Shiki

Shiki had such an awesome premise, however, from my perspective it fails to do that premise any justice. I will try my best to give a feel for the story, spoiler free of course. The story and artwork just weren't my cup of tea, but I understand some might enjoy this type of story / cast so I will attempt to avoid outright trolling. STORY I was very disappointed in the story for a lot of reasons. It progresses painfully slow, and the character development eventually drops just about everyone in the 'gray area' between good and bad. So basically by the time the climax comesaround you have nobody to root for. You don't care if any of the main characters survive, shiki or human. ART / SOUND This is what ruined it for me. I probably would have enjoyed the story more if the art wasn't so ridiculous. The hair on some of the characters...the hair. It's like Super Saiyans on crack. Gravity defiant, logic defying hair that makes the living humans look undead even though they're still alive. The elderly and even some of the young characters (Masao in particular) look hideous right from the start. It's not scary, in my opinion it's just unpleasant to look at. There's not much to say about the Sound. It didn't really leave an impression. The sound effects weren't always used the best way (I.E. Excessive cracking noises coming from a Shiki that is barely moving it's neck) CHARACTERS A lot of the characters are so incessantly obnoxious to the point where you want them to die. Then they die. Then you realize crap this is Shiki, I have to wait for them to die a second time before I'm through with their BS. Even the characters you like in the beginning betray those good qualities by the middle / end. One more thing, chain smoking doctors aren't cool. You're supposed to be a doctor dammit, save those cigarettes for us non-doctors. CONCLUSION Shiki failed to live up to my expectations. I feel like Shiki never intended to give you a likeable cast. The point of the story is to submerge you in moral ambiguity with a bunch of mediocre characters and slow moving plot. Most likely the goal was to have the viewer ask him or herself in the aftermath of the climax "What was (morally) good? What was bad? Was anybody really in the right?". It's left up to the viewer to decide without the anime deciding which side was 'right' for you. Unfortunately, at least in my case, by the time I got to that point I didn't really care enough about the story, the characters, or the ending to think too hard about it.

Something strange has been going on in the quaint village of Sotoba... Ever since those wealthy outsiders built their lavish mansion at the top of Kanemasa Hill, there has been a succession of mysterious deaths... People of all ages will become lethargic and anti-social, refuse to go to the doctor, and then die after only a few days... Could it be an epidemic? Some new disease? And are the rumors true that the dead are still walking around? Those newcomers are certainly strange, and Sotoba does have ancient legends about Okomiyagi, or the dead coming back to life...But those are just stories, right? Based on a series of novels from 1998, Shiki tells the story of an entire rural Japanese community as it deals with one mysterious death after another, slowly whittling their population down as their efforts to explain it... And hopefully put a stop to it... yield no results, no answers, and an ever diminishing sense of hope. It isn’t until a few open-minded individuals start to consider the supernatural that they finally begin to make some real progress... Unfortunately for them, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. With a cast of hundreds like this show has, it’s essential that you set aside a special handful of characters for the audience to follow, so we can explore the story from several different perspectives. Shiki has this requirement covered, as it gives us three very different pairs of eyes to look through. First, we have Natsuno, a disgruntled teenaged boy who’s been forced to move into this village with his new wave, idealistic parents. He despises the village, and refuses to make any long term connections, believing that doing so will make it difficult when they finally move back out. Of course, despite his best efforts, a close circle of friends do form around him. In fact, Megumi... One of the very first people to be killed by the mysterious epidemic... Had an obsessive one sided crush on him... and it seems that even death can’t take her away. Our second leading role is Toshio Ozaki, the director of the primary hospital in Sotoba. Having taken over the clinic from his deceased father, he’s a driven and tenacious doctor who’s initially baffled by the amount of people inexplicably dying around him, and having come up against a challenge like this, he will stop at nothing to overcome it... And I mean nothing, as his quest for a solution leads to him experiencing and performing some of the cruelest acts imaginable. And our final lead is Ozaki’s childhood friend, Seishin Muroi, a local priest and a moderately successful author. His novels tend to be on the poignant side, dealing with subjects like loss, betrayal, and abandonment by God. This attracts the attention of Sunako, the little daughter of the newcomers, who’s apparently a huge fan of his work. He forms a connection with her over time, as his pacifist religious beliefs gradually lead him to develop a sense of sympathy