Category: Finished Series: Horror

Before, I criticized this show for not having very impressive animation for PA Works’ standards. And then that dream sequence came. Talk about fluid animation here. Overall, it’s clear that after Blood-C, Tsutomu Mizushima really saw the light. Here too the visuals just don’t shy away from the hard-to-animate gore at all, for the scenes where normally the camera would just pan away.

The mystery is also really on track here. On the background, you can really feel the evergrowing presence of that ghost student who keeps picking off dead people. The second half of this series is also going to be very different, now that Misaki is actually no longer ignored by her fellow student, with the plan having failed and all. It’s a good way for the show to evolve.

The challenge for this series was to keep its audience in its atmosphere, even during the building up scenes. For me, it succeeded. I’ve really been caught up in it and even though the start of the show tried a little too hard with the dolls and all, the quiet parts of this series didn’t feel boring at all. This time it’s due to both the interesting characters, and the very solid build-up of atmosphere.

With this, it’ll be up to this series to actually make use of the build-up, and make things come together, and it’s there where the tricky part will start. Bring in enough creative twists that will force the characters to develop themselves, and make the revelation of the real ghost have some real impact. A beach episode isn’t really the right way to do that!
Rating: ** (Excellent)

You know what? Everyone keeps praising Ano Natsu for its down to earth romance, but with this, I think that Another has beaten it. Especially after Ano Natsu came with that awful sixth episode.

A large part of this episode just showed Mei and Kouichi casually talk to each other and about themselves, and surprisingly it felt really natural. There were no cliches like shyness or random fanservice, and for once the creators actually allowed them to talk. And holy crap. I just realized how not often such a thing happens: long conversations between love interests. There were also these small scenes of them looking at each other that were neat touches. The only thing that stood out as weird was that dance scene, but even there: I am so glad that for once the creators went with an original fantasy. Most of the time they just stick to males sparkling, and females undressing.

The second half fleshed out the basic premise of this series more. It’s interesting how there is one guy who pretty much has been with the mystery from the start, and also doesn’t really have anything to hide. Instead, the creators used this artificial amnesia to create most of the mystery after this point: traces of the ghost that it’s trying to hide in order to stay unnoticed. It’s in any case established that the death of Kouichi’s mother was something special. In the meantime though, we have a teacher going crazy.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

I didn’t expect the answers for everything to come up this early in the series. This episode was where this show said “okay, that’s enough building up, time to explain why everyone is acting so weird”. And I must say, I like the story that’s behind this a lot here.

This puts the first episodes in an interesting perspective: we were lead, along with the main character, to believe that Mei was some sort of ghost. Instead, she was only treated as a ghost by the students of class 3. On top of that, the real ghost is one of the other students of the class, just nobody knows who.

That also has a very interesting effect that I applauded this series for: there are no copy-paste students in that class. Everyone here feels like a proper classmate, there just are a bunch of them who don’t talk to the main character. This doesn’t have the usual anime syndrome where some characters have obviously better character designs or something. The only exception of this being Mei, who just looks too moe compared to the rest of them (I was quite surprised when I saw how much she changed compared to her designs of the original source material).

What’s also surprising is that my criticism of the first two episodes (it’s trying too hard!) are much less noticeable right now. I mean, during art class, episode 2 had people draw things like the scream, and the random doll shots that appeared for no reason whatsoever. In this episode, everyone was acting very naturally. It’s like the creators were afraid that these first two episodes weren’t interesting enough to hold people’s attention, so they threw those random things in there or something. Personally, I use completely different criteria to determine if something is worth my time. In particular I look at the execution and acting, which were perfectly fine and would have been even better with those obnoxious distractions.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

You know, this series reminds me a lot of Ookamikakushi, but well executed. This series pretty much is what I hoped that series to be. And within four episodes, it also has pretty much surpassed Ookamikakushi in every aspect. In particular the cast of characters is a lot better here.

The lead character… he actually doesn’t just passively do nothing, or act stupid like a wimp. He’s actually trying to find out what is going on, while at the same time he’s not the other side of the spectrum of being way too damn impulsive. What mostly sets this one apart is the dialogue, though. You can definitely see that this is coming from something other than a manga adaptation. It actually feels pretty natural here.

Also, I wonder how it must be marathoning this series in one go. It’s probably a completely different experience. The cliff-hangers in this series don’t give me the feeling of “must… know… what… happens next…”, but the shock factor nevertheless works really well. It will be pretty hard to eventually explain (aside from that the ghost wants to make the lead character’s life completely miserable), but I like the direction so far nonetheless.
Rating: * (Good)

Yeah. You can really see that the director of Blood-C is working on this thing.

The animation may not be as good here, and it also doesn’t necessarily have the same style of characterization, but this episode really showed: the horror is uncompromising. Censorship is for wimps and when someone dies, it is in full graphic detail.

The execution in this episode was also quite a bit better here. The thing with this show is that the animation isn’t really impressive. But if the animators need to animate something well, they do it. The dolls completely disappeared after the first half of this episode. And meanwhile, the doll shots in the shop were actually put in context. The rest of the episode made use of a few interesting cuts or camera angles that worked much better. As for the final climax… I’m a bit iffy on the use of music: that could have been better used, but it was such an over the top death that I can’t really think of a track that would have fitted such a scene better.

The classmates in this episode also surprised me by not being annoying. It’s very tempting to just throw in the usual annoying classmates to make the lead character look normal, however this show doesn’t really need to. Things are strange enough for the main character to stand out, so they can actually make for some rather down to earth characters. In particular the dialogue between them was the best so far.

And yeah, the atmosphere in this show works quite well. I really hope that the creators can keep this up for the rest of the series.
Rating: ** (Excellent)