, pastel color palette, and chibi art style are overwhelmingly adorable, somewhere between Wakaba Girl and Is the Order a Rabbit?. That art style works for those two shows because they were pure cute girls doing cute things; they had no plots, they were just about fun and friends and looking at pretty things. When Hinako Note commits to that direction more in Episodes 1, 2, 7, and 8, it works well—much better than anything else the show attempts. But the middle portion, with its limp attempts at plot, reads more like cute girls drama, like a Hibike! Euphonium or a Clannad or, as we’ll discuss below, A Place Further than the Universe, except it’s exceedingly incompetent in its execution. Clannad makes an entire story arc of the theater club being shut down and Nagisa trying to get it going again and recruit members with Tomoya’s help. Hinako Note resolves that problem within the same episode and then resolves it twice more for good measure.

Some elements of Hinako Note read more as wacky surreal comedy with cute girls, like a Digi Charat or a Bakuon!!; Hinako’s ability to talk to animals and the fact that they cluster around her or that she can walk through the city with chicks on her shoulders and no one remarks on it is either a genuine supernatural ability or comedic exaggeration. But I would accept this in a cute girls doing cute things show; after all, in Is the Order A Rabbit?, it’s strongly implied that Chino’s grandfather died and his soul possessed an Angora rabbit. I have a harder time accepting Ruri, who is only nine years old, but is a professional actress as well as a drama teacher in a high school, and also has like C-cup boobs at the tender age of nine. (Her boob size is remarked on in the show.) I would have accepted her, with exactly the same character design, as a very short woman in her twenties. That’s a common trope for teachers in anime, and it wouldn’t have changed anything because no part of her personality and nothing she ever does in the plot are in any way affected by her being a child. But a nine-year-old teacher is too far from anything remotely realistic for me to accept in a cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things. Hinako talking to animals can just be a weird, mysterious thing that exists on the fringes, but for a nine-year-old to be a teacher, society has to be fundamentally different than it is in real life. That’s fine for a wacky comedy where these things don’t need to be addressed; it works in Negima, or Pani Poni Dash. But cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things need to be more grounded.

And then there’s the constant fan service, which doesn’t fit within any of these three subgenres. It’s the closest fit with wacky comedy, but in wacky comedy, the fan service is usually played for humor by making it part of a ridiculous situation. Hinako Note just slips it in there for no reason. The characters aren’t aware it’s happening. It comes from no one’s perspective. The camera leering at the girls ruins the cute and fluffy tone that the art and the stories in later episodes create, and sabotages the show’s attempt to be cute girls doing cute things or drama of any kind.

I won’t say I hated Hinako Note; in the end, I enjoyed some parts of it and liked some of the characters. But it’s more interesting for its flaws than for its minimal successes. Someone with some level of competence was clearly working on it, but either they let their worse natures win out or they were overridden by studio executives who were out to make a buck, or they too faithfully adapted a manga that had the same flaws. And what makes it frustrating is that when it finally starts to succeed towards the end, it does so at something that’s well understood. It is well known in the anime world how to make a good cute girls doing cute things show. You pick a fun theme, pick a beautiful setting, you get some cute girls, you choose from a couple standard art styles (something more realist like K-On, something more chibi and cute like Yuru Yuri, or something in between like Kiniro Mosaic) and put your own little spin on it, you put the girls together and let interplay happen, and after that it’s all down to your skill in executing said interplay and how well you planned out the way the girls’ personalities mesh. And that part is indeed hard, but that’s not where Hinako Note messed up. It messed up in the planning stage, the part that should be well understood and almost formulaic at this point. They picked a fun theme, theater. They picked a beautiful setting, the nice little enclave of Tokyo that looks exactly like the Swiss Italian Japanese village from Is the Order a Rabbit?. They set up some cute girls and picked out some of the standard dynamics (the strict tsundere one who yells at the slow clumsy one, the girl who’s gay for another girl, the one who eats a lot, the short girl who looks like a child and hates being called a child). They had an obvious path forward from here: get them together in a theater club or troupe and show them enjoying every day while they prepare for performances and then give performances. Instead the show decided to try and do drama for six episodes, and then gave up and went back to what seems to have been the original plan, based on the art style, all the while sabotaging itself with massive amounts of gratuitous fan service and unrealistic elements that take away the cohesion of the world.

