Loups=Garous

I'd like to clear up a few things about Loups=Garous.
First of all, I'm 99% sure Kono Ayumi (the blue-black haired character with short hair and yellow eyes) is a boy, not a girl--because he is always referred to as a guy in the movie. (But Wikipedia, My Anime List, and I think even the back of the DVD case say different, so don't quote me on that--but I'm pretty positive that if they talk about him as a 'him,' then he's a boy)
Secondly, everyone has given harsh reviews and scores about Loups=Garous. When I started watching the movie, I based it on the 6's people ... would score it as. But I found that I really enjoyed the movie--the characters (apart from the main heroine, Makino Hazuki, who is extremely frustrating and very very useless) were very likable. If we say that Kono Ayumi is a boy, then he's super attractive (in a reserved kind of way.) Tsuzuki Mio is a hacker genius and consistently hilarious. Rei Myao (her name sounds like 'meow,' how can you not like her?) is a tsundere-fighter. Yabe Yuko, one of the victims, is sort of a non-character. Nothing much to say there.
The art is different from most animes, but the facial structure and the eyes are still wonderful to look at.
A great quality about Loups=Garous's plot is that it's understandable (not like The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which got great reviews but I couldn't understand--violins, numbers, airplanes...WHAT IS GOING ON?!) The audience can easily follow along with the ideas and clues given out as the story progresses, but they still have to do a little legwork and put the pieces together. The story progresses quickly and has some interesting factors--like a dance routine and a twisted screen-based society.
Maybe this kind of movie isn't for everyone, but I hope that my review has convinced you to try it out with a more positive outlook!

What to say what to say.
First I hope that you guys can forgive my English since it's not my native language.

The anime:

As I read the synopsis I was thrilled, it felt like an awesome idea. But as soon as the anime started it started differently as the synopsis said it would. Well I kept watching and got a bit annoyed by the main characters. Hazuki is really insecure and not even funny, sexy or cute. I had no resemblance to her in any way. The other characters were boring, not even interesting. Myao is that typical anime girl who fights and kicks ass but we ... know nothing about her while Mio is the typical screaming attention girl who has probably a interesting history but we don't know anything about that. And then we have the silent scary female witch really looks like a guy Ayumi. Ayumi is boring not even interesting, you won't get any dept from her. You don't know why she lives alone and who she is. Witch really annoys me. Overall the main characters are weird and form a boring group as they try to find who the murderer is.

During the story we see a system that observes the everyday life of people, the first thing about this concept what bugs me is. Why do the people need this? There has been some kind of virus but there is actually no information about this virus. In the entire movie there isn't once mentioned why this system is what it is. Witch leaves a big gap in the plot of the anime.

What annoyed me even more was how little we see of the world they live in. We see the same street like 4 times and they always meet at the same place also I'm really confused about the everyday life of those people. Let me just say that it doesn't give you the satisfaction it leaves you with questions about this phenomenon.

The story itself started of interesting, there has been a couple of murders and there is a little twist at the beginning. But during the story it gets really obvious who the culprit is. It even get's so obvious that you start looking in the least obvious way. The whole reason why the murders are happening is vague and well even sick but not in the twisted way we like blood and gore no but in a really sick and not even awesome way.

What annoyed me the most was the character Mio, how can a girl at the age of I don't know 12? Hack a entire system. She is a computer nerd who lives in a different district (why they have poor and wealthy districts is unclear and how this city they live in works isn't explained)
and is able to hack into police records and street views etc. We get to see so many people and so many events but yet almost non of it is explained. The main story line builds up pretty nice the first half hour. But after that it is just boring. And it even gets more boring, the ending is so lame and stupid that your glad it only took 1.5hours to get there.

Doesn't this anime have any good features? Of course it does, the music is nice not special but I liked the rock and the songs they played. Story is boring although it starts interesting. The art is nicely done, I have seen better art, but the art job sure wasn't bad. Enjoyment? although the beginning was nice it later on began to become a real bore.

Verdict:
Well I can't really recommend anyone this anime. There isn't enough blood and gore, or a really scary thriller storyline to enjoy. It isn't sexy or funny. It's just another anime movie. I give the anime a 6, since they got my attention the first half hour and the art and music were nice. The characters were boring but that isn't the biggest let down, the storyline is such a let down that it ruins the entire anime. What could of been a awesome anime with a great concept, turned into something predicable and lame at the same time.

This anime is a big bore but if you have nothing better to do and you don't have any hopes up for this anime, it can be decent to watch.

