Anime Information

Forums

THIS IS AN ANIME ONLY DISCUSSION POST. DO NOT DISCUSS THE MANGA BEYOND THIS EPISODE.
----------------------------------------
Wow that was totally messed up. Yoko slept with her father to compensate for her mother being sick and unable to please her husband. Yoko gets preggos and has Kanako. Amemiya, Yoko's glasses b/f, wants to become a good father and wishes to bring Kanako everywhere when she gets over her sickness. His dedication turns into infatuation though. To the point where he asks for her arm and any other body parts to be preserved from her train accident at the beginning. He finds out that Yoko's father, the doctor, also preserved Kanako's head which, indecently can still talk thanks to the doctors invention, and he steals it....the rest all pieces together nicely.

I feel bad for Kiba, he really liked Yoko. You can see him crying as he hand cuffs her and reads her charges. Must have really sucked to find out the chick you loved had a kid with her own dad and then stabs you in the chest and runs off with him.

Funny how this entire show could have actually been good had it been condensed into a two-ep OVA.

Gorgeous art, shitty almost everything else. The characters were so one-dimensional it hurt. They tried so hard to make everything DEEPU and mysterious that 90% of the show turned into irrelevant monologuing. Not to mention huge plot points that don't make sense, at all. Protip: "This separated head can talk because of SCIENCE!!" is not actually an explanation, it's a cop-out.

By the end, none of the supposed 'twists' were surprising anymore, and even if they had been, I couldn't have given less of a shit. So Yoko is in love with her dad? Alright, why should that have any emotional impact on me, whatsoever?

If the art wasn't so pretty I'd have rated this far lower than 4/10.

I LOLED.

So...Kanako is still alive ? Or is she dead ? That guy said something about a men who carried everywhere with him a box. Inside that box he saw nothing more than a piece of black,dried flesh. Does that mean that Kanako's head eventually died and it continued to decay inside that box ?

If Kanako was ever even alive after the operation is left to our imagination.
In the end she was a comatose lump of flesh, the only thing still working was her brain.
When Kubo saw her head in the box on that trainride, I assumed that what we saw from Kanako was already only minor facial reflexes by the electric shocks that went through her and kept her blood pumping for a while.

Of course if you want to go the mystical way, then Kanako was of course alive (more beautiful than ever)...but that was, as far as I'm concerned, only in Amemiya's head where he wanted to stay a family with Kanako forever. He even failed to see how Kanako kept rotting away and turned into nothing more than dried up flesh.
That's the irony in the end, that Amemiya turned into such a lunatic, yet Sekiguchi, and I think many viewers too, were still envious how he was so totally happy with what he got.


Well, I don't know but I have no idea how they could have condensed the 1050 pages source novel even further without loosing everything in the process.

If it didn't work out for you that's okay, but I found the characters quite well evolved. Of course many of them (especially Sekiguchi) lack the depth that they get over the novel's course, but in the end it was a murder mystery and we weren't meant to know too much about them, so we could keep guessing what's going on.


Well, some see it as irrelevant monologuing, I see it as building up the theme of the story. It was all about the space in time (Japan around the 20's till the 50's) where science and legends mixed and formed both wonders and horrors. Many of the monologues served to flesh out how people felt about the world changing and how the old beliefs in religion, demons and ghosts held them back from fully embracing technology.
I mean your point

makes sense if you take things at face value, but many of the things in MnH happened from a very personal viewpoint. Like I already said, it's not sure wether Kanako was really alive at all at least after her head was taken away. Ah well, that was one thing that I found a bit distracting in the anime, because originally Kanako was in the same shape in that box as Kubo in the end...meaning everything above her stomach, except her arms, was still there...I think they changed that because the box would have been to big and it would have looked ridiculous on Amemiyas lap.
There are some things that work written that don't work on screen.

In the end it was a story how a group of people who still believed in the supernatural was drawn into such a tragedy by something simple as an experiment on life support.

I have to admit that I didn't know it was based on a novel, though that does explain some things, and I can see how the entire story could work FAR better when it's a long novel. As it was, I felt as if the show couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be supernatural horror, a drama or a murder mystery, which resulted in it not succeeding at any of those.



