Purple Eyes in the Dark

This is a promotional music video for a manga, and it's about a girl who turns into a leopard or something (if she dates anyone, is this bestiality?). Dunno anything about that, but we do see a few panels from the manga scattered throughout. I actually stumbled upon this because I enjoyed other efforts from the director Mizuho Nishikubo, who was a good choice for a music video, as he also worked on Radio City Fantasy, which had a lot of music videos sprinkled throughout the story. However, this is a cheap effort compared to most promotional OVAs, and there isn't much here to workwith for nearly 30 minutes. Often, this is just a slide show. Featuring many glossy images that look like concept art based on various chapters of the manga, sliding into place, shifting around the frame, sometimes zooming in or out, other times overlaid on some animated backdrops, or dissolving into the next frame. There's a little bit of visual experimentation with split screen and other techniques, but this honestly looks like a tacky, stitched together slideshow from a super-fan of the manga. Whatever scenes are animated are generally pretty nice. The beach scenes look solid and have fairly fluid animation. There are plenty of scenes of water, as well as a few scenes with the leopard running and background animation. I want to say only like 5%-10% of this is animated, but even when it's animated, it's usually just loops of sparkly stuff or hair billowing or flowers adrift or sky backdrops. There's no real narrative to the music video either. It all feels very randomly placed. I'm not sure the music fits that well or is very good, but it does the job. I'd be pretty sore if I shelled out cash for this back when it was released, even if I were a fan of the manga... now that it's widely available, it's worth a look if you're a fan, I guess, but this is something that probably deserves to be forgotten, relegated to the twilight hours on an old grainy TV set, droning away in the background while you're performing menial tasks. I try to be sparse with the 1/10s, but this is so boring and pointless and an absolute waste of time and bereft of any entertainment value or meaning, so it deserves it.

It's very clear that Yami no Purple Eye is a low-budget advertisement for the manga. The majority of the first half of the music video can be summed up as a manga panel slideshow with some special effects. The second half, however, features a slight increase in animation which brings some cool scenes with that classic retro anime aesthetic. These visuals are accompanied with some relaxing 80s Japanese music. Despite these elements, I believe the project ultimately fails to achieve its goal, which appears to be promoting the manga. The music video is too much of an out of context manga panel slideshow and not enoughof a cool retro animation showcase which makes most of the experience boring and the manga that is being advertised to appear uninteresting. Additionally, the length of the music video is much longer than it should need to be, a shorter 3-4 minute video cutting all the stills would have been far more effective. Unless you are already a fan of the manga or are curious about J.C. Staff's early works, there isn’t much reason to watch this. The music is by no means terrible, but there is plenty better within the same genre. There are also other anime projects that deliver the classic 80s anime aesthetic visuals with more animation and less still frames. Final Scorings: Animation: 2/10 (Mostly still manga panels) Sound: 6/10 (Fine music but nothing amazing) Value: 3/10 (First J.C Staff project) Enjoyment: 2/10 (Very boring) Overall: 3.25/10 ~ 3/10 (Very Bad)

This anime is just purely music so don't come in expecting a 30 minute segment of peak fiction or any development at all, although this is certainly peak music. The animation itself is pretty poor but as expected for the era it was made, there isn't much of a plot to this at all and the plot that it does have is pretty boring and isn't worth following. The only take away is that the music is actually quite a bop so perhaps you want a break from watching some anime and want to listen to some music or maybe you'll add this to yourplaylist instead. It really kicks off about half way through and despite there most definitely being better music out there this is still quite enjoyable and niche.