for the beings that his best friend Toshio has sworn to destroy. The rest of the cast is made up of smaller roles, the basic types of people you’d expect to see in a tightly-knit little community... You have business owners, rebellious teenagers, concerned parents, comfortable elders, nurses, teachers, happy go lucky children... All of whom deal with the growing problem in their own unique ways. And for such a large cast, the dub is surprisingly on point. It”s a Funimation effort, but it’s a really odd Funimation effort, where the lead characters are all portrayed by actors that you normally wouldn’t see attached to such high profile roles. Toshio is played by David Wald, a long time actor who’s somehow stayed completely off of my radar until just now. I’m going to have to keep an eye out for him in the future, because he rasps and grumbles his way into the jaded, chain smoking doctor as though he was born to play the part. Seishin Muroi is played by John Burgmeier, a man who rarely ever steps out from the technical side fo a dub for anything other than a bit part... He directs, he writes, but when he acts, his subdued performances are normally outstanding. He plays down-trod, broken men as though it were a second language, and his role in Shiki is probably one of his best voice performances since Gunslinger Girl. Jerry Jewell also does a commendable job on Natsuno Yuuki, and you’ll find pretty much every Funimation voice under the sun sprinkled here and there... Hell, even Anastasia Munoz gets an appearance... but the star of this dub has to be Cherami Leigh, who plays the ominous Sunako, who looks very much like she was taken directly from a Katy Towell cartoon. I wish I could tell you why her performance in this role is so perfect, but to go into detail would mean giving away some serious spoilers. There’s at least one bad egg in the dub, however, and surprise surprise, it’s Tia Ballard. Tia plays the role of Megumi Shimizu, a sixteen year old girl who dreams of getting out of her quaint, suffocating home town and going to a college in the big city. And she will not shut up about it. I know that in anime, non conformists are often portrayed as loud, disruptive nuisances, and they did a very thorough job of it with this character, but when you combine that archetype with tia’s shrill, screechy voice, she single-handedly renders the first episode almost completely unbearable. Thankfully, she only really has a strong presence in this episode. Spoiler... She dies in it. Now, when I tell you that this story is about a small group of protagonists struggling to put a stop to the mysterious deaths happening all around them, with ticking clock being their worst enemy, you may think that concept sounds suspiciously familiar. Well, that’s because you’ve seen this same plot before, as Another and Hell Girl: Two Mirrors have both tried... And failed miserably... at making you care about it. But where those two regrettable shows failed, Shiki succeeds with flying colors. Unlike Another, Shiki doesn’t make over-the-top, ridiculous spectacles of it’s death scenes, choosing instead to focus on word of mouth and the sad faces of relatives, so that it can liberally float between tragedy and statistic depending on the tone that any given death calls for. And unlike Hell Girl Two Mirrors, Shiki paces itself, putting just enough time between each death so that it can drain the hope of the viewer, little by little, as it spirals down towards one hell of a catastrophic ending. And with that manipulation of hope, Shiki is one of the most well executed horror anime titles that I have seen in a long time. There’s almost no filler in it’s entire 24 episode run, as every single event that occurs has a distinct purpose, and is placed exactly where it needs to be in the narrative. The first ten or so episodes are admittedly slow, building up the tension in the village to an almost OCD-like degree. Very few answers are found here, as tragic death after tragic death drives the residents to either blind paranoia or complacent acceptance of fate. By the second half, the nature of this menace has been all but revealed to the audience, even as our three main characters slowly come to terms with a truth they know they shouldn’t accept, and with a terrifying threat that comes to face them almost immediately after they come to face it. It’s a brilliant, gripping story that will have you skipping through the otherwise beautiful openings and closings just so you can catch the next development as quickly as you possibly can. While you may find yourself hard-pressed to experience any emotional reactions through the majority of the story, as death will inevitably become commonplace in this kind of story, there’s enough disturbing, unsettling material in the final act that will not only horrify you, but will also completely subvert your expectations of a horror story. As much as I would love to continue to praise this series, and call it one of the most excellent horror titles i’ve ever seen, I can’t. It’s time to talk about the artwork and animation, and I can already feel my hand reaching out to grab hold of my bottle of Haterade. Why? Because this is one butt ugly show. Okay,. maybe that’s not fair of me... It’s not the artwork itself that’s bad, as it doesn’t look sloppy or anything. If anything, the backgrounds and environments are easily on the high end of the scale. No, what I really have problems with is