Set in Taisho-era Japan, Miss Benio Hanamura is a motherless, modern girl who chafes at learning feminine skills in finishing school and who would much rather be riding her bike, practicing swordplay, and generally getting her next-door neighbor Ranmaru into trouble. In fact, Benio considers herself to be such a modern woman that she’s not even sure she’ll get married. Maybe she’ll become a doctor or something else instead!
Which of course means that our “Miss Modern” (“Haikara-san”) has already been in an arranged marriage before she was even born and her father believes that now is the time to introduce her to her betrothed, the half-German army officer Shinobu Ijuin. Unlike Benio, Ijuin has grown up hearing stories of how the Hanamuras and Ijuins promised a few generations back to join their families as soon as they could and he is perfectly happy to uphold this promise, and he also has hopes that firecracker Benio will help shake up the stuffy complacency that his family has fallen into. But Benio has no such plans! Her own plan is to be such a bad fiancée that the Ijuins will have no choice but to kick her out!
Such is the basic set-up for Haikara-San: Here Comes Miss Modern, but this 97 minute film covers much more than that. Adapting the 1970s, eight volume shojo manga of the same name, Miss Modern may have an updated, modern if you will, art style, but it is filled with situational gags, some visual stylings, and enough melodrama to reveal its 40-year-old roots. A viewer might miss these things however as they try to keep up with the frankly frantic speed of the movie. I don’t know how many of those eight volumes were adapted in this first (of two) film but I can say that it was too much material! The story crashes through half a dozen subplots, careens through multiple arcs, and rarely do the consequences of any action last for longer than ten minutes.
Truly, there were at least three different places where I thought the story could have ended, not including the actual ending to this film! I personally would have cut the last 15-20 minutes out of this film and made it the start of the second film. It would allow it to also begin on a new chapter of Benio’s life (mirroring the start of this film), but I imagine the decision was made to cut the story where they did for maximum melodrama. I couldn’t tell if the melodrama was being undercut or heightened by the story galloping through events, although possibly it did both, and I can see why the original anime adaptation of the manga required 42 episodes.
At the very least, this story needs something more along the lines of 13, half-hour episodes rather than the three to four hours of movie that it will end up having, because this fast pace really was quite distracting. Being unfamiliar with the original manga, I can’t say what I wish the staff here had cut but I do wish they had cut something and just let the story breathe a little more, like the way other anime movies created in 2017 do. Haikara-San feels like a film from another time, not because of the story, but because of the tropes, pacing, and plots. This might make it a stranger film than the modern viewer expects to see.