Yuru Camp: It Made Me Want to Go Outside

Pretty shortly after watching Hinako Note, I watched Yuru Camp. This turned out be a good decision, because Yuru Camp is almost certainly the best anime I watched in 2019. I can’t remember the last cute girls doing cute things show I enjoyed so much.

It absolutely nails every part of the formula I described above: the theme (relaxing winter camping), the visuals (beautiful forest, mountain, and lake shots with an amazing color palette that’s both earthy and vibrant—if you told me the backgrounds were all Bob Ross paintings, I’d believe it), the music (a fun, relaxing, eclectic mix of country, folk, and Celtic), and the characters. Unlike a lot of cute girls shows, Yuru Camp actually take a long time to bring the main group together; we don’t see them all on a trip together until the last two episodes. Because of that, I didn’t get as attached to some of the characters as I might have, but I loved loved loved Rin Shima, the de facto main character. Not only is she adorable with her huge bun, her scarf, her shawl, and her introverted, quiet, and bookish nature, she’s also awesome. She’s genuinely competent and rugged, braving the tough road and the bitter winter cold in return for the solitude of an empty campground and a beautiful private view of the mountains and the lake. In the first episode a campground worker sees her going out to the empty campground in the winter cold and comments on how tough she must be. She pitches her tent and sets up her campsite with a practiced efficiency, and she has no trouble gathering supplies, planning out her trips, hauling all her things on a bicycle, or building a campfire from wood she gathers off the ground. But she’s also not perfect; she still has trouble pitching her tent when it’s windy out, she needs help to figure out how to make the coals hot in her portable grill, and she falls asleep in a roadside rest area and ends up having to make camp in the dark. When her first trip by scooter takes some unexpected turns, Rin gets worried and frustrated, but she also keeps her cool and thinks through what to do next, and she gladly accepts help from her friends to get her through.

Rin pairs really well with Nadeshiko Kagamihara, the co-lead, too. Nadeshiko is energetic, friendly, and sort of an airhead. She and Rin meet because Nadeshiko heard she could see Mt. Fuji, so she biked up to the same campground where Rin is camping, but she forgot to bring her phone or any money and she doesn’t know her home number because she just moved, so she gets stranded dying of hunger and has to borrow Rin’s food and phone to call her sister. Nadeshiko later joins the Outdoor Exploration Club and makes friends with its two members, Chiaki Oogaki and Aoi Inuyama. With them she starts to learn more about camping and acquire equipment. She also goes on more trips with Rin, who seems fond of Nadeshiko even though she sometimes acts standoffish towards her. There’s enough contrast between them to be interesting, but enough similarity that their friendship feels realistic. Rin has a type anyway—her other friend, Ena Saito, is also sort of a lackadaisical airhead. The one Rin claims to have trouble dealing with is Chiaki, whose personality is more hyper and purposefully silly. Since the series takes so long to get all five girls together, there’s less focus on group interaction, but we still get to see them interact in pairs or triads throughout the series before the big finish, which means the series doesn’t have to purposely set aside time for certain members of the group to peel off and interact like in shows that build the group right away. Plus, with Rin as the main character, it feels true to her personality that she’d be slow to join a larger group and only want to do it after feeling comfortable with all the members.

Every episode of Yuru Camp felt like it was only ten minutes long because I enjoyed it so much it just flew by. I delayed watching the final episode for a week because I didn’t want it to be over. I ordered the soundtrack from CDJapan because it makes such great music to work or read to. Rin’s peaceful weekends reading by a beautiful lakeside even made me consider camping myself, something I’d never before felt the urge to do. In the middle of writing this blog post I felt a sudden urge to rewatch it, which I’m now doing, and it’s just as I remembered. The first episode just shows Rin go to the campgrounds, set up her campsite, read, make a fire, meet Nadeshiko, eat cup ramen, and see Nadeshiko home, but it felt like it was over in ten minutes and I enjoyed every second of great music, beautiful scenery, and the vicarious cozy feeling of sitting by a warm campfire eating hot soup while piled in shawls and cloaks and scarves.

