Another - Reviews

To make things short: Another was amazing.

Animations, Artstyle and Sound were perfectly matched with the scenery. Really... although there should nothing happen in some scenes I constantly lived in fear of a jump scare. Guess that's my problem, I hate jump-scares...

Looking at the characters there was a bit of room for improvement. Though the protagonist and mei misaki, the horror version of the similar crazy Rikka from Love, Chunibyo & other Delusions, had a good background story, other characters came indeed too short. For example: Teshigawara or Sugiura. However I have to admit: I'm really complaining very little negativ things again.  

But the story offsets the tiny mistakes... No, in fact the story makes the whole anime so unique and exciting. During the first episodes my brain was totally crushed by all these questions about the situation (and the dying people lol). And what made me watch every single episode were the little cliffhangers before the resoluting answers. Over and over again I had to pause the anime to understand what shit is going on right now. Sadly the end was a bit, yeah "randomly brutal" I guess.  Really I don't know how to describe the 11th episode. Ok let me say it like this: It was absolutely exciting, but some (completely independed) happenings provided lots of unanswered questions.

Spoilers are following:

The main conflict of finding the dead-person in class remindes me of Erased. But before some people start to insult me: In Erased it was obvious. Here it really tricked me til the end. At first I assumed it was Teshigawara, than for a long time I suspected the really pretty 😅 Akasawa-san, because of the "can-coincidence". I literally never thought about the teacher.

End of Spoilers

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If you are searching for an horror-anime with (sometimes) much brutality and a consistent uncomfortable atmosphere than Another is the right choice. In my opinion it was very good.

My reaction to people, who say that Mei is not Rikka :

Some horror flicks manage to work because of good pacing, unique presentation, and a genuinely unnerving atmosphere, others are just entertaining gorefests that make up for there weak writing and stupid characters with a healthy dosage camp. I genuinely enjoy both sides of the horror spectrum and came into Another looking for one or the other and instead got what seems to be a horrendously botched attempt at both. As far as being creepy goes, Another employs the most ridiculously derivative approach. A small pale chick and ugly dolls? It’s about as done to death as it sounds . Plainly put, the series puts a pitiful amount effort into establishing a legitimately creepy atmosphere using such cliche imagery isn’t gonna put my hairs on end. The ominous music does it’s best to compliment these scenes, but it ends up being overused and doesn’t do much to elevate such weak material.

OK, so Another clearly isn’t very successful when it comes to being unnerving, but there’s still the “other” type of horror I already brought up right? Well the death scenes are ridiculous, but Another otherwise lacks a fun sense of self awareness. Any fun to be had in this show is reduced to simply laughing at an absurd death scene before the series try to make you take it’s plot and characters seriously once again. I could forgive botched attempts at spookiness and some death scenes too silly and jarring to take seriously, but the underlying writing is so unrelentingly bad it’s unbelievable. The mystery in Another in simple terms makes no sense whatsoever. All the reveals regarding the calamity of Class 3-3 have to do with either how it happens and what the rules are. There’s never any explanation as to why it happens. It’s just a bunch of rules applied to some class with no rhyme or reason. The idea behind the show was bad, but what ruined the show was excruciatingly terrible. For starters, after the 1st couple of episodes, the show pretty much front-loads the viewers with most of the information through forced info-dumps, which is boring as hell to watch and doesn’t really give you much to think about besides the mystery behind who the killer is. You know exactly what’s going on for most of the show (minus who’s causing it all) which guts the tension quickly.

A lot of the problems with the plot could’ve been mitigated if the series wasn’t driven by a cast with perhaps one of the worst case of plot convenience and plot-induced-stupidity I’ve ever seen in quite some time. This is where the characters come in unfortunately, who’s actions seem to lack any semblance of logic whenever the script demands so. It’s the type of stupidity that creates plot craters as opposed to holes. Why doesn’t anyone try to do something about a curse for 30 years? Why doesn’t anyone try to transfer out of a cursed class? Surely you’d consider at least that much before trying to murder your fellow class mates right? The writing goes far enough to avoid aspects of the world that ought to get involved in the annual massacre of children (like parents, the police, etc) to the point where the school may as well have been teleported to a remote island. The worst part of it all was the reason they gave for why Mei doesn’t just tell Koichi the identity the real undead person, it’s an insultingly stupid handwave that essentially causes the show to be four times longer then it needed to be while making most of the deaths entirely preventable.

Koichi himself as a character isn’t stupid like the rest of the cast, but that’s really all I have to say about him. He’s essentially a blank slate ” hey project yourself on to me” type of character. This sort of lead works OK for video games (though even then I’d prefer not to have to put up with it), this degree of blandness is sleep inducing. They don’t even really give him much to do besides talk, and talk, and talk, and hey that person just died, back to talking. There’s not really much to say about the rest of the cast as individuals, but as a whole they came of to me as nothing more then l mere death fodder whose names I never bothered learning or forgot after/during my watchthrough of this series. Anyone who tries to drop information the writers deem to be to juicy to give up at the moment either do so by dropping very vague hints that you’d have to rewatch the show to catch (fat chance of me doing that), or something ridiculously contrived and inconvenient happens to stop right exact moment where a truth bomb is about to be dropped. There was also a hint of romance between the two leads, but the writers barely gave it any attention, as will this review.

There’s nothing to recommend about Another. As a serious mystery it’s unbelievably dumb to take seriously and far too dry to have fun with.

Worth watching.

I was recommended to watch Another because of my huge love for Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni. I have to say that I was not dissapointed. It has the the whole high school setting with a strange curse due to some murder that happened in the past, and of course, the nosey transfer student has to go poking around which in turn sets in motion a chain of grim accidents. It'll have you on the edge of your seat at times shouting at the screen "No! Don't go in there!". All in all, story is relatively solid, entertaining twists here and there make it an interesting watch as you wrack your brain trying to figure out what's causing the deaths (without giving too much away). I wish they did a little more rather than have a lot of "filler" episodes re-itterating supposedly key factors, especially conversations between the protagonist and the mysterious girl with the eyepatch. But, in turn this does set the scene and the show does radiate an extremely well crafted eerie, sppoky atmosphere. And this of course is where the animation comes in. It is obvious that's a modern (ish) anime by the texture detail, especially on the dolls. It can be sharp at times, making it kind of hard to watch, but the actual character animation is flawless and the doll animation just creeped me the f*** out. However I feel what let this anime down the most is the characters themselves. I understand that it's meant to be a gloomy and serious place, but there's just no connection to any of the chracters. When things happen to them you're left feeling "Meh" rather than bawling your eyes out like in Gurrenn Lagann or Code Geass. 

So I say, fans of Elfen Lied, Higurashi and other mystery gore animes will find a hidden gem with this one. Story's pretty good, no real emotional attachment with the characters that's kinda needed for a murder mystery, animation top notch and the atmosphere perfect for what it was set out to do.

Honestly I really like this anime. It's not as horror as I thoguht it'd be but definetly worth a watch. Sometimes it might be very confusing and it requires to use your brain to the maximum to understand what they're saying or doing.

Although it is slow, the characters grew on me and the mystery of Mei kept me interested until the story picked up.

I've watched the entire series and enjoyed it. It has a pretty bloody ending. There are a few foul words, but only used sparingly.

For anyone squeamish, or under of the age of 16, be warned, there is a graphic suicide scene. 

One thing that bugged me is the main characters' behavior during horrific events. Sakikabara and Misaki don't react too much no matter what happens.