Fantasy stories are stories that contain a fantastic assumption - some fable that has to be accepted as-is, while every other element in the story maybe far from fantasy. 'Dracula' assumes there are vampires. 'Star trek' assumes there are spaceships with warp function. What does 'Honzuki' assume? That a college graduate from Japan founds herself in another world confined in a body of a 5-year-old girl? Nope. The fantastic assumption of 'Honzuki' is that right after she gets up from bed, she begins her attempts to produce books. No acclimatization, no after-death shock, no troubles with establishing relations with people around her. The only problem of the new world is the absence of books.
'Another world', an 'isekai', should be either extremely fascinating, impressing enough to make the viewers forget all their possible questions, or stop pretending to be serious. It's all very nice that Main makes commercial deals, but while everyone around calls her a weirdo who behaves as if she's much older, in fact the problem lies not in her, but in almost all children around her, and nobody seems to notice it. I'm sure children were helping parents from a very young age in Medieval Europe, but I'm also sure they were children, and that they didn't make any philosophic conclusions like chibi characters in 'Honzuki'. At the same time, Main behaves like a real child with no trace of her former 20-something-year-old self, despite the fact she remembers how to produce things.
So I've been watching anime for something close to 20 years. And my parents have had enough chances to have a look at what I watch. And 'Honzuki', I must tell you, is one of the few anime series that my mother asked 'Is this an anime for children?' about. She also praised voice acting. And what this means is simply this: that the voice actors speak in a manner easy to comprehend, so that even my mother, a foreigner with no knowledge of Japanese, can hear where one word ends and another starts, can guess the moods of characters based on their intonation, and can understand that the speech is clear. In other words... this IS an anime for children. I mean, it's not supposed to be, but it surely looks like one.
Only after my mother said this I realised what bothers me so much in 'Honzuki'. Despite getting a rating of PG-13 for some serious topics and some violence such as killing a pig, 'Honzuki' is a children's fairy-tale-cum-textbook. It's no wonder Shou Hayami with his low voice narrates the beginning of every chapter like a local Drosselmeyer. Every character explains their actions and Main herself comments on everything she does. Older characters constantly remind her what she needs to do being a daughter / a merchant / a noble. Sit down and write down, children, this is the role model for you.
Sometimes there comes in a person into the anime studio who exclaims 'But this is a drama!'. Then the staff rush to make it dramatic. They add touching moments of Main suddenly remembering that she hails from another world... Twice in 3 years, huh?
Soon season 3 will come out and it looks like it may be far from the last. But I'm sure the ending of this story is like this: they lived happily ever after. What a pity I don't give a damn about it. I only give it the 3 out of 10 it deserves for the few funny moments there were.
Now that I think of it... I didn't even make a single screenshot of this series. I guess, this is as much as there was to capture.