A Place Further Than the Universe

I watched A Place Further Than the Universe slightly before either of the other two, and it, along with Quintessential Quintuplets, got me fired up to watch cute girl anime again. It’s a comedy/drama about four girls who go on an expedition to Antarctica. Shirase Kobuchizawa lost her scientist mother to an Antarctic expedition and is determined to get down there herself. What she hopes to get out of the trip isn’t entirely clear at first—does she hope her mother is still alive? Does she want to continue her mother’s work?—but her determination inspires Mari Tamaki, aka Kimari, and Hinata Miyake. Kimari is ditzy and lacking in ambition, but she meets Shirase and gets fired up to do something amazing. Hinata has stopped going to school and is working her tail off in a convenience store when she meets Shirase and Kimari and also gets sucked in to their passion. They get their chance by teaming up with Yuzuki, an idol who’s been asked to host a documentary following an Antarctic expedition led by Gin Toudou, an old friend of Shirase’s mother.

A Place Further Than the Universe has a similar vibe to Hibike! Euphonium. The look is more realistic than Hinako Note or even Yuru Camp, the color palette more muted. The characters come off simple at first, but we’re kept somewhat at arms’ length from them and we discover they’re more complex than they seem as the series develops. Hinata, for instance, seems friendly and boisterous at first, and Shirase seems cold and impassive. But we soon discover Shirase is burning with passion, and Hinata is actually deeply standoffish. And also like Hibike! Euphonium, the drama comes from the characters’ actions, which come from their personalities, and not because of happenstance dictated by the script. Every character gets a satisfying arc to unravel what she was trying to get out of going on the expedition. Shirase’s was suitably the most full and satisfying, but I really enjoyed Hinata’s arc, and her unique personality made her my favorite character. Kimari’s and Yuzuki’s were less good, but they also received less focus because their problems were smaller, so it still came together well.

Between the drama, we get to see what daily life is like during several stages of an Antarctic expedition. We see the girls learn how to pitch their tents in sub-zero temperatures, and how to avoid getting lost in a blinding snowstorm, during training. We see them dealing with nausea on the ship ride down. Then we see what meals and work shifts and sleeping arrangements and Christmas are like at the Antarctic base. It sometimes felt like the best written and most moe school video ever. Yuru Camp made me want to go camping, but A Place Further Then the Universe didn’t make me want to go to Antarctica—still, it was a great series that I enjoyed a lot, with light humor to keep the drama from getting overbearing and great arcs for all the main characters.

What made the other two better than Hinako Note?

Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are far and away, unquestionably, undeniably, indubitably better than Hinako Note, and it’s interesting to think about why. After all, from the outside, it might look like they’re all the same—three shows about cute girls doing boring daily stuff.

But there’s one big reason why Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are better than Hinako Note: both of them are original ideas with carefully thought out casts and clear identities, while Hinako Note is the cute girls doing cute things equivalent of a taco you make by throwing whatever’s left in your refrigerator in a tortilla and microwaving it. Some things it directly stole from other, better anime: Hinako wants to be in the theater club only to find it’s shut down, just like Nagisa in Clannad; Mayu works in a coffee shop, just like the girls in Is the Order a Rabbit?; Kuina eats books, just like Touko from Bungaku Shoujo. Its characters are common tropes: the tiny cute girl who gets mistaken for a child; the tsundere rival who comes to like the main character; the big eater; the gentle, mature sempai; the child teacher. The way they relate to each other is mostly tropes: both Mayu and Yua have yuri crushes on Chiaki, but the show never goes anywhere with this, so it just looks like they were so out of ideas that they just went, “Make two of them in love with Chiaki!”

This refrigerator taco nature of Hinako Note is the main reason why it fails. For a cute girls show, identity is vital. Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe both have very strong identities. When I read their names, I immediately get a picture of the visuals in my head, the earthy browns and greens and beautiful night sky for Yuru Camp and the muted color palette and bright white snow and orange snowsuits for A Place Further Than the Universe. I immediately identify them with their characters—especially Rin for Yuru Camp, and Hinata or Shirase for A Place Further Than the Universe. I recall specific scenes and events. The whole show—visuals, characters, story, music—comes together in a coherent package. Even less original, more bland cute girls shows can still cohere into an identity, albeit not one that leaves as strong an imprint on the mind as these two extremely good ones create.

