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Mononoke is an experimental abundance of art, tragedy, horror and it dares to be different making it an interesting watch.

The art is by far the best aspect of Mononoke. All the clothes, surroundings and sometimes even faces are covered with color. On top of that there appears to be a grainy texture covering all of it which also doesn’t seem to move, as if a colorful drawing were to be covered with a transparent sheet with multiple scattered smudges of white and grey.

When the story of an arc fails to be mind blowing, the art makes up for it as I get lost ... in the beauty of the visuals. It was much like Gankutsuou but it had a more dispersed variety of color.

The stories of every arc are simple and some quite common but are packed with loads of emotions. But what makes them so different and great? Well, that’s where the Mononoke come in. The idea of Mononoke and a lot of mythical Japanese creatures make it seem like it’s very unique and makes it stand out a lot. None of the stories hold back and are brutal, dealing with the ‘harsh’ truth and many depressing realities of life although in a very exaggerated way.

The downfall of this anime is that it tires way too hard to show it’s viewers that it’s outrageous and sometimes forces the viewers to feel the emotions that it wants them too. It repeatedly drags things out and tries to make them as dramatic as possible to be extremely dark. It told more than it showed. It would have been even better if the darkness was conveyed mostly through their actions and the plot but it has a habit of repeating things in the form of dialogues or random sound effects to make the matter at hand obvious to the viewer so they recognize the unbelievable situation.

Each arc was however quite different from the previous one and each has it’s own speciality. What was best about them was that they completely absorbed me into the intense story. Each arc was nerve wrecking and I wouldn’t be able to look away for even a mere second. It told simple stories in a very hyped, complexed and brilliant way. The beauty of it lies not in what it had to say but how it said it.

I enjoyed it to a great extent though. It was as if reading about ancient Japanese folklore and it had this sense of mystery and suspense topped with stunning art and it’s own way of doing things.

We have all wondered about the possibility of a different outcome in our lives if another path had been chosen in the past. Our main character, Watashi feels the same way as he longs for the ‘rose colored campus life’ or a ‘raven-haired maiden’ none of which he possesses and so we embark on a journey of the many lives of Watashi as he struggles for the vague idea of what he thinks is happiness.
My attention had been gripped very tightly from the beginning due to the fast paced dialogue although at first it was a nuisance I was slowly able to appreciate the element ... and texture it added to the anime. Getting into this anime I was very skeptical of it as I feared that the repetition of it would be its doom. However I couldn’t be more wrong. Although this might seem like the case in the beginning, every episode is brilliantly layered and what appears to be the main character using a reset button to come to the same conclusion every time is actually utilized in a magnificent way.
In the second half the the pieces of the puzzle slowly start to come together and all the episodes begin to intertwine and we begin to see more sides of a character in each episode or slowly being to realize the symbolism or significance things might have held, ones we might have looked past before but it is nearly impossible to escape the realization of what they represent. The castella, the mochigum, the book Higuchi took forever to return, the ramen, the 4.5 tatami room.
I could go on and on and even though reading this you probably think I have given away everything and spoiled it for you, I have not. That is how incredible this anime is. Just when you think you have everyone’s motives or where this story is headed figured out, it throws something at you that completely changes what you had in mind. That is one of the greatest things about it, it never lets the viewer rest, it forces you to think harder and harder about what everything could mean, what conclusion it could come to. It experiments with Watashi’s psychological state in such depth that sometimes it feels like simple problems of a college kid and his life but at others it’s an unsolvable maze which has you perplexed trying to figure it out. My never ending praise for this anime might seem exaggerated but I am overwhelmed with emotions after watching it.

Upon entering this show you will also notice that the animation and art is uniquely strange to ones usually seen in anime and they were a huge contribution to making this show stand out. The music too was glorious. The opening is partly why I kept coming back to this anime with incomprehensible amounts of excitement. The quirkiness of the characters and the unfortunate failures of Watashi would flash through my head and I wouldn’t be able to help but smile when listening to it. The ending song was nice too.

It was a glorious ride and I command you to watch this anime or you shall be banished to a dungeon where all you get to eat is castella and fish burgers for an eternity.