Haru

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• Japan • 2013 • 60m •

• Directed by: Ryôtarô Makihara. • Starring: Yoshimasa Hosoya, Yôko Hikasa, Mamoru Miyano, Tamio Ôki, Shinpachi Tsuji, Rin Mizuhara, Hikari Yono, Uko Tachibana, Shôko Tsuda, Ikki, Kanami Satô, Hiroki Gotô, Arisa Nishiguchi. • Music by: Michiru Ohshima.

A man named Hal dies in a plane accident, and his girlfriend Kurumi loses the will to live. To open her heart and help her move on, a robot named Q01, designed to look and act like Hal, is sent to her house. Though reluctant at first, Kurumi slowly becomes fond of the robot Hal, as Robo Hal begins to uncover parts of Hal and Kurumi's past.

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Teaser

0:16

Trailer

1:12

Review:

The show starts out rather strange with a plain suddenly exploding over a quiet little town. Then they suddenly talk about a boy named Hal who had passed away and a girl who seemed to be his girlfriend is taking it pretty hard. To me, this beginning just feels like it was a promo for the show instead of the actual show because we don't really get any information at all. We can speculate what's going on, but that's all. We don't get a full picture of what is actually happening. And then we have a robot that becomes human in order to help the young girl. I'm actually not sure if we could really call him human right away though as he doesn't seem to know how to actually act human or feel human. I know this is going to into philosophy but this really does ask the question, what does it take to be human? Throughout the whole show, we learn a lot about Hal. I mean the real Hal in fact, not the robot one. I like how we learn through Robotic Hal's way of learning then just being told straight out. It gives us a mystery to solve then just a romance. In the end, there is a point when Hal's past seems to haunt the two. And then in the end, it really changes around, making things a bit more confusing but making it really fun all the same. It's not like any other love story between a robot and human. It's hard to explain because of it being such a big spoiler that it would mess with you. You really should watch it if you are interested in knowing what the hell I am talking about with switch. And even at the end, there are one or two things that don't seem to not be closed up, things that should but don't take away from the story.

The artwork is amazing, and the sort of playful toy aspect to this is rather cute. All the vibrant colors and amazing little adornments all over the place. I didn't really see any problems with the animation being poor, though I didn't like some of the design aspects they did for a couple background characters. It doesn't mess with the story but it makes me frown slightly at that. Still, the design of the rest was wonderful and made me happy to even watch the show.

The English dub was so good; I couldn't believe how wonderful the voice acting was. Of course funimation did give it the dub so I shouldn't have expected anything less and yet I have seen some that felt like they needed a bit more. Each person sounded like what I thought they should sound like, even the ladies at the adult day care sounded good and those are normally the ones that would of sounded bad if there was a bad voice. The strange thing is that there were not that many names that stood out to me in the cast. I mean, there were people like Todd Haberkorn and Chris Burnett but the rest seemed like they did mostly background characters before this. They may still do background characters in this one too but the characters give a better connection with the world and emotions.

This is one that I definitely think you should watch even if you're not into sci-fi or romance. It's not one or the other and it sort of opens up the idea of just what a Robot could be as well as just what a human could be.

Review by Angels_Review from the Internet Movie Database.

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