Hana-Kimi – Episodes 1-2

Content Warning: Homophobia, gay panic, nonsexualized nudity

What’s it about? 15-year-old Mizuki Ashiya is prepared to go the distance in order to compete alongside Izumi Sano, the high jump prodigy who inspired her to take up track—including moving from the United States to Japan and disguising herself as a boy to enroll in his school. But she faces an unexpected hurdle beyond keeping her gender a secret: Izumi has given up high jumping.

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Hana-Kimi is a stone-cold classic, following in the footsteps of other high school dorm comedies like Here is Greenwood while also establishing a school rom-com formula so wildly successful that you can still see echoes of its influence today. I and many others devoured it during the height of the 2000s manga bubble. Its 2007 Taiwanese live action adaptation provided a foot in the door for many English-language fans to start exploring Chinese and Korean dramas. It’s also one of the primary series that Ouran High School Host Club was (lovingly) making fun of when it debuted…in 2002. It’s always felt like a massive oversight that no anime adaptation existed, but I definitely came in worried that a 1996 series would feel irreparably dated in 2026.

What I got instead was (mostly) a very pleasant surprise. The charms of Hana-Kimi’s oddball cast shine through, from sweetly tactless Mizuki and awkward Izumi to the pair of golden retrievers (metaphorical and literal) Nakatsu and Yujiro. The tropes are almost certain to be familiar to a modern viewer (school clubs with wacky presidents, the harsh but wise school nurse, the ever popular “they were roommates,” etc) but that’s partly because success means replication. It might even help a little that we live in an age where works about exploring one’s gender are at least a bit more common. As a child, I was frustrated that Mizuki’s cross-dressing is purely utilitarian and that she’s quite comfortable as a girl, because it was the closest I’d come to seeing myself on the page and yet a world away. Naoto hadn’t yet taught me to appreciate writers who know not to be careless with a knife.

While I still don’t love Hana-Kimi’s very 90s gender essentialism that’s still visible in places (all hail Yujiro, the gender-sniffing dog!), it’s now kind of a relief that the show doesn’t even bother engaging with a theme it knows it can’t handle. Mizuki isn’t going to muse about how maybe being seen as a boy rules, actually, only to embrace going back into girlmode as part of an alleged happy ending. She’s a girl in pants, and one of the smartest things the show does is put tongue firmly in cheek at its own premise—by the end of episode 2, three people have already at least started putting the pieces together, including Izumi. It tweaks the threat of a “reveal” from the standards and toward an escalating game of “I-know-you-know-I-know (don’t I?)”, which is a lot more fun to watch than keeping the entire cast in the dark for a whopping 23 volumes. Instead, it’s just poor Nakatsu having a gay panic meltdown about having the hots for his new bestie. It is, shockingly, not as bad as I had braced for.

Part of that is some smart adaptation choices. It’s clear that this is a labor of love, including a very sweet tribute to the late mangaka in the first episode, but it’s also not so beholden to the original text that it hampers necessary changes. The comfortable pacing of these two episodes covers roughly the first volume, but some scenes are shifted around to help aid the sense of drama. More crucially, the scripts have made some small but important adjustments to how the show handles queerness.

There are two gay men in the show’s main cast: “school idol” Nakao and school doctor Dr. Umeda. Both are sympathetic characters but also laden with some 90s-flavored baggage, whether that’s other characters being casually homophobic as a punchline or the story’s inability to imagine either of them in a happy relationship. But the anime has so far taken some small steps to alleviate the former, cutting Mizuki’s horrified shock when Umeda tells her he’s gay and deliberately underplaying dialogue where characters assume Mizuki is a gay boy. It’s a small change but has an unexpectedly profound effect on the tone, centering the homophobia more on the characters being shitty teens than a position of the work itself—which also makes the gay panic jokes feel closer to being about Nakatsu’s obliviousness.

This tension is always going to be an issue when it comes to adapting older works, and particularly older josemuke, and it’s a tension I often wrestle with as a reader. These works often age poorly in regards to their handling of marginalized genders and sexualities, but that’s also a sign that they bothered to try. Hana-Kimi might have been writing Sad Pining Gays in 1996, but Umeda is also the adult voice of reason in Mizuki’s life (and a never-untoward doctor in a school full of teenage boys) and Nakao is still treated as part of the community and someone Mizuki ultimately sympathizes with. Compare that to, say, Gurren Lagann, Gainax’s shonen darling that came out ten years later and characterized the effeminate Leeron as a sexual threat to the teenage protagonist and a source of revulsion to famous cool guy Kamina. Intent isn’t everything, but shojo in particular often gets overlooked in the ways it has consistently made social issues a part of its storytelling tradition. I’m not sure that this adaptation will be willing to make active changes to the plot, but I do appreciate the thoughtfulness on display thus far.

As a technical achievement, Hana-Kimi is…fine. It’s polished if not especially flashy on the animation front, and while I miss the extra fluffy hair from the manga art, the new character designs walk a decent line incorporating modern design sensibilities. I can’t say I love the 3D camera work, as it makes environments seem rather cold and empty, and going with an aggressively chiptune-esque opening feels at odds with the content, even if YOASOBI is killing the delivery as always. But there is some absolutely gorgeous use of lighting, and the voice cast is hitting all the right notes.

It feels easy to assign Hana-Kimi in the vein of homework, but I think it has more to offer than that. It’s a well-made ensemble comedy that captured hearts the world over for a reason. I don’t know if this will receive the full-length adaptation that Fruits Basket did, but it feels like an adaptation approached with similar care. Whether or not you end up clicking with it, this is the kind of baseline that joseimuke projects deserve.