Hanazakari no Kimitachi/ Hana Kimi 花ざかりの君たちへ

Recommendation:
Genre: Romance comedy high school drama
Type: Japanese Dramas TV series
Air Period: July 3 to September 18 2007
Number of episodes: 12 + 1 special

The synopsis is as follows:

Horikita Maki plays the part of Ashiya Mizuki, a Japanese girl from America. One day she sees high jump athlete Sano Izumi (Oguri Shun) compete in a track and field competition in America on TV and becomes attracted to him.

About one year later she decides to transfer to his school. With one slight problem; it turns out to be an all boys school! She ends up enrolling herself disguised as a boy and the story revolves mainly around her and the young athlete and of the incident that happened in the past when Sano was competing in America. She is determined to get him over his past and pushes him to regain his ability. This becomes her primary reason for transferring to Japan but there seems to be something more....



Here's a Preview



What I think:

OK so the series consists of 12 episodes and a special not to mention the other Live special. It's a very funny drama. This series is especially good for people into useless and random antics, as there are a lot of those scenes played throughout the drama. For those of the more serious type, they may find Hana Kimi to be rather stupid and silly as it turns out to be more of a comedy than anything else. However, the viewers are warned in the beginning of the first episode of the foolishness that was to follow ("Please excuse the silliness of this drama" or something to that effect). It had a very interesting plot and there were several sub-plots throughout the story where it was a bit unecessary as it really did not help to advance the main plot. Although it did, keep the viewers interested since most of these "side quests" involved quite a bit of stupidity. Stupid yet entertaining. It got the audience's attention.

The cast is extremely vibrant and are well suited for their roles. As amusing as the other characters were, Horikita Maki's role wasn't as silly or foolish as the others. She leaned towards a more serious tone of acting than anything else while maintaining a cute and lovable quality to her. It was just fun to watch her. All the other characters gave a very strong sense of comedy to the drama it was almost ridiculous.

As for the romance, the chemistry between Maki and Shun were adequate enough. However, the overall romantic value could've been more pronounced in terms of, let's say, lovey doviness. The romance isn't really fully realized until the later episodes.

Ikuta toma as Nakatsu Shuiichi , brought a sort of "flaming" element to the series. Starting in the second episode he begins to like Mizuki. Which is very confusing and quite traumatizing for him since Mizuki is supposedly a guy, so he then begins to question his sexuality and starts to realize that he maybe a homosexual, but doesn't realize at all that Mizuki is really a girl, which really makes him straight, if that makes any sense. He adds yet another level of comedy to the story and does it with such confidence and snappiness, his performance was just awesome.

As for Oguri Shun, it seemed he did his job. His role as Sano Izumi didn't call for too much. It fit him well.

The one thing that I can truly appreciate in the drama is the lighting and the colors as well as the setting. Everything was so vibrant and just sort of fit together like some photoshop enhanced image. How does one express "0_0"?

To sum it all up, Hana Kimi is just very entertaining to watch with some interesting twists and an epic amount of randomness to keep your eyes glued to the screen like Nakatsu glued to Mizuki's face. My reccomendation is extremely high for this Japanese drama whether you like the element of stupid or not. Simply put; a pleasure to watch.

Here's a Music Video just for that. Haha.



So check out Hanazakari no Kimitachi, I highly recommend it. I would buy the dvd for best quality. You just can't appreciate in it's entirety with a low quality stream on the internet. So go buy Japanese movies and dramas or subscribe to a high quality video feed. Watching low quality just sucks. At least for me it kills it.

- J