Wag your fingers, scoff if you will, but my habitual expectation from modern Gainax is nothing short of a visual tour-de-force, the kind of show that makes an English-speaking fan like myself wish he was fluent in Japanese so he wouldn’t have to peel his eyes away from the intoxicating animation sequences for a single moment. Alas, Shikabane Hime: Aka didn’t quite deliver the first-round knockout I was hoping for. Though all the familiar, formulaic tropes have been neatly gathered and arranged (‘gentle-but-refreshingly-unemo boy meets ass-kicking-superpowered-girl’), and the story hustles along at an appropriately frenzied pace, my first impression is that the Shikabane manga doesn’t cleanly fit the relentlessly action-driven cast established by Gainax exemplars like FLCL and TTGL. The upshot is that there is plenty room for both improvement and a more satisfying exploration of the story in forthcoming episodes.

Summary: Ouri Kagami is a young student with an unusual lack of apprehension for the supernatural. Ouri’s elder brother-figure Keisei Tagami is a Buddhist monk. By day, Keisei works as acting head of the orphanage and temple where they live; but by night, he joins rank with a secret group of monks to hunt and destroy undead monsters called shikabane. Manika Hoshimura is their trump card - the ‘Shikabane Hime’ (’Corpse Princess’), a undead girl who sides with humans kills other shikabane without remorse. When Ouri decides to move out of the orphanage where he was raised and distance himself from awkward pseudo-familial ties with Keisei, he runs into Manika a second time on ‘business’. What is the secret of this girl, who has no heartbeat…?

Review: Patches of lukewarm comedy and a few nods to the mundane may leave you twiddling your thumbs here and there, but rest assured Shikabane is an action show at heart, and a creepy one at that. Favoring images over garrulous narratives, the plot rushes headlong into the thick of things with little verbal explanation, leaving a mosaic of short scenes and sparse dialogue to tell all:

In a flashback, Ouri Tagami awakens in the middle of a moonlit room full of sleeping orphans; a bizarre black cat materializes hauntingly through a window, speaks his name and betrays his brother’s secret; a group of monks (including Ouri’s aniki) rush to the side of a girl’s (Manika’s) deeply-gashed corpse, introducing her as a ’shikabane’ in a candlelit shrine. Fast-forward to present day: a police team breaks into a blue haired harem-ladykiller’s neon-lit apartment and threatens his arrest before he jumps out the window and goes on a demoniac rampage; Keisei leads a mealtime prayer at the orphanage; Manika offers up the token shower scene while awaiting the next night’s action - halfway into the episode, all the backstory basics have been established, leaving a good fifteen minutes for the obligatory first battle.

Fans will immediately recognize Gainax’s signature animation style from recent titles like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and FLCL; yet the spastic, freewheeling action sequences are at a bit of a disadvantage in Shikabane’s comparatively subdued dramatic milieu. There are a few too many holes in the action (for instance, leading up to the first battle between Hime and the vampiric ladykiller shikabane) and the directing style lacks the unrestrained bucking needed to put it to proper use. Sadly, when the first battle finally arrives, much of the wallop has fizzled away and the sequences do not last longer than a couple of minutes. Manika’s self-referential dialogue may have conveyed the appropriate shock value earlier in the episode, but we’ve seen it all too many times and she had already been introduced in too many different ways for it to serve as anything more than a banal formal introduction.

It may be my imagination, but guest director Masahiko Murata (Jinki: Extend, MazinKaiser, GR -GIANT ROBO-) and guest scriptwriter Shou Aikawa (Fullmetal Alchemist, Martian Successor Nadesico) seem to agree that guns, boobs and lots of explosions aren’t going to sell this show (it is a shounen show, after all.) However, it is not yet clear what they plan to use to fill these obvious gaps. Pathos? More action? Story? I have my reservations about using the story as the series’ mainspring — at this point, the characters are but a dangerous few lines ahead of another throwaway shounen plot. I, for one, would like to see the plot thicken.

Will Keisei, Manika and Ouri get locked into a love triangle (the kind that Gainax has a fondness for)? Will the next shikabane be even more sinister? And what the hell *is* that cat? I suppose we’ll have to wait until next week to find out, except for those of you who have read the manga. Let’s hope that Gainax can manage its wildly inconsistent animation style deftly enough to put the action front and center without spoiling Shikabane’s thrilleresque mood.

Verdict: C+

Browse Timeline

• « Skip Beat Episode 1 - Kyoko-sama has arrived!
• » Sakura-hime of My Youth

Comments (10)

Add a Comment