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Ouran High School Host Club
 Home/Change Series
This series is based on a manga by Bisco Hatori that ran from September 2002 to November 2010. It focuses on Haruhi Fujioka, a young girl from a lower-class family who gains access to a prestigious private academy through her scholarship. Due to her boyish appearance, the members of the “Host Club” (a kind of escort service for upper-class female students) accept her as a fellow male. They soon discern the truth and learn to accept it, and Haruhi for her part finds the job of hosting their female “clients” surprisingly easy for her. In the process, the series inverts and satirizes many of the conventions of shoujo/bishonen manga/anime.
The anime adaptation was one of Bones’s many big successes. It ran in 26 episodes in 2006, directed by Takuya Igarashi, who had previously worked extensively on the Sailor Moon franchise, including being overall series director for the Sailor Stars season. Character design and overall animation direction was provided by Kumiko Takahashi, best known as chief AD for the Cardcaptor Sakura franchise. And the animation directors of individual episodes were often artists of equal prominence, making this a series of outstanding graphic quality.
Sadly, the series was popular enough that sketch sets were routinely broken up and sold as individual sketches, sometimes douga-by-douga. The lots that I’ve obtained so far may be the remains of such break-ups and consist only of the rough and timing sheet, with maybe a random douga or layout. However, for me the rough is often the most precious item in such sets, as it was usually executed by the episode’s animation director. In any case, it is pleasant to open this gallery with a set of vivid, dramatic images.
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8.82/10 
9.47/10
9.03/10 
84 votes