Bakemonogatari - Reviews

What an interesting concept. Short stories about people struggling in life and these problems being visualized by oddities and how our main protagonist, Araragi, tries to help these people to overcome these problems.

The show does an excellent job of mocking traditional character tropes but it also creates these super complicated and memorable characters. The visual storytelling of the show is the best in the business with some clever tunes to support the visuals, making it a complete experience.

The show has a very unique way of handling affection that isn't for everybody but the same can be said for the heavy use of witty dialogue. The interactions are really playful which does an excellent job in making us forget about how depressing these situations can be.

I do believe the series does become even better as you get older.

The animation takes away from the story, a trying hard "Perfect Blue" animation copycat, mixed with interesting character but fall short of potraying it perfectly.

Honestly, I knew from the start this anime was not going to impress me.  I kept on watching for the sake of hoping it would get better.  This was a really strange anime.

 

For one, most of the episodes bored me.  I felt like I was watching someone talk and talk for ages.  I didn't even laugh that much with what witty comments were thrown in there.  The WORST episode had to be the one where the whole time they were in a playground it appeared to be.  There was no change in scenery hardly and I think for half the episode they were conversating about his being a virgin and how she can pay him back.  It was horrible and the dialogue did not capture my interest at all...

I also thought this anime could have captivated more monsters.  With what few stories there were in the series, they had some interesting points but they dragged on forever.  I was craving more monsters or more curses, whatever you wanna call it.

Something akward I thought to myself, was always the weird breaks between scenes.  They would pop up with weird pictures and dialog 'not even long enough for you to read of course' (red....black...weird pictures that were photographs of real life).  UGG another example of boredom was the scene where she was talking on her phone for ages and after she would talk it's go to the little 'break' between scenes.

Next is the ecchi, I felt like that was thrown in there randomly to actually create some type of interest after the horrendous boredom this anime created.  It was really unnecessary and disgusting when I think about it, one of them was what a kid??  There was a lot of pervertedness thrown in there for the most part, but it didn't really capture my interest.  I'm not against it either because some perverted animes make me ROFL copter.

One thing I can give props for was the introductions of each episode.  They changed it to the character the story was about in that episode.  I particularly loved how it showed a sense of who each character was.  (The basketball girl's intro kind of explained some of my confusion, since there was a lot during this anime).  The music was great too, it suited every scene and intro.

 

Anyways...I think I'm done complaining for now,  I know maybe some will disagree since this anime has such a high rating, but this anime did disappoint me.  I will go along with someone else's review and recommend not watching episode after episode as I have done.

First and foremost Bakemonogatari is a series that almost completely centers around conversations.  So anyone who doesn't like reading a lot of dialogue really won't find Bakemonogatari to be all that appealing.

Moving on the story in Bakemonogatari has to be one of the most well written works that I've ever seen.  Want you basically get is a series of 2-5 episode arcs that in each case focus on the male lead as he tries to help the female that the arc is focusing on.  With the female who is in trouble with something in the way of curses, spirits, and oddities.  While the individual small arcs are good in that they create a nice flow that doesn't really ever drag on, but at the sametime it's because that it is made up of smaller arcs that a sense of one grand larger arc never really gets established so then by the end it kind of leaves you wanting more since the story feels somewhat incomplete.

The animation I thought was really something special when watching this.  Things like it have been done before by other series, but in the case of Bakemonogatari it felt unique even among other anime that use similar art styles.  With awkward camera angles, random flashes of screens with nothing but text, and an overall dark atmosphere Bakemonogatari creates experiences that at times I found myself watching again for no other reason than that I found it interesting.  Those moments weren't even necessarily the greatest moments in the anime but I found myself watching them again because of how unique they looked.

The sound by and large was fairly good.  With primary opening being somewhat catchy it really is the individual opening for each arc that I found to be the best.  With the opening for each arc I thought did a good job in kind of catching the personality of each female.  The voice actors for each character did an great job in capturing their perosnality and matching a tone that each character held visually.  Especially Senjogahara who voice actor did an amazing job in portarying her personality and really stood out from everyone else.