To me, there was absolutely no substance in it, so it didn't succeed in any theme-building either. But again, that's possibly something that could have worked with me had I been reading the novel, but as it was I found it far too slow, and far too shallow to interest me.



That's, once more, a cop-out to me. If you don't have rich, multi-layered characters, then you better make sure your plot is one that can draw people in. And I basically spent 12 episodes--minus the first moonlight-dancing ep--watching a bunch of cardboard cutouts stumble around in the dark, what little progress they ever made mostly done through out-of-the-blue revelations. It's lazy, incredibly unsatisfying storytelling. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters, much less about the case they were trying to solve.

A 1000-page novel can't be done justice with a 13-ep show, man.

YMMV.

I am so lost, I need either to read that novel or re-watch all 13 episodes

I must admit, if I hadn't read the first novel it's very likely the characters would have seemed one dimensional. When showing this to a friend a few months back, I had to fill in a lot of detail to show that Eno was so much more than the pretty boy they made him out to be.
I think this series was created specifically for people familiar Kyogoku's other work. An outsider would never have guessed that the book Vertigo Sekiguchi was writing throughout the story was an abstract telling of Ubume no Natsu, the whole ordeal he'd just gone through.

To be sincere I think that we were never meant to be sympathizing with those characters kind of like in crash. You don't associate yourself with those characters and you were never meant to be.

Quite an interesting explanation as to the whole mystery. I always knew there was something fishy about Yoko.

MY GOD, THAT WAS SOOOO DEEP!
4.5/10

Enjoyable overall, and a few things people have noted here from the novel helped clear up some concerns I had with this series. Other than a few subtle details cleared up here, it was fairly easy to follow... and I imagine that this adaption didn't do justice to the novel since some aspects/characters were rather shallow.

8/10

I loved it. It kept me guessing the entire way through... I even went back and re-read some of my "predictions" in previous threads, LOL HOW WRONG I WAS ABOUT NEARLY EVERYTHING!

For those still with questions, I found this article

http://www.iwanihana.info/2009/10/21/book-mouryou-no-hako/

on the source novel to be extremely helpful in clarifying some elements (e.g., Chuuzenji's power of words).

Character development in this series was sacrificed in order to get the story going for 13 episodes. The initial idea of the story and the way it was told was interesting enough but in the end it didn't become the masterpiece it could have been. Characters are one dimensional and their connections were too vague. It actually was trying too hard to be mysterious that it missed the chance to create well developed characters that you actually feel about or connect to. As a result all the final revelations ended up being bunch of info that we'd known beforehand or new info that we didn't care about that much. I have no idea how the novels are but this anime failed to impress me as much as I hoped it could.

I guess I could have predicted none of that based on the information I gathered from all the other episodes. Oh well it was an interesting show but it got really confusing then the whole two episode explanation at the end put it all together. The only characters I liked were Kiba and Yoriko (because of those cute braids I think), anyway the explanation episodes in the middle were kind of interesting but then it kind of seemed like it was just a lot of talking, they didn't really develop the characters after the first couple episodes and it all seemed like it was sacrificed for the explanations that for me barely helped out with the conclusions at the end.

Good anime but a bit confusing.

7/10.
This could have been a lot better if the characters were more interesting.I really hated the way Kyougokudou would lecture everyone around him with his eyes closed(liked the anime before he was introduced).
Disappointed is the best word to describe my feelings about this anime

Really interesting ending, took waaay too long to get there. I'm glad I didn't drop it though.

Ok. I watched it all, but still slightly confused.(srry) But what this is saying is...1.Kanako /was/ alive and had a living human body (and that her mother was her "sister" who slept with her dad) but was pushed into the train tracks by her friend Yuriko? and the her "guardian" wanted to keep her head so instead of trying to save Kanako, they chopped her up and put her head into an electrically charged box? XD The heck?!
And cause of that Yuriko died too? by the hands of someone...who was related to this how? Everyone in this series was obsessed with BOXES!

I finally came to understand the whole series!
It's worth rewatching it again.
It was a good series imo, the series is executed differently than the usual mystery series. The animation was superb.

But the one thing I would have liked to see would be an actual ritual of the onmyouji... >>

The incest part saved the series for me.

7/10