Category: Mouryou no Hako

Short Synopsis: Not just heads get cut off in this series.
Highlights: Awesome use of different camera-angles.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Those creators really are out to get me with their incredibly complicated dialogue. Heck, the website even refuses to list the name of the different characters in anything else but Kanji, making it even more difficult to try and put combine the names with the different faces, especially since half the cast doesn’t seem to be introduced yet (Yoriko has a sister?).

So, the beginning of this episode shows the main character with glasses, apparently Tatsumi Sekiguchi is his name, as he’s just cut up several bodies, commenting on how he just can’t get them right. Later in the episode, we see him again, showing a novel he’s writing. We don’t know whether his “failure” refers to his novel, where the cut-up body was just a visual metaphor, or whether he really does have a secret. Yoriko’s sister Kimie is apparently much older than she looks on the official website, and my guess is that she works for the ones who plan to publish Sekiguchi’s novel.

And at the same time, we see Kanako in a strange bed as she’s lost all of her limbs. There is someone who watches her, who I suspect to be the guy with glasses who left a bit earlier and whose name was Noritada Amemiya, I think. Later, strange limbs are found all over the country, but the DON’T belong to Kanako. The detective acts shocked, while the chief policeman in charge (at least, that’s what I thought their roles were) doesn’t act surprised. Suzaki (the most important doctor) then gets killed (probably to make sure that he doesn’t find any weird stuff) and the biggest enemy of Yoko is the detective Kiba. Yoko in some way has a very big role in this, but what exactly is it? For some reason, she also completely flipped once she found out that Suzaki was dead.

Then, a random teenaged girl gets kidnapped, cut up and stuffed into a box, I’m not sure who the guy was who did that. What I guess are a few months later, a new detective contacts Kiba, probably to team up with him, and he tells him about the four limbs that were found, and even though htey weren’t Kanako’s, he believes the two cases to be related. He seems to think that Sekiguchi is the victim, and the night he ran into them in the hospital wasn’t a coincidence, it seems. I wish I could remember who those others were who were with him in the car.

He points Kiba to some guy that Yoko got affiliated with when she was still an actress. Minami Kinuko, could that possibly be her stage name? It doesn’t appear anywhere on the list of names for this series. This is where Amemiya pops up again, apparently he was the one who forced Yoko to retire from her job as an actress. The guy also tells him about a certain doctor “Amakasu”, who is trying something like the doctor Frankenstein: he’s trying to create the perfect soldier that won’t die, explaining why in this series bodies have to be cut up.

What really strikes me so far is that this is a 13-episodes, and yet two of the five main characters haven’t felt like main characters at all (they only popped up once or twice) and two haven’t even appeared yet! I’m really curious to see what this series is going to turn into once it hits its second half, but so far I’m already loving every second of this. I’m in for lots of convolution once in a while, and this series is exactly what my inner mystery-fanboy needs.

It’s also interesting that this series shows the power that still frames can have. Especially that sequence in the beginning: it just consisted out of about ten drawings, there was no movement, and yet it perfectly showed what was going on, it looked excellent, and it set the mood. Madhouse really is an excellent studio when it comes to proving that you don’t need the budget of a small country to make a series look beautiful. You can easily try to save budget by simplified drawings (á la Kaiba) with lots of motion, or go Shigurui and have very detailed drawings with hardly any motion, but as long as you put enough thought into the artistic direction, you can make anything look good this way. This is exactly why I’m a big fan of series that experiment a bit with their graphics. It looks much more interesting than the straightforward drawings that just go with predictable poses and camera-angles.

Short Synopsis: Yoriko calms down a bit and contacts the detective again.
Highlights: Too many to just list here.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (excellent)
With this episode I’m convinced: Mouryou no Hako is going to be THE hit of the Autumn 2008-season. It’s already a very good season, but none of the new shows matches up to it, and in three episodes it accomplished what usually takes three times that length. I’m already engrossed with the characters so far. At first, I was a bit worried about the short airtime, but this series has definitely shown that it knows how to tell a story. The director hasn’t directed a series before, but he’s definitely shown so far that he knows what he’s talking about.

As usual, my Japanese isn’t perfect so I might have missed certain parts (especially that letter that was sent to Yoko. But it seems that the episode starts with Kanako, being brought to a strange hospital that might be able to save her. The detective, Yoko and the guy with glasses whose name I can’t seem to find accompany her. Meanwhile, we get some flashbacks about Shuutarou’s past, when he was still involved with that war that’s still giving him nightmares.

What caught my attention is that there’s a surprising amount of police guards around the place when Shuutarou comes back a few days later. It seems that the explanation for that is that strange letter that Yoko received, though unfortunately my Kanji’s pretty much crappy. What I understood was that someone’s after Kanako. The entire hospital is pretty much strange and unconventional, looking more like some sort of military base. Joshino Suzaki seems to be the most talented doctor around the place.