An anime really only needs one really good character to carry the entire show and in the case of Bakemonogatari we get several good characters.  Senjogahara easily stands out from the rest of the cast she is controlling, cold-blooded, and an excellent talker who can be rather surprising with the quickness of her comments.  I strangely enough found myself paying a bit more attention to the show whenever Senjogahara was talking because her and Araragi had some of the best conversations in the entire anime and that's saying something.  Araragi is the basic "help everyone in need" character type and while in other anime this can become a really annoying trait.  In Araragi case it actually works since in addition to this he has a very laid back personality and it makes him into a more likable character.  The rest of the cast can pretty much speak for themselves and none of them every actually become annoyting since besides small cameos they don't show up much outside of their arcs.  With strong personalities and interesting traits any person is sure to pick out one or two favorites amon them.

 

Let me start of by saying I'm not much of a pro within the Anime universe. I have watched a fair few series by now, yet none of them are particularly related in genre nor would I not be able to name a single studio or famous author/artist behind the scenes. 

Anime is something that surprises me with how different and unexpected things can be as opposed to our western culture. 

I came across Bakemonogatari in the year it came out. I watched the first few second and was astonished by the artwork, I had not seen much anime at this point though, I decided to stop watching after the first few minutes until I could find a higher quality version. I then forgot about it until this very year and when I did finally see the full first episode I did not stop watching till early next morning.

I came here to check if other people had a similar experience with this anime to what I have had. And frankly was disappointed by how much negativity was thrown at the story part of this series. So for the first time and probably the last I will write a review about an anime on the interwebs.

Story

Right then. Lets start with the reason I am writing this review in the first place. This IS my favorite part about the anime. It was not really the story in and on itself but rather the way it was told. As we are well aware, dialog is the center of this anime. Lots and lots of dialog. 

The dialog is what usually turns me off in a lot of anime yet here it seems to really "speak" to me. I found something here that was new to me. It was challenging. It is probably the most high speed slow anime of all time. The amount of things that happen in one episode is very low yet the amount of information that is thrown at us within the same episode is extraordinarily high. This was challenging for me personally in two ways; 1 the amount of japanese folklore is not easy for me to grasp yet fun to explore and 2 The speed of the sentences in japanese while reading english subtitles about very intense subjects including love, relationship and the less conventional molestation, extortion & insecurity to name a few.

I found myself quite literally exhausted after each episode as it took such a huge amount of focus not just to watch but to actually understand the dialog. Somehow this is how the show stood apart and gave me something that no other show had given me to date. It felt like it was testing my limits of comprehension. 

Then something hit me. The dialog is not dialog. I genuinely believe that, especially the conversations with Senjogahara would be what conversations in the real world would sound like if our brains did the talking. The dialog was often thought processes out loud rather than regular speedy conversation. 

As for the actual story. I believe its interesting to see characters progress through their journey so slowly yet eventful.

Animation

The feeling I personally got from the animation as with everything else was that it was there to enhance the atmosphere around the the dialog. There are literally no other character in the entire show other than the ones described the character section on anime planet, it is like the entire town is empty apart from these few kids and a crazy guy who lives in an abandoned building. Even when one of them is suppose to be in a crowd, everybody remains faceless or mere silhouettes of what is suppose to be other humans. The entire town drives only one type of car and there a several other examples that give the viewer a surreal feeling and in some cases drop you right into the uncanny valley (my favorite valley). Especially the frantic cuts to unanimated scenes with bits of live action body parts can be unsettling, yet exciting.

This also perfectly enhances the dialog, as before I described I found the dialog more like thought processes. When we are in deep thoughts about ourselves and the people close to us whilst walking down the street, do you remember any of the faces you encounter on the way? Do you remember how many cars went past you or which models any of them actually were? Not very likely (I know I don't). Do you rather visualize thoughts that go through your head not matter how morbid or perverted those might be? Probably. The animation is doing everything in its power to give that feeling of thinking processes.

Sound

Gonna skip this one...I am a sound engineer and have extremely high standards in audio quality. I think Japan can still learn a think or two about sound design overall but there was little that stood out or was wrong for that matter in the sound department of this show.

One thing I do want to say is that I liked the lack of sound in a lot of scenes. It gave space to focus more on the dialog.

Characters

Senjogahara is definitely one of my favorite characters in anime. I did not care too much for the main character. He was more of a black slate for the viewer to fill in the blanks. I found some characters very interesting and other slightly less. One thing that did stand out was that they had all come from a very different background and their supernatural issues were all based on a combination of folklore and real world complications.

Overal

Overall I just wanted to share how I experienced this series. It is not light, fast, action-packed or some crazy spectacle. It is simply a completely different anime from all other that I have seen so far and if you judge it by the right merits can really be a very exhilarating experience.

Thank you for your patience.