Making a successful romance anime is a big task, especially in the Shonen genre. There are very few romantic anime series that have earned fame and recognition in the Shonen world, and Horimiya is one of them. Horimiya is based on the popular manga Hori-san to Miyamura-kun created by Hiroki Adachi in 2007.
Although the Horimiya manga was serialized in 2011, it got an anime adaptation in 2021 and was directed by Masashi Ishihama. Ishihama is a big name in the anime industry, as he has worked on many prominent projects like Bleach, Dragon Ball, Beelzebub, Spy x Family, etc. However, Horimiya is special to him because he was the director of the series.
Ishihama once revealed he was quite confused while working on the anime series because of one major factor. This factor was the time difference between the manga’s serialization and the anime’s production. Because of this time discrepancy, many elements of the manga’s original plot seemed irrelevant in the anime.
The Difference in Information Between The Manga and Anime
When the anime series finally started, Anime Corner got a chance to interview director Ishihama regarding the different aspects of the show. While talking about the difficulties he faced during the production of the series, Ishihama pointed out that the biggest issues were created by the time difference.
He stated:
There did not lie any difficulties. The first point that I was concerned about was the age difference; the source material’s serialization started in 2011, and the gap involves a great deal of change in the times there. The speed of information is different in the school life of the age when smartphones were not widespread than it is today.
However, if I did try to fit it in the present world, it would no longer be “Horimiya” and it was obvious that it would lose the charm of the original story.
Ishihama struggled a lot with the time difference and couldn’t decide whether to make it according to the current scenario or base it according to the manga’s timeline.
In the end, he felt like changing the story to the present would make Horimiya lose its charming qualities. Thus, he decided to go with the original timeline from the story. This backfired as the series involved many aspects that became redundant to the current audience.
Masashi Ishihama Had To Visualize Every Aspect of Horimiya
While talking about the time discrepancies with Horimiya, Ishihama pointed out that once he decided to go with the original timeline, things became a lot easier for him. He just visualized every aspect of the anime according to the original story and let it flow.
Ishihama stated:
Therefore, it made me think that I would just have to visualize every single thing according to the original work. It made me think that I would not find anything difficult to make a decision every time. When I reached that point, I came to the conclusion, I said at the beginning, that there were no difficulties. You could say that “Horimiya” is a manga that is quite easy to adapt into visuals.
According to Ishihama, Horimiya was quite easy to adapt for him and it was majorly because of the people who worked on the original piece. He didn’t have to focus much on direction because everything went much more easily than he thought.
While the anime came out in 2021, the series also got another adaptation in 2023 called Horimiya: The Missing Pieces, that was created to fill in the left out details from the original manga.
Horimiya is available to watch on Crunchyroll.
