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Kara no Kyoukai
Sep. 15th, 2011 12:55 pmSo I finally finished the damn thing and can make my report on Kara no Kyoukai: The Garden of Sinners.
This anime comes in the form of seven movies, following the adventures of Ryougi Shiki, a stone-faced kimono-clad badass whose magic eyes show her how to kill anything, and Kokutou Mikiya, whom you've already met and whom we're supposed to take as clean-cut and lovable although he pursues Shiki in a manner that's frankly stupid and creepy (meanwhile every other character in his age range falls in love with him for no good reason).
My long-ago very first reaction to this series still holds; a flashy surface and shock value are the main things it has going for it. If you tune in, expect gallons of pressurized blood and gore (at times to the point of ridiculousness; in the second movie there's a scene where a decapitated corpse sits there spraying like a firehose for minutes on end), plus the third movie revolves around a rape scene, the seventh comes just about close enough to one, and tamer fetish fuel is sprinkled throughout. The "ideas" it tries to put over through that are mostly nonsense. One aspect I did find interesting is that the first four movies are not arranged chronologically (the order would be movie 1 fourth, 2 first, 3 third, 4 second), and this creates a feeling of mystery and fragmentation that lends a strength to the first three. With the fourth movie, they begin to pull focus and fill in the gaps, but what is revealed ends up not seeming worth the trouble. Movie four is remarkably weak. Five should have been the climax, and it does have its moments, but it left me thinking "all of that... for this?" (its animation was also not up to the series' standard at the worst possible time). Six is closer to form but feels minor, and the finale in seven is tiresome, ridiculous, and manages to be in poor taste even after the foregoing gory and sexual violence.
However, some of the characters have charisma despite everything, and I did find most of it fun to watch. If you're not easily triggered and you're up for a thrill ride, at least the first three might be worth a go.
The standout of the whole thing is still the ending theme from the first movie, Oblivious by Kalafina, which does sound awesome (the video also has clips from the first three movies and will show you the look of them), so I might be tempted to buy some Kalafina albums now; Amazon has MP3s...
(As a PS, that with Oblivious reminds me of another such case from my old anime club days, a movie that was just awful---worse than Kara no Kyoukai---but I had to have the soundtrack because of That One Song. That time the movie was Spriggan and the song was Jing Ling.)
This anime comes in the form of seven movies, following the adventures of Ryougi Shiki, a stone-faced kimono-clad badass whose magic eyes show her how to kill anything, and Kokutou Mikiya, whom you've already met and whom we're supposed to take as clean-cut and lovable although he pursues Shiki in a manner that's frankly stupid and creepy (meanwhile every other character in his age range falls in love with him for no good reason).
My long-ago very first reaction to this series still holds; a flashy surface and shock value are the main things it has going for it. If you tune in, expect gallons of pressurized blood and gore (at times to the point of ridiculousness; in the second movie there's a scene where a decapitated corpse sits there spraying like a firehose for minutes on end), plus the third movie revolves around a rape scene, the seventh comes just about close enough to one, and tamer fetish fuel is sprinkled throughout. The "ideas" it tries to put over through that are mostly nonsense. One aspect I did find interesting is that the first four movies are not arranged chronologically (the order would be movie 1 fourth, 2 first, 3 third, 4 second), and this creates a feeling of mystery and fragmentation that lends a strength to the first three. With the fourth movie, they begin to pull focus and fill in the gaps, but what is revealed ends up not seeming worth the trouble. Movie four is remarkably weak. Five should have been the climax, and it does have its moments, but it left me thinking "all of that... for this?" (its animation was also not up to the series' standard at the worst possible time). Six is closer to form but feels minor, and the finale in seven is tiresome, ridiculous, and manages to be in poor taste even after the foregoing gory and sexual violence.
However, some of the characters have charisma despite everything, and I did find most of it fun to watch. If you're not easily triggered and you're up for a thrill ride, at least the first three might be worth a go.
The standout of the whole thing is still the ending theme from the first movie, Oblivious by Kalafina, which does sound awesome (the video also has clips from the first three movies and will show you the look of them), so I might be tempted to buy some Kalafina albums now; Amazon has MP3s...
(As a PS, that with Oblivious reminds me of another such case from my old anime club days, a movie that was just awful---worse than Kara no Kyoukai---but I had to have the soundtrack because of That One Song. That time the movie was Spriggan and the song was Jing Ling.)
