The sixth Kara no Kyoukai movie is called “Oblivion Recorder”. Unlike the fifth movie, it only takes up an hour of airtime, and tells about another supernatural mystery case in which Shiki becomes involved. While it doesn’t match the standard that was set by the movies 3, 4 and 5, it nevertheless is a nice little movie.
In this movie, we learn that Mikiya has a younger sister. This movie shows her, as she tries to solve a murder mystery that took place in her school, helped by Shiki. The storyline this time is simple but effective, and there’s a nice layered mystery behind a seemingly straight-forward murder. The build-up is pretty well done, and overall this makes for an enjoyable movie.
Where this movie fails to live up to in comparison to its predecessors is that its scenario and execution lack polish. Mikiya’s sister turns out to be yet another girl with a brother complex. I dunno, I think that the creators tried to appeal to taboos, but that doesn’t really work when this trope is already used by tons of other anime. And overall, as much as I appreciate that we got to know more about Mikiya this way, as a main character for a KnK movie, she fails to stand out and is among the least interesting ones.
On top of that, the dialogue also feels rushed and uninspired for a movie. There are a number of conversations that clearly lack a bit of polish here and there, and there are quite a few plot-holes left open at the end of it, most of which I don’t think are going to be answered by the seventh movie. This movie simply doesn’t have the deep characters nor the addictive storytelling of the third, fourth and fifth movie.
What it does have, however, is the best CG during an action scene out of the six movies so far. Mikiya’s sister’s magic is very flashy and the creators make really good use of it during the action scenes. As a standalone movie Oblivion Recorder would have been fine, but the standards of the Kara no Kyoukai movies so far have become higher than average after all.
| Storytelling: | 7/10 |
| Characters: | 7/10 |
| Production-Values: | 9/10 |
| Setting: | 8/10 |
Agreed. The fight scene looked pretty damned awesome, but Asaka was kinda annoying. I felt that it was kind of obvious too, and compared to the interesting and developing plot from the previous movie, this movie felt uninspired and too straightforward. I dunno about the dialogue though; didn’t really notice anything about that.
I read a summary of the corresponding chapter in the novel and there the whole plot was much more interesting. This wouldn’t be so surprising since novels and/or original material in general is more extensive in almost any case but strangely when I read summaries of the other parts of the novel I didn’t notice any significant differences while oblivion recorder seems to have suffered quite an amount of adaption decay. They either left stuff out or even changed some aspects completely and I don’t understand why since they would have had enough time to flesh out everything just as in the other movies. So all in all I was quite disappointed with the 6th movie as well.
The Taboo thing is one of Nasu’s trademarks in story telling. It appears in all his works and as kara no kyoukai was his first work its been quite interesting to see the templates for characters appearing in his later works.
Well, she was adopted so it’s more like a cousin complex but still… guess they are trying to cover all their bases.
Pretty sweet fight at the end though. Not the best of the movies but still enjoyable.
I liked thew whole non-chronological story line until this this one. I was really hoping they would follow up on the last movie. I agree with your score and everything. For me the 2nd movie is still the best(I loved the 2nd movie).
While it might not have been the best KnK movie, I thought it was rather good. The introduction of Azaka along with the personality she brought was a fresh breath of air for the series.
I haven’t read the novel so I can’t compare it to the movie. However, now I’m interested in doing so. ^^
The action scene in the end was epic with high quality CG. They need to put more action scenes or make them longer!
wasnt azaka introduced as mikiya’s little sister in the earlier movies?
“we learn that Mikiya has a younger sister.” LEARN? She was in the first five movies! Pay attention!
Nice to see someone who really knows their subject. Good work on this.