Cheers Lucid

Saw this on Production I.G.'s work list for 2010 and got curious.
The story revolves around 3 young girls and a teenager caught in a world where monitor's have replaced real contact (not entirely). Hazuki (One of the young girls) has a Communication dissorder. Another young girls calls herself loups=garous,another is a pretty good hacker and the teenager is a fighting machine.
And this is where the anime movie goes wrong
You can't just put ideas together without a coherent story.
The emotions are there,the action too, the characters (undeveloped), the setting , but it just doesn't add up to a whole.
Very dissapointing. The loups=garous itself is an easy ... way of wrapping it up but the beast has no content.
Good to pass the time but barely one layer of interesting stuff
Why does production I.G. lend it's name to this?

This is the worst anime movie I have ever seen.
Character motivations make no sense, the story just meanders and it all falls extremely flat. I finished the movie literally less than 5 minutes ago from writing this and i am struggling to remember what happened.
The whole 'killing children' premise is laughable, with motives being weak, and the original plot point being dropped almost immediately for a boring stereotypical villain, with their dialogue being 100% exposition.
The only moment I enjoyed was towards the end, when the villain was silenced in an unintentionally laughable manner.
Not worth anyone's time, effort or money. It really is a shame. There ... is a really good premise at the heart of this film, but it does everything in its power to ruin it.

This was the best i've seen. I love the theme of needing to communicate above all else. There is a valid world of schoolkids and an organised society with bizarre elements that don't need a total plot to create.
Great voices in the dub, I certainly watched the boy "kono" as a boy and would find it helpful and downgrade it if he really is just a girl they call a boy. imo.
Lovely and then a real adventure which probably is not bad for the young but i've no children to be saying this. However as in a child or adult life death is a threat ... then to realise it in a dramatic way where the children have volition instead of just crazy superpowers is worthwhile and there is the larger story of group bonding and individual learning that is an enhancement of the character of each of them.

Loups=Garous has an interesting enough premise but when the back of the Blu Ray case gives more setup and back story than the film does then you know there are going to be issues.

Supposedly this film is set in a future that after a virus decimates the population those who remain live in a society where their every move is monitored and even contact with close family members is done through computers. Commuting out of the house is normally reserved exclusively to a trip to and from a numbered community centre. I’m pretty sure the virus isn’t mentioned at all in the actual film ... itself.

The film is quite slow paced and surprisingly lacking tension. The plot should be interesting but is developed with such little fanfare it just felt like it was going through the motions. In a big brother society, where people only communicate online and where even the police cannot gain your full trust you’d think seeing our main characters venturing out at night against the rules to meet and in the process trying to get to the bottom of a murder case that threatens to take them out one by one would be quite gripping. So it’s astounding really with a plot like that this film felt so plain and frankly occasionally boring for the majority of it’s running time. It's not helped by the fact the characters all feel flat and lifeless, I didn’t connect with any of them.

The animation style is quite peculiar, occasionally I questioned to myself if I was watching a Flash animation, albeit a very well polished one. The character design was strange and cheap looking, the eyes especially were just dead.

In the end it built up to something that left very little impression, The main villain is revealed to have a damn dark secret but it again was revealed in a shock lacking manner. Dramatic change to the world has apparently occurred before the ending credits but that change isn’t exactly apparent. Like I mentioned the film goes through the motions and simply ends. Moments that should have been quite dramatic weren’t, the final showdown was over before it begun.

It’s just a plainly executed thriller, the potential is there and that kept me watching, It’s not terrible but it just leaves little to no impact on you.

Animated by Studio I.G. which is superb when it comes to making science fiction settings. They rarely create likable characters though; they feel like robots or generic puppets most of the time. It worked fine for Ghost in the Shell but it is iffy in all the rest. Directed by Fujisaki Junichi, whose only other work was Blood+. Not much to say about him, other than he likes to direct dark and violent shows with schoolgirls.

The setting is the only interesting thing I can find in the whole film. It has to do with a future society where peace has been established and the time ... when people had to kill other people, or even animals for food, is now just a thing of history. There are some though who still commit atrocious acts; they wear masks and are called wolves. So basically we have the heroes, who grew up in a constantly monitored, secured and almost robotically emotionless world full of fancy hi-teck gadgets, suddenly being pitted against a violent society of unregistered people and murderous beasts from a world that was supposed to now be long gone. It is interesting to see these opposite ways of life in a conflict.

And this is where all the positives stop since all the rest is one big mess. Here is the horrid black list of the things I disliked.

