Anime Review 5: Higurashi, Angel Sanctuary, and Pumpkin Scissors

Why are you asking questions about Higurashi, sweetie? DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LAST BOY WHO- what? Nothing? Making a threat? No, why would you accuse an innocent girl like me of such a hurtful thing? You mean you won't be my friend anymore? I can't believe what a jerk you're being! *cry* Anyway,hehe if you tell anyone about Higurashi you might find yourself having to transfer away... Yes. Transfer...

Higurashi is a brilliant horror story. There is a small village where everybody knows everybody by name, there are cute and quaint local festivals, and there are fifteen children total who all share a one-room schoolhouse. Keiichi moves there and transfers to the school, and it's filled with cute girls who all like him and want to play cards with him and make him lunch! What could possibly go wrong... Oh, crap. Please, for the love of God, put that machete down! Ahhh, no!!!

This series was great for me as I review these anime by getting a first impression based on the first 5 episodes. While I watched the horrific events of the story unfold in episodes 3 and 4, I thought until almost the end "It's okay. Keiichi won't die yet. There's a ton of episodes left and he's the main character. There's not much real danger. But (SPOILER ALERT) In episode 4, Keiichi beats the girls he suspects of trying to murder him to death with a baseball bat, which I completely didn't expect. Then he's on the phone in a phone booth talking to an older police officer he's been unraveling local murder mysteries with. He says he found out that the murders were actually supernatural and caused by demonic possession. As he's saying this, an invisible demon kills him. The next episode, episode 5, resets everything. All the characters are brought back and the series' cute schoolgirl feel it had in the first episode returns too. Aside from using some kind of witchery to cheat at card games and one of the girls, Shion, having a twin sister that didn't appear before who looks exactly like her, the girls definitely no longer seem to be the possessed or psychotic evil monsters they were before. TV Tropes tells me that there are in fact many short story arcs within the show that are all similarly reset. This would make for interesting watching because you never know what could happen, and they won't save the juicy climactic endings just for the end of the series, I get the feeling that there's a cool ending every couple of episodes. This storytelling style would also be good if you were reading the manga, because you aren't wasting money by buying early volumes (I often think manga don't really become climactic a lot of the time until later in the series).

Higurashi has all the elements of good horror films and books without anything in it being cliché and unoriginal. I love horror stories about places and people that seem nice on the surface, but turn out to be evil. Also, these are little girls drawn with petite frames and big anime eyes and bright colored hair, they have such cute charm. This makes it all the more jarring when they start talking like crazed murderers and wielding knives and other weapons. They also seem to dart back and forth between a Miss Innocent routine and cold-blooded sociopaths the next, complete with their pupils changing from big and round to lizard-like. Their facial expressions when they are murderous and wielding weapons is haunting, shocking, and memorable.

My main problem was, when it was revealed that all these girls were liars and really were plotting against Keiichi, they were no longer sympathetic. The episodes I saw could have been better if they spent more time giving the girls sob stories about their pasts to make them seem more morally conflicted than evil and worthy only of hate, not pity. However, I think the point of that was to show that these girls were in fact possessed by demonic forces.

It's about a war between Heaven and Hell and caught in the middle is a creep who wants to bone his sister. He's the protagonist, Setsuna and he's really deeply in loe with his sister, Sara, who loves him back. They just want to go somewhere where no one will know their secret and they can pretend to be a normal couple. 

Because Setsuna is treated cruelly in school when his classmates find out about him and Sarah, and he despairs at wanting the wrong thing, his life is miserable. This is why he is the reincarnation of Alexiel, an angel who sinned against God and was punished by living out many Earthly lives filled with pain. In this show, the angels and God are portrayed very unsympathetically, while the demons, while not perfect, are more sympathetic. The angels are possibly stronger though, and the demons are more comedic (and often gender-confused) while the angels seem dead serious. 

It was pretty hard to root for a protagonist with incestuous love and lust, but the way Setsuna is treated by society for something mutually consensual that he feels he can't control is sad and does make me feel sorry for him. This story plays out as an epic cosmic battle in just three episodes. There's something to be said for a show that can pull off a badass epic story just as good as longer shounen action animes  in just three episodes. Although, I think they could do a lot more with this story and I think there is a lot more to this that's in the manga but never got made into anime.

Because of its lack of incest and creepy knife-wielding schoolgirls, this was my favorite out of the three I watched this week. It had great action with guns reminiscent of Yasuhiro Nightow's work, and war angst that's handled appropriately and wasn't over the top, like in Fullmetal Alchemist . I liked the main heroine, Alice, and thought she was very heroic and admirable. I was curious about Randel's backstory and the mysteries about his past that are gradually brought to light. I mean, who wouldn't be curious about someone from a military unit that does not officially exist, who's trained to fight tanks single-handedly? The story is actually about the Pumpkin Scissors Unit helping rebuild a country after a terrible war has ravaged it, but as most of their "peaceful" missions end up sending them into very dangerous situations, it's a good thing they have Randel who's an experienced veteran with crazy awesome combat skills. This series is great for fans of action, cool combat scenes, and war dramas with some comedic relief (like MASH, kind of). Definitely recommended.