the art design. The characters look ridiculous, with angular faces and giant, cartoony eyes, and so many bizarre, gravity defying hairstyles that even a Pokemon animator would say “Hey, dial it back a bit!” No, you know what? Forget Pokemon. Looking at Shiki’s character designs is like watching someone from Clamp come up with their own Yugioh Spin-off. It would be okay if this were some wacky comedy, but it’s not... Shiki is a mature, poignant show that asks you several profound questions and dares you to come up with your own satisfactory answers. And if you really want to see this show go from ridiculous to horrifying in the blink of an eye, just wait until one of the characters starts to cry. These characters don’t cry the way normal anime characters cry... They cry thick, opaque marbles of liquid that could make a serious claim at being one of the scariest elements of the show. If you were to take a frame of it out of context, you’d think you were looking at an image from some ill advised Eiken sequel... And no, I am not even remotely joking about that. The art design of this show is distracting as hell, and took me out of the story more times than I can count. And the animation quality is no prize either... It’s one of the cheapest looking shows that Bones has ever produced, and if you know Bones, you know how big a claim that is. In spite of this, Shiki is a very strong anime title that has a lot to offer you... It’s bold, thought provoking, and without a single hint of pretense. It succeeds at exploring ideas and concepts that cause other shows to flop face down onto the floor, and if you’re looking for a very broad hint at what these ideas are, one of those floppers is my old arch-nemesis Blood C. Unfortunately, with an irritating first episode and a constant assault of distracting and sometimes even inappropriate eyesores, you have to put up with a lot of abuse to appreciate this show, so I really can’t see it reaching the level of quality that it deserves to. It’s still a great show, and I strongly recommend checking it out, but I can’t give it any higher than a 7/10.

I was directed to Shiki by a fellow anime fan who, like me, enjoyed more horror based anime. He insisted that Shiki was superior to shows like Another or Higurashi, since it created "characters you cared about". Having now watched it, I am wondering what he was smoking. I'll go through each aspect individually. Tharrrrr be spoilers (at least in the plot section), so read at your own risk. Art = 5 I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, the backgrounds are great. It looks like a small village. They are beautiful, though a bit colourful at times for an anime which is supposed to be "dark".Points also go to this one for mixing up the character designs and not having all the characters as beautiful supermodels. Though not excessively gory, the blood and gore aren't skimped on either, another important point. On the other, there are big problems with the character designs. Some of the characters look utterly ridiculous. Seriously, what is with their hair? It detracts from the "horror experience". The best horror anime have characters who look vaguely like real people, not people who have had their hair styled by Ronald McDonald. Okay, enough about the hair. Another nitpick I had about the art was how obvious it was when a character was turned, so to speak. Red eyes, glowing white skin, just unnatural looking. It might have been more interesting if it was hard to tell the two groups apart. I am pretty forgiving when it comes to art so I can ignore a lot of ugly if the story is decent. Sound = 7 Credit where credit is due here. The majority of the voice acting worked for me. Everyone had a distinct voice and most of them were fitting. I couldn't tell you what any of the minor characters voices sounded like (or if they were "off") but that doesn't bother me in the slightest. The music is ... interesting. The openings are fine, for the most part. Ending songs aren't quite as good but still passable. Some of the in-show music works very well, in a creepy subtle way. By that token, there is also some that are too subtle and fail to evoke any mood. And then there's the weird pop-techno blend song that comes in once in a while. Each time I heard it, I spent the entire time trying to figure out what popular song it sounded like. The sound is pretty good. It works. No real problems here. Character = 3 We start off by sticking close to a pink haired girl named Megumi. She is a stuck-up bitch who hates the town she lives in (and many of the people, including some who go out of their way to be nice) and has an unhealthy obsession with a boy named Yuuki. Think she's the protagonist? Nope. What about Yuuki? He's the outsider who's just moved to a new town and is slowly making friends. Again, not really the main character. We spend a good portion of time with him until about a third of the way in. The people we spend most of the time with are the Doctor (Ozai) and the Junior Monk (Seishein). This is a mixed blessing, since Ozai is perhaps the most interesting and likeable character in Shiki. Megumi is, for the most part, annoying as all hell, though she gets better as the series goes on (and her role is downplayed). Yuuki is tolerable but never really breaks out as a character. He's the stoic (semi-)badass who says he doesn't want friends but has a good heart. Seishein is ... horrible. I know I'm supposed