The cute girls + warships formula will no doubt attract comparisons to Kantai Collection, which is unfortunate because I considered that anime to be, in a word, bad. But then the ditzy lead ( Natsukawa Shiina) puts on her inappropriately cool hat (without the snazzy uniform, to my disappointment), with which Hai-Furi seems to pull itself together and eventually lead to EXPLOSIONS-though not without some quizzical cluelessness about exactly why it was being serious all of a sudden. In fact, one got the impression that Hai-Furi itself wasn’t too sure what it was as it cut slightly stiltedly from rose-tinted flashback to awkward slapstick to various yuri-shipping to high school slice-of-life. Now, that wasn’t actually entirely apparent from the beginning though, what with its notably fluffy start. On my part, though, I actually went into Hai-Furi looking for an ARIA substitute until the Amanchu anime next season, and somehow I don’t think I pegged it right.
And I suppose Hai-Furi could well be simply anime’s next attempt to cash in on the warship craze-and even as I typed that sentence I realised how silly it sounded. Somehow, it seems that warships are all the rage in Japan right now.
