Ranked #885

Shikabane Hime: Aka

Story - 8/10
Ok. This series started on the "monster-of-the-week" formula, so it may be very misleading. Even the sypnosis that a Shikabane Hime must kill 108 corpses to go to Heaven is misleading. The real plot and story has really nothing to do with it. The truth is, this series does provide a reasonable and interesting plot development in the SECOND half of the season only. And the last four episodes or so does have enough plot to build up decent cliffhangers that forced me to watch the raws and chinese subs (instead of waiting for the english subs because of my impatience). But keep in mind that there is a second season that follows up directly, so this whole first season gave me the feeling of PREQUEL to the actual story (which turned out decent)

Art - 7/10
Sometimes, the actions are animated in a pretty sloppy way. The characters' design are sometimes too simplistic.But you may argue that it was done intentionally as a more "stylish" way of animation. The colors are all in the range of grey, dark red, black and deep blue, blending into a nice gloomy atmosphere befit of a horror action series.

Sound - 9/10
Nice fighting music and nice insert songs, opening songs and ending song by angela. The music is very catchy and the voice acting is not bad. Ouri (main protagonist)'s voice sound pretty unique and has a good touch of innocence and tonelessness, befitting his strange attitude towards death (a key element in the plot)

Characters - 8/10
I would say the characters are decently developped for an anime series. Ouri's evolution is clearly portrayed throughout the series. Makina's realtionship with Keisei is revealed bits by bits in a very good rythmn. At the same time, Makina and Ouri's relationship also evolves with each episode in the SECOND half of this series.

Enjoyment and Overall - 8/10
The first half was pretty random and generically boring. The second half really redeemed itself. This is series is underrated because the first 6-7 episodes didn't have enough to keep the audience from labelling this as "another generic action series". Although it is far from being a breakthrough, the second half really made good progress in terms of plot and character development. It does deserve the slightly above average rating of 7.5 to 8 out of 10.


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Shikabane Hime: Aka is an anime that deals with the issues of death and life in an interesting manner. However, despite some of this anime's strengths, there were weaknesses littered throughout this series.

The main thing that the story gives is uniqueness. After being murdered, Makina Hoshimura turns into a "living corpse". Armed with dual sub-machine guns, she must kill 108 other corpses in order to gain entry into heaven. She is assisted in this task by Keisei Tagami, a Buddhist priest with links to an anti-corpse group known as the Kougun Cult. The setup of the storyline is rather unusual, and there have not been many anime that look at a living corpse working together with a living person to try to destroy other living copses.

The animatioin was very decent. Each character had their own distinguishable look. The background was very well done and the action scenes are pretty good as well. Gainax is known for creating some of the greatest animation in the industry, but in this anime the art didn't deliver what it could have. Something the animators did very well was creating the mood with the dark animation. You couldn't help but feel scared in some scenes because of the dark backgrounds. Gainax did very well in creating atmosphere.

The opening theme was very, very good. Other than that the sound was meaningless. I don't remember the sound being a big factor in the anime.

This anime seems to focus mainly on Ōri and Makina. There was only one character that I truly liked, and it was Makina. She is the main character and a contracted "living corpse". She is tasked with killing 108 corpses to gain entrance to heaven. She has formidable physical skills and her weapon of choice is an Ingram MAC11 machine gun. Makina starts slow but develops faster than Ōri and by the end of the season she becomes a great character. The main male character, Ōri himself, was really annoying at points. Ōri Kagami is a normal high school boy who was raised at Keisei Tagami's temple. He coincidentally appears at several points where corpses appear and the reason of this is unknown. Ōri is a bland character that slowly develops as the story progresses.

I didn't really enjoy this anime. I kept looking at the time and wanted it to finish faster. It wasn't all that bad. It was pretty confusing but there were a couple episodes that were really good.It was a pretty decent anime. Nothing special but decent. read more