to agree with or sympathize with him since we spend a decent chunk of time with him, but he's a drag in every scene he's in. Ozai is perhaps the most logical and realistic of the characters. He realizes something is wrong and he ATTEMPTS TO FIX IT! The problem with the characters is development. There is a large cast of characters, the majority of which aren't important anyway, which means we don't spend enough time with any character to get too attached to them. And very few of these characters change in any meaningful way. Most of the characters are the exact same whether alive or dead, though the dead do angst a bit. The character I had the most sympathy for was the girl in the track suit. She's young, unprepared for this, forced to choose between doing unthinkable things and dealing with friends and family who have risen. Her increasing instability is one of the few interesting changes within the series. Too bad she's downplayed in the second half. Plot = 3 There are spoilers now. You have been warned. Shiki is about vampires. If you didn't know that going in, you would have figured it out by the second episode at the latest. It takes the rest of the characters at least another three or four episodes to catch up. The plot is sloooooow. Most of the mystery, if there was any to begin with, is dispelled right away. Every once in a while, something interesting would happen and I felt like I wanted to see what was next. Then the plot would drag its feet a few episodes with no substantial progress being made. To sum up the first 2/3rds of the plot, the vampires are killing people. A lot of people die. Only Doctor Ozai, Seishein and a few kids realize what's going on. Then the kids drop off the face of the earth for a while and barely factor in again (with one exception). Most episodes in this bit focus on Ozai trying to do something, the townsfolk doing nothing and Seishein being tormented. Should he do something? (YES!!!!) To repeat, the vampires kill a good portion of the population and no one is all that disturbed about it. In the last 1/3rd, the show does a 180 and tries to make us sympathize with the vampires. This might have worked if they hadn't been mercilessly slaughtering townsfolk for half of the series. There are some moments where you genuinely think the vampires have been dealt a shitty hand (not choosing to become one but being forced by whoever bit them), but they are few and far between. Suddenly, the humans are the bad guys for protecting themselves and their families against the immortal people who have been murdering them. While many of the humans who are cleansing the vampires are obviously enjoying the experience waaaay too much, it's hard to argue that they're wrong in doing it. Should the vampires survive, the humans will just be mined for blood until there are none left. You can complain that the vampires want to live too and they've retained their memories, but the bottom line is that their existence is just to kill former neighbours and friends. And then there's just moments of incredible stupidity. -At one point, it's suggested that the Shiki want to convert all the humans they can so the village is entirely Shiki. This would make sense, if you forgot that they NEED the humans for sustenance. Without them, the vampires starve. -A third to half the town is wiped out and everyone is content to believe it's an epidemic, yet make no effort to do anything about it. -No one questions why there are now large populations of people who work only at night, why many families have just disappeared and where the death records have went. -Ozai makes a tape of him dissecting his wife, proving the existence of Shiki .. then shows it to no one. -If you can figure out Seishein, you deserve a cookie, his entire character and motivations make no sense. -The technology problem prevalent in horror. Why does no one phone about this? The final few episodes make an attempt to tie everything together but it only partly satisfies. Many of the characters motivations are still stupid and there are jumps that we're never shown. This isn't to say that there isn't ANY depth in Shiki. There is. It just happens to be muddied by other aspects. In the second half of Shiki, we start being presented with questions about the value of life, whether it is ethical to kill (if your life is on the line), the propensity to deny rather than act. The questions are interesting. It's the way they're executed that doesn't do them justice. Enjoyment = 4 I wanted to like this series. I really did. And there were some positives. I liked that they used some old-school vampire tropes (not being able to enter buildings without being invited ect). I liked the tracksuit girl. I liked Doctor Ozai, who has a couple of badass moments (though not enough!). It's the pacing and the plotting that really let this series down. For every thought-provoking idea ("is it right to kill someone else so I can live?") or genuinely nice/interesting moment, there is much more padding. And stupidity. No one (besides a few characters) seem to ever catch onto what's happening before they kick the bucket. Everyone is so complacent that you wonder whether they're all too stupid to live. I was ready to scream at these characters sometimes. DO SOMETHING! Overall = 5 See above, really. Shiki has potential, but squanders it by dragging everything out and failing to make any compelling characters. Look ma, no Twilight references!