Yoriko meanwhile has her own problems after wishing her mother do die, while caught up in her emotions. After that, her mother started seeing spirits (Mouryou), and even hires a priest to get rid of them. After that part has calmed down a bit, she remembers how Kanako had some sort of boyfriend. She contacts Shuutarou (who right before that moment sees Kanako’s acquaintance with glasses, who disappears right afterwards). This boyfriend could quite possibly be the one who sent the threat letter.

Yoriko is then brought to see Kanako, who seems to have regained consciousness. It’s faint, but she can recognize her (although the room in which she’s stored is really creepy. What kind of hospital is that anyway?), and she tries to talk to her, but sound doesn’t come out. Yoriko is removed to give Kanako some more rest, but apparently, one of the main detectives in the hospital can lip-read, and it seems that Kanako said something pretty disturbing. When two doctors come to examine her afterwards, Kanako somehow disappears and turns to stone, with two butterflies flying above her bed.

So, there are three people in here that definitely have something to hide: Kanako, her boyfriend and the guy with glasses. I think the latter is merely obsessed and confused with everything that happened, but that boyfriend could possibly form the key to a lot of the mysteries that happened. Although there’s also the matter of Kanako’s body simply disappearing. I think that her boyfriend was the one who introduced Kanako to these strange beliefs, of wanting to ascend to heaven.

I just want to ask one thing: whose idea was it to do with CG? The art in this series is absolutely amazing, and yet there ugly CG-trucks ruin the entire mood. Can’t these people just stick to ordinary drawings or something? CG-trucks are something you’d expect from Gonzo, not from Madhouse.

What also seems strange for this series is that the manga has only been running since past December, and there are only two volumes complete at this point. Will there be enough material to fill this series, and will there be a second season once the manga gets ahead enough? But then again, this is Madhouse, not Studio Deen, and they very rarely go for sequels if they can also go for new concepts. In a way, that’s also admirable, to see that the studio continues to seek out new and fresh concepts instead of milking its own cash-cows, but in this case it remains a pity to see this series end so soon.

Short Synopsis: Kanako’s family and relatives rush over to check whether she’s okay.
Highlights: I really hope that rumour of 13 episodes is wrong.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Okay, so it was pretty obvious that I was going to blog this series. As for the ones I’m not going to blog:
– Vampire Knight Guilty: no way.
– Ga-Rei Zero has been very good so far, but the schoolgirls who are all awesome at handling swords still give me a few doubts here and there.
– Skip Beat is awesome. If some of the shows I’m planning to blog turn out to be disappointing, I’m probably going to pick that one up.
– Macademi Wasshoi at least didn’t lose as much inspiration as the rest of the shounen-comedies did in their second episodes, but I still don’t see much future for those perverted teachers.
– Oh, and I think that this is also a good point to note that I’ve finally managed to use this season as an excuse to stop watching Soul Eater. I don’t want to continue wasting my time on it if there are so many better series this season. I really think that it would have been better as a 39-episode series, because it’s taking way too long. Instead of filling up its extra time with cute slice-of-life moments, the creators decided to go with pointless exposition and dragged-on fight scenes to fill up their extra time.

There’s a LOT to like about Mouryou no Hako, and it’s at least my favourite new series of the season. It’s one of these very rare series that only pop up about half a year, that try to beyond the usual genres (Real Drive was this in the previous half year). While it’s technically a mystery-horror, it doesn’t feel anything like the other mystery-horror series I’ve seen so far. It’s got a bit of Shoujo-ai here and a bit of humour there. It’s got a story that saves its cards and doesn’t play all of its trumps at the first episode, and STILL it had one of the best starts of the season.

The second episode was much less dramatic than the first, probably because the focus shifted from teenagers to adults. It starts out as a basic aftermath, but soon continues to progress the overall plot like crazy, introducing important relative after the other that seem to suggest that there’s more to Kanako’s suicide attempt than we might think. Especially since a famous actress ran all the way from her busy schedule.

Another thing is this series’ subtle characterization. This series uses a lot of subtle non-verbal communication to flesh out its characters, like the incompetent policeman that worked on the lead policeman’s nerves, or his fascination with that lead actress. The subtle hints that suggested that the actress is hiding something.

And then there are those heads in boxes. I finally read the premise of this series, and it turns out that it’s all one big murder mystery around a bizarre serial murderer, and here this series starts with a seemingly unrelated suicide attempt. What’s the link between these two, and why did the creators decide to open the series with this?

The characters also look great. This is what happens if you combine Madhouse, Clamp and the character-designer of Simoun. They all seem to fit. I’m not sure what went wrong with Clamp when they designed the characters from Code Geass, but this series shows that they can also go for a much more down-to-earth style. They’re very versatile indeed.

(oh, and *note to self: Mouryou no Hako + Horrible Raws = bad idea. It’s not the lower quality, but those overly sugary Japanese commercials that keep interrupting it DO NOT FIT the overall mode of this series AT ALL*).