1) So here you are watching this film waiting for cool stuff to happen and in just a few minutes WHAM the harsh reality hits you in the face. All the main characters are part of the plague that kills modern anime: Moe schoolgirls. Damn what a drag, they killed the mood. Sure, having cute / frail / innocent girls going through an emotional hell before getting all horrified and bloody may sound like an instant hook for most casual viewers but it has been done SO many times that now it’s just ridiculous. Plus, the characterization is almost always close to zero as moe is nothing but simplistic personalities and squeaky voices. And indeed, with only one movie worth of duration none of the characters have the time to be anything other than generic moe schoolgirls. They don’t even change clothes when they are not at school for Pete’s sake.

2) The foreground artwork, and especially the character designs, is lazy. Apart from being mostly overused caricatures of schoolgirls, there is also very little to no details on them. The visual effects on computers and gadgets are cool but the characters have no interesting uniforms, no complicating facial structure and barely any shading or lightening on their bodies. That makes them look like a lifeless-looking gag manga. I mean just look at those lazily drawn faces!

3) The soundtrack is full of girly J-pop that nobody will give a damn about. Where is my epic chorus / synthesizer music you bastards? This is a sci-fi movie!

4) The dialogues felt really artificial. The moe girls constantly repeat the questions as if they don’t understand anything and need to spend most of the duration in breaking the fourth wall just to explain how some common-knowledge issues to them need elaboration. It felt totally retarded. And sure, it fits to have a bunch of oblivious cute girls being gaga with everything but it doesn’t make the plot any better. Here you have an elaborate sci-fi setting that would normally be full of complicating notions and what you get is a bunch of dumb girls going “Duh, food? Duh, mystery? Duh, hacking? Duh, kidnap?” For 90 minutes!

5) The plot is retarded. You just have no idea why something happens the way it does and not in a more logical way.
- People are kidnapped and the police don’t even know they are missing for weeks, despite having security cameras in every room and road, and despite everybody having a GPS signal on them. You would at least assume the teachers or the parents or the eye witnesses would report to the police how some of the people they know haven’t shown up for weeks or that they saw them being attacked. And no, you get squat! How the devil is this society working if they have so many security systems and yet they can’t do the simplest thing? How did they even reach to such a blissful state if a common kidnaper can do anything he likes and nobody will report him?
- A bunch of dumb schoolgirls who are bored of their boring controlled lives are otherwise outsmarting the system and deal with all sorts of mysteries and criminals by just walking around and making a few simple questions. You can’t believe how retarded it feels to have such characters being fifty times more effective than the otherwise awesomely controlled status quo. And as usual, you have no bloody idea of why they never inform the police or anyone else for what they discover that can endanger the lives of millions.
- You also have no idea of what is going on with the storyline. You see a girl being attacked but saved at the last moment. Yet in the exact next scene, she is kidnapped for no obvious reason. And when they finally save her for the second time, they let her recover in an open remote bedroom for a week, while they are practicing a teen band song for kicks. Ain’t they scared in the least for what the hell just happened? Why didn’t they tell anyone about it? What are the police doing all this time? How did the movie swift from horror / sci-fi / mystery to a fluffy K-On clone? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Wait, now the girl is attacked for the third time? So much for being more cautious you dumb girl! And then more attacks and stuff that make no sense. I can go on forever with how terrible the storyboard is. Especially the ending where the motives of the villains are revealed. God, what a shitty asspull was that?
- What is even dumber than all that is how the whole fuss was resolved by just one character who was just killing anyone getting in its way. Everybody else was just a stunt and eventually useless to the plot; all it took was to take a knife and start killing anything that moved. Thank you very much for the cheap way out and the trashing of the rest of the already generic cast. And the funniest part? Said character was not even the protagonist. The protagonist was in the contrary the most useless of all the moe girls who did absolutely nothing other than crying and running away in the whole damn film.

One of the shittiest anime movies of recent times and a shame to the already large bad roster of I.G. titles.