Shiki, or Corpse Demon, is effectively the story of a village in the middle of nowhere being subjected to a mysterious string of unexplainable deaths. If you want to watch this anime and go into it 100% spoiler-free, even though this is not much of a spoiler at all, look away now. The deaths are, of course, being caused by vampires. While they take their sweet time coming out and saying it, it's pretty obvious from a really early stage. But don't tell any of the characters that, because they don't half take their sweet time working it out. Over half the story is dedicated towatching the cast struggle to grasp something you worked out by the second episode, which is effectively this show's most crippling weakness. Now stop. Do not hit the "Not Helpful" button just yet. Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to this, let me clarify my point quite firmly: No, I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, think that assuming the existence of vampires to be true is a logical conclusion. Not by a long shot. However, there are several very simple logical steps they should have gone through that would have lead them to it. The most glaring of these is shown through Shiki's focus on the medical aspects of the show. One of the few things that sets the story apart from every other vampire story is that we see the doctors dealing with all the deaths trying to work out and explain what is going on. This would be a lot more compelling if they didn't miss an obvious sign. They promptly go through every aspect of the deaths, but leave one thing out: every victim shares a pair of bitemarks on their neck. Aside from the symptoms themselves, this is the only thing that every single victim has in common. But the medical staff don't even try to explain it. On top of that, every patient died of severe anaemia, but had no rational way of losing so much blood. Except the bitemarks, the only possible explanation and a plain and simple way of putting the only two loose ends together. Now, once again, let me clear this up: I do not think that the bitemarks shoudl have instantly made them realise vampires were behind this. But so much about it makes it clear that vampires would have crossed their minds. Even if they initially brushed it off as implausible, they would have thought of it. Instead, this thought takes a long time to occur to anyone, and when it finally does, they are bizarrely accepting of it. But even once they do realise it, they have to spend a long, long time convincing everyone else. In troper terms, this effectively leads to the villagers Dying Like Animals from sheer stupidity. Which leads to a highly drawn-out stretch of episodes consisting of Dr. Ozaki trying to stop the villagers from essentially jumping headfirst into their own graves. On that note, the characters of Shiki are, to put it generously, less than likeable. There is only one personality in the entire series that is simultaneously interesting and does not make you want to punch them in the face, and that is Dr. Ozaki. The remaining cast are either boring, or sociopathic for no apparent reason. There are also a small handful inbetween who are mildly interesting but very stupid. Effectively, this is both the best and worst thing about Shiki. On the one hand, the cast is utterly insufferable. On the other, they die. A lot. And it manages to be gloriously, gloriously cathartic. It is also what makes Ozaki such an empathetic character. Ozaki is the only sane man in the entire village. And he is just as frustrated as you are at their complete lack of survival instinct. Also, despite some earlier absences of common sense, Ozaki really manages to pull out some incredibly impressive tactics. And I mean REALLY impressive. In spite of all the show's failings, in the final act it really gets it together and does a complete 180. This leads to an incredibly impressing finale, that is nothing short of a war. It leads to the point that anyone can (and probably will) die. Sadly this is only for the last 6 episodes, and at this point it is too little, too late. While these episodes were absolutely stellar, they don't quite justify watching the previous 16 episodes. From a technical aspect, Shiki ranks to the latter on the scale of good vs OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!. The art style is about as awful as they come. The hair on the characters is the most stupid I've ever seen. Anime, as a medium, is known for its love of stupid hair, but even among them Shiki manages to be unbelievably appalling. The sound is quite a bit better, being a user of eerie ambient music. The first OP is also quite an excellent song, excellently merged with the animation. The remaining OP/ED themes are fine, but unremarkable. I mentioned earlier that there were three ways that Shiki attempts to stick out from the vampire crowd, the first being the medical aspects. While none of these were very well-executed, they are still interesting: The other two being that the humans vs. vampires war is portrayed as simply being two opposing forces simply trying to survive, rather than good humans vs. evil monsters... and the third, being that they focus on the angst of those forcibly turned into vampires, having to kill people they once knew to survive. Overall, Shiki has a lot of good ideas but in the end doesn't really execute them every well. It's a mixed bag, with enough upsides to keep it watchable earlier on, and with an excellent finale. Still, it really isn't worth watching in the long run. Story/Plot: 5/10 Animation/Graphics: No seriously, what?/10 Music/Background: 7/10 Characters: 3/10 Overall: 6/10 For Fans Of: Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, Dance in the Vampire Bund.