“Drama is way more important than how mysteries work,” he says – and he may be right. Though the question they’re trying to answer is framed as “how did Hongou intend this story to end,” the question most of the characters actually answer is “how should this story end.” The first interview subject, Kaitou, acknowledges that they’re dealing with a locked room mystery – but in his view, the solvable mechanics of mysteries are a minor issue. The show doesn’t have to spell out how these methods work together to enhance the team’s abilities the shot framing demonstrates that Oreki gets the information he needs purely from his subject’s oversized reactions.īut for all that visual storytelling and classic distribution of character strengths, it’s the points raised by the interview subjects that steal the show here. And Oreki pushes the hard lines, with his pointed questions provoking strong reactions in their first suspect.
Mayaka asks the straightforward and deliberate questions, playing to her “Justice” part as far as it will go. Chitanda leans forward in the frame, shots demonstrating how she consistently engages with people and meets them halfway. Satoshi leads with the classic detective notebook and plays the good cop, asking leading questions and sympathizing with the suspect to get what he wants. Everyone leans on Oreki – he’s challenged by the interviewees and constantly turned to by his own “friends,” demonstrating the uneven nature of their arrangement. The framing and overt ways these interviews play out demonstrate that the “suspects” here aren’t the only ones who aren’t really on the same side. The movie club’s three amateur detectives are introduced like suspects in a lineup, and their meetings are conducted not like a group info-sharing session, but as if they’re interviewing possible killers explaining how they did it. Moody scene-setting impress the feeling of a murder mystery on the overt story as the next stage of investigations begin. The opening shots of this episode deliberately frame it not as a conversation, but an interrogation. The episode’s middle act was essentially a self-aware interrogation of the nature of visual storytelling and so it seems only appropriate that the following episode is entirely focused on narrative storytelling, and how our relationship with a theoretical author dictates everything stories could possibly mean. Through its awkward direction and oddly remarkable animation, it pulled off techniques anime normally doesn’t use for very good reasons, in order to make intentionally bad staging decisions. Hyouka’s eighth episode pulled all sorts of meta visual tricks, using the context of an in-show movie in order to play with character acting and shot framing in a variety of interesting ways.
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