I went into Hinamatsuri packing both considerable skepticism and curiosity.  To be honest the premise here sounded pretty dumb, and in general it just doesn’t seem to be up my alley.  On the other hand the manga seems to be extremely well-regarded by a lot of people, and Hinamatsuri’s adaptation is being handled by Studio feel..  They’ve had an awfully nice run of late with both Tsuki ga Kirei and Kono Bijutsubu ni wa Mondai ga Aru to their name, and director Oikawa Kei also directed Kono Bijutsubu, as well as the very good final (for now) season of Minami-ke (though I’m always suspicious when a director has two shows in the same season, as Oikawa does with this one and Uma Musume).

As for the premise, as far as I can tell it boils down to a hotshot young yakuza named Nitta Yoshifumi having a little girl with superpowers emerge from a pod naked and (after wrecking some of his vanity swag) start doing his jobs for him.  Presumably at some point Hinamatsuri is going to tell us why Hina dropped into the life of Nitta-san, but it’ll take a lot of persuasion for me to believe it’s anything other than an excuse for a literal explosion of gap moe.  That pretty much puts the onus on the series to be entertaining enough to make that point if not moot, at least tolerable.

So far, so good?  Well, pretty good I would say.  This is a solid premiere and it did have a few genuine laughs in it.  While pretty much everything that happens does indeed seem random, it’s executed in such a way as to be engaging just the same.  There’s a good rhythm to the dialogue (“patter”, I would call it), and Oikawa-sensei is very good with sight gags (and knows never to step on his punch lines).  The production values certainly aren’t anything special but good framing and cinematography can make up for that to a certain extent.

Beyond that, Hinamatsuri gets problematic, at least for me.  Anime seems to have an obsession with yakuza (like Nazis) lately, and I for one don’t especially love to see people like this portrayed in a sympathetic light.  And of course, it’s a given among givens that anime is obsessed with cute 12 year-old girls.  I’m not saying Hinamatsuri can’t win me over simply with charm and humor, but that’s a fairly high bar – I’d like to see some sort of honest attempt to frame this silliness in a way that at least makes sense.  Just because that didn’t happen in the premiere doesn’t mean it won’t happen – maybe we just need to be patient for a bit.  But with only 12 episodes to adapt a fairly massive catalog of source material, be prepared for an eventual non-ending.