Oooh! It’s really been a long while ago since we’ve seen such an episode, I was afraid that anime creators had given up on them and were too afraid to put them in. This was certainly a pleasant surprise here, because simply labelling this as an “epilogue” doesn’t do justice to what it actually is.
So basically, this episode was nothing but Shiki and Mikiya talking, nothing more. It was entirely set in one place: a lone road with in the background the people of Ufo Table having a contest to see how many snowflakes they could put on one single screen at the same time. Now imagine that for half an hour.
It’s here where you can really see Kinoko Nasu’s unique writing style. Many of you probably know that I love these kinds of “lots of talking” stories, and the excellent writing of this one, plus the extremely calm atmosphere make this epilogue definitely worth watching if you’re into that stuff. If you watched Kara no Kyoukai for the actions and graphics though, then you can give it a pass.
I really liked how this gave a complete new insight into Shiki, and this OVA is pretty much entirely dedicated to this. Because the creators let Shiki (or whatever you’d like to call the entity that was there) talk so uninterruptedly, it gave a lot of depth to her character and that made this episode so much more than just someone reading a boring essay.
Overall, at first I wasn’t too fond of Kara no Kyoukai when it first started. Looking back now though, I really love what it did. Not only did it create a full story, nicely closed off with this epilogue. That’s of course great, but what’s also great to see is the influence it had: it came with a really bold idea: to create a series of movies of which pretty much nobody knew whether it would work well or not. It worked really well, and the result? It opened up a whole new market for for example the Mardock Scramble, Votoms and Berserk movies. Kara no Kyoukai has some excellent writing, but even without that: if this series was never made, those three also probably would not have gotten green-lighted.
OVA Episode Rating: 8,5/10
I’m usually okay with dialogue heavy scenes, but this episode really tested my patience with how Shiki and Mikiya kept talking in circles. Really hard to digest all the info at first watch. I’ll let it simmer for a bit before I watch this one more time.
For me this was the most interesting part of the whole series (along with movie 4 maybe).
But I’m still a bit disappointed with the mystery aspect of the series. A lot of things are left hanging, although this epilogue did help.
I think your conclusion about the influence of this on other properties is rather bold and not exactly supported by the facts, but otherwise…yes, the epilogue was a pretty good way to close off this story for good.
I would disagree about the movie series being a kind of risky project… TYPE-MOON were already extremely popular before these movies were produced and the same goes for Kara no Kyoukai itself since it’s always described as a turning point of… well, however you want to translate 伝奇小説. I mean the current state of Japanaese juvenlie fantastic/adventure novels. It would have been adapted either way and of course I was surprised how they actually decided to make an entire movie series of one weighty novel, but on the other hand considering the team’s and the work’s popularity I wouldn’t call it that groundbreaking.
@gandalf
That’s quite surprising. For me, the 30 minutes just flew by. I thought this was absolutely fantastic. I am still entranced by all of the very interesting and fascinating ideas they proposed there. What an amazing epilogue to a stunning series!