But Hinako Note has no identity. It has no idea what it wants to be. The visuals say it wants to be cute, simple, and colorful like Wakaba Girl. It manages to somewhat succeed at that, but it sabotages itself with elements that work against that identity. The attempts at story say it wants to be more of a drama, like Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe. There’s a big difference between the type and scale of problems the characters face in a drama compared to a more simple, iyashikei cute girls doing cute things show like Wakaba Girl or Is the Order a Rabbit?. In these shows, the characters’ problems are small-scale and resolved easily because the show’s goal is a fun, light feeling of daily life. In Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe, the problems are much bigger and much harder to solve. They come from the characters’ personalities and personal journeys, and showing how the characters resolve them and how it changes them is the show’s goal.

Hinako Note sets up problems that could be on that scale. Getting a theater club running and a theatrical production put on is the subject of an entire story arc in Clannad. And nearly the entire story of Hibike! Euphonium revolves around rivalries, grudges, crushes, and friendships in a club. The story towards the end of Season 1 where Reina is given the solo but Yuuko insists that Kaori should have it is conceptually pretty similar to Yua’s jealousy when Hinako is given the lead role in the play. But Hinako Note simply resolves these problems with a wave of the hand, by pure coincidence, so it utterly fails as a drama. On the other hand, these kinds of problems don’t set up a fun, light, everyday tone, so they don’t fit an identity as an iyashikei show either. Later on, when the show does find some measure of success, it does it by scaling down the problems to Mayu getting lost at the beach and feeling embarrassed because everyone treats her like a child and she just proved them right.

And the unrelenting, utterly pointless fan service works against both identities as well. Neither Yuru Camp nor A Place Further Than the Universe would do something like a scene late in Hinako Note where Hinako and Chiaki are sitting at the table talking, and while Hinako thinks about what she wants to say, the camera pans over Chiaki’s boobs and ass for no reason and then goes under the table and shoots up her skirt apropos of nothing. That’s because they understand the stories they’re telling, and the place that eroticism and fan service have in those stories (pretty much none). A Place Further Than the Universe is a touching story about four girls who become friends and find themselves while doing something extraordinary for personal reasons. If it was the same characters, same story, same visual style, same dialogue, same voice actors, but the camera was constantly focusing on the girls’ boobs and asses and we got shot after shot showing how their boobs bulge out under their orange snowsuits, it would be as if everything happening in the show was occurring under the gaze of some unseen horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. That detracts from everything happening on screen. Just imagine the camera pulled back a little and you could actually see the disgusting horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. Imagine you could hear his inner monologue thinking, “Look at those great tits! That amazing ass! I want to rub my face on them and touch myself!” while the girls were having personal revelations and learning to survive in Antarctica. It would completely undercut the girls as characters and devalue their personal journeys, which are the things that make this show great. Same for Yuru Camp—the feeling of relaxing immersion is ruined if some horny man is constantly leering at the girls from the sidelines. Both of these shows understood that that sort of eroticism would completely destroy the tone they were trying to create and the feelings they were trying to invoke, that there was nothing inherently sexual or erotic about their characters and that it would be ruinous to try and impose that eroticism on them, and consequently both ended up on this list of most feminist-friendly anime of 2018 that I randomly turned up when I was looking up one of the minor character’s names.

I’m hammering on this point about the fan service so much because it’s the most common mistake for cute girls shows to make. Even K-On got this somewhat wrong, with Mio tripping and showing her panties on stage and Sawako forcibly dressing Mio up in fetish costumes. But K-On minimizes the damage to its tone; we viewers don’t see Mio’s panties, and the fetish costumes aren’t revealing and aren’t framed in an overtly sexual way. And unlike Hinako Note, K-On did this only when it was an actual part of the story. Mio trips. Sawako forces her into costumes. It’s not being imposed on scenes where it doesn’t fit in at all. Eroticism and fan service work when they’re a purposeful part of the show’s story and tone, as in harem and ecchi shows like To-Love-Ru and High School DxD. You may or may not like these shows, but they were made to be sexy and the fan service is part of that purpose. Throwing fan service into a show where it doesn’t fit is like throwing birthday cake into your refrigerator taco. It may taste good in the right setting, but it can’t be just thrown into whatever food you want as some magic spice to improve it. If you put birthday cake in the wrong food, you’ll ruin both the birthday cake and whatever that food was.