“Did we keep you waiting?”

Tanabata, also sometimes called “the star festival,” is an annual celebration in which people write wishes on strips of paper and tie them to bamboo branches in hopes that they’ll come true. So if anyone out there wrote “I wish there was a new Haruhi Suzumiya song,” this year, guess what? Your Tanabata wish came true!

Yes, Haruhi and her SOS Brigade buddies are back with a band-new song and dance, one that starts off with the lyrics “Matasechatta? Iku wa yo !”/”Did we keep you waiting? Here we go!”

They really have kept us waiting, as it’s now been more than 14 years since the final episode of the second, and so far last, season of the phenomenally popular The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya anime aired. The timing of the new video’s release, though, has more to do with the first episode in Season 2, “Bamboo Lead Rhapsody,” which takes place on Tanabata.

For the new song Mutekiteki Happiness (meaning “Invincible Happiness”), they’ve gotten the band back together in multiple senses of the phrase. Not only do Haurhi, Kyon, Yuki, Mikuru, and Itsuki all reunite for the video, so too do their voice actresses/actors, Aya Hirano, Tomokazu Sugita, Minori Chihara, Yuko Goto, and Daisuke Ono, who provide the song’s vocals.

Aside from the voices, if the song’s high-energy composition and snappy lyrical style have also got your nostalgia engine’s cylinders firing, that’s probably because those are the works of Aki Hata and Tomokazu Tashiro, the duo that was always behind “Hare Hare Yukai,” The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’s ending theme that was almost as big a deal as the anime series itself.

But while the audio is definitely a cheerful salute to what fans have known and loved, there’s a new wrinkle to the visuals, which are CG.

Depending on how strongly you feel about CG anime in general, and how attached you are to the hand-drawn Kyoto Animation-produced artwork of the Haruhi TV series and theatrical feature, that could make this new music video a bit of a monkey’s paw as far as Tanabata wishes go. Still, online reactions so far are very positive, with fans clearly just happy to have Haruhi and the gang back, leaving comments such as:

“They did it…they brought Haruhi back!”
“What an awesome Tanabata surprise!”
“Now they’ve gotta make a Season 3!”
“Now I’ve gotta learn this dance!”
“Tanabata is a magical day.”
“Thank you to everyone who wished for this.”
“I never dreamed I’d be able to see a new Haruhi music video in this day and age.”
“Even in the Reiwa era, the SOS Brigade is still here!”
“Haruhi songs are always so positive and energy-boosting. Thank you for the awesome new one.”

It’s probably still a little too early to take this as undeniable evidence that the long-awaited Season 3 is on the way, since “Mutekiteki Happiness” was produced following a successful crowdfunding campaign for a new Haruhi song and music video, so right now the only thing we can say with 100-percent certainty is that the full-length version of the video is scheduled to be released on July 28. Still, with rights holder Kadokawa seeing how much joy even a minute-and-a-half video is producing, odds are at least someone at the company is thinking about how much even bigger the reaction would be for some new Haruhi anime episodes.

Source: YouTube/Anitune, YouTube/KADOKAWAanime, Twitter/@haruhi_official, Denfaminico Gamer
Images: YouTube/Anitune
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