And now for some excused scorings.
ART SECTION: 7/10
General Artwork 1/2 (lazy for an I.G. level of production)
Character Figures 0/2 (generic and lazily drawn)
Backgrounds 2/2 (fitting with the feeling of the series)
Animation 2/2 (ok for a movie format)
Visual Effects 2/2 (funky sci-fi visuals)

SOUND SECTION: 4/10
Voice Acting 1/3 (retarded moe dialogues)
Music Themes 1/4 (out of place J-pop crap)
Sound Effects 2/3 (ok I guess)

STORY SECTION: 4/10
Premise 2/2 (interesting)
Pacing 0/2 (sloppy)
Complexity 2/2 (rich context)
Plausibility 0/2 (none)
Conclusion 0/2 (anti-climactic asspull)

CHARACTER SECTION: 4/10
Presence 1/2 (generic)
Personality 1/2 (cheesy)
Backdrop 1/2 (generic and simplistic but it’s there)
Development 0/2 (non-existent or messy)
Catharsis 1/2 (overblown but it’s there)

VALUE SECTION: 2/10
Historical Value 0/3 (none)
Rewatchability 0/3 (no reason to bother again with this crap)
Memorability 2/4 (cool enough concept to remember but the rest of it is crap)

ENJOYMENT SECTION: 1/10
Art 0/1 (looks lazy)
Sound 0/2 (sounds out of place)
Story 1/3 (cool concept, shitty presentation)
Characters 0/4 (generic and lame)

VERDICT: 3.5/10

rate of 7 (good)
seen via english dubbed

Have you ever wondered given the rise of technology would life be improved if life was entirely monitored? that concept and more is asked and answered in a regard in this film. As the movie unfolds some aspects you can deduce others you have not been give the full picture too. While the rest leaves you curious even when the movie had ended. For example is their a male kid lead or is there not? the answer could go either way. Or, was that place mentioned in flashback in the end a true statement for that place and that ... time?

Alas what held back a higher rating? the answer is lack of follow through. There was two endings in my eyes why they extended it i am not sure. Their extend version did solve anything new.

a helpful piece of information the wolf mentioned in the intro is not a werewolf. Some might say i spoiled it but i disagree. One can not say i told you something when it had no part in the movie at all. there is another form on the word wolf is all i am saying.

I really enjoyed Loups-Garous but the story was extremely confusing and it had lots of gaps and that kind of annoyed me (so I got the book).
Story: The story is very intriguing and interesting but after some point things are just going too fast and a lot of information is merged into just one scene. Therefore many things don't make much sense and end up being very confusing.
Art: There wasn't anything exceptional about the art. I wonder if a more realistic art would have suited the script better but I really liked the character design.
Sound: I personally don't know much about sound but I thought ... it was good. There wasn't anything very memorable about other than the ending though.
Character: I really liked the characters in this movie. I found them very quite interesting actually. They all had some unique characteristic about them even though their personality was rather stereotypical. The main character though, Hazuki was quite different. Many people might find her annoying but I actually sympathized with her, she was standoffish, confused and didn't do much in the progress of the movie but I though that she matured throughout the story. Moreover, I think that she is portrayed in a very realistic way as a girl living in that society, in those circumstances and having the problems that she has.
Enjoyment: I really enjoyed the movie but I believe that the creators failed to recreate the story in the book in an understandable way. However that could simply be because of the limited time of the movie. I think the story should have been split in two or even three movies.

Ok... I guess it's kinda because i'm writing a review many years after the anime aired, but still it was 2010! (...) I can't help but feel disappointed... Because I have "survived" many older series that had better plot, soundtracks, art etc.

So when i started to read the wikipedia page about Loups=Garous it felt like an awesome anime. But the film doesn't mention viruses, an dystopic world or a post-apocalyptic one, you have to read the synopsis to realise that they are living in a "dystopic world where their faces must be covered" I didn't feel anything special about the characters, even though they ... met each other in person, i couldn't see anything from their facial expression that indicated that meetings like that was something unusual/ forbidden!
The film was quite slow and didn't felt like a mystery, thriller or something "dark." Instead the atmosphere was kinda happy, with cute "mascots" and pretty girls x)
The biggest problem i guess about the characters is that they don't start to evolve, i guess they are quite static, the main character can't do anything and always just stands there/ sits down -.- They don't have any depths, we don't know anything about their background... Sure we get a flashback, but it's still quite vague..
The only thing that i really liked was the "sound," perhaps it's because of the rocking soundtracks x)

The premise for the movie is compelling but the actual execution of it was not. The events didn't really seem to flow smoothly together and it felt like a lot of things were missing or unexplained, which left me confused and unsure of what the plot was. The supporting characters felt sort of one-dimensional, like they each had only one defining character trait, and the protagonist Makino didn't seem to have any character traits at all; it seemed like she was only there to tag along instead of having a clear role.

After reading the book that it was based on, I think the biggest mistake ... that the movie makers make was trying to adapt such a long book by cramming the contents into such a short time. The movie's art, soundtrack, and voice actors were nice so it's really disappointing how much it is dragged down by the amount of plot and characterization that is missing. The movie is is okay but I think it would have done better if they had tried adapting it into episodes instead.