Hello Harinezumi: Satsui no Ryoubun

"Hello Hedgehog: Domain of Murder" is an oldie detective short-film, being an adapted story from the manga. Although it's old, the art style is proportioned well and still looks good - taking on a look similar to Naoki Urasawa's art. The animation is also good and rarely wavers in quality control, while there is moments of stuttering due to not enough frames at times. The sound work is good to the ambiance and the soundtrack is also fair, with older music styles at times. A dub was created for this, surprisingly, and it's even more surprising how good it is. I went the dub route ... and could definitely say it's not the wrong way to go, as there isn't one "ill-served" actor (random quote from section on this anime from "The Anime Encyclopedia, 3rd Revised Edition: A Century of Japanese Animation"). There is also no try-hard voice actors that speak out of a natural state (besides some brief workers), which deserves extra points. The characters of this short are also well-realized some of the time, featuring moments of interaction that feel genuine and are interesting just with that in mind - even if nothing much were going on. The mystery of the story is interesting too in what it leads to, and in some of the turns that come along the way, but the story is also in a way the weakest part of this short.

With some believable characters and good English actors, it was just a shame that the detective case itself didn't end up with the same genuine taste in the mouth. The issue with it is that there are far too many assumptions that lead to the case's resolution. Some of these assumptions that are made are also inherently based on nothing, and are even biased into making one think a certain way about a situation that a detective should still be critical about - not finding every possible twist to lead the conclusion in the direction they see the culprit's motives and mentality from personal feelings. However, the assumptions do go in the detective's favor of course, but I never really felt impressed by his work. The only thing the detective really did as a solid move forward was finding a person related to the suspect to get information, along with finding an explanation for an angle of a wound. From there, further information was given by that same related person when it benefited moving the story forward - one moment literally being the related person to the suspect calling the detective right as the growing thought of a potential turn to the case brews in his mind, only happening to solidify his hunch for him to move forward with it. That type of scenario happens twice, but that isn't the only type of victorious assumption that is made. Two other assumptions are literally never backed with anything and are simply of the detective rebuilding scenarios in his mind to understand what happened - but with no real evidence to lead to his twisted conclusion of supporting how he hopes everything will turn out. There is also one, without a question, stupid decision that is made by the detective and the police near the end - and it happens so continuously that I almost want to say it was multiple stupid decisions. This decision leads to a bad situation that could've been prevented, but evidently leads into a nice conclusion with regards to why the whole case happened. And while that conclusion does feel good at being conclusive, the previous out-of-nowhere stupid decisions leading to it make it feel potent of contrivances. I would say some of the assumptions leading to developments as fueled by contrivances as-well, with regards to random information being fed from nowhere to make new thoughts feel plausible real-time.

Overall, "Hello Hedgehog: Domain of Murder" was enjoyable and in-a-way better than I thought. I have been looking for something like "Monster" for quite a while and can safely say this isn't that, although the similar art style was nice along with the surprising work that went into this in visuals and voices. I feel that more adaptations of this manga would've been cool as there is no telling if there's better stories than this, but even if this were the average level - a show like that would still be enjoyable.

Domain of Murder is an interesting anime to say the least. The audience is somewhat thrown into the story and are given the same clues to work with as the private investigator which I thought was pretty fair. As a 'psychological' anime it does fulfill that role and deals with some serious questions about the grey area of morality (specifically analyzing the concept of sacrifice to save another) and by the end you are left with the general message that the decisions we think are easy may end up being ones we regret for the rest of our lives, which is pretty damn psychologically mind ... boggling for a half hour movie. However, the movie had its ups and downs from the start.

The art style is what you would expect of for an anime of this era so there are no complaints on that front, and the sound is a bit grainy but again, expected. The characters are fairly enjoyable, unique from each other, and have intriguing goals/motives that the audience can tell from the short amount of screen time they had. Now here comes the bad news - they completely blew the arc of the story. Just as things were coming together and the mystery was getting deeper, one character suddenly reveals a VERY important detail that they "forgot" to mention earlier, despite how very clearly important it was to the case. Not only this, but that fragment of the case could've been revealed in several different ways, but for the character to brush it off like "oh right I forgot to tell you that the killer told me who his next target was" is a *little* frustrating on its own, let alone how nonchalantly the character brings it up. This struck me as a lazy way of keeping the plot going but at the very least the movie didn't end on that note.

The climax of the anime takes place in a theme park and was genuinely well played out in terms of twisting your mind and sort of making you sick/sad. To be as general as possible, they bring in two snipers who claim they aren't capable of taking the shot, the one man who doesn't want to take it is the only one who knows he can, and the decision of whether to pull the trigger is left to a character who thought the decision would be much easier said than done. The wrap up shortly after the climax is a bit too mushy for my taste but I'm hard to impress when it comes to endings.

Overall, I think it was worth the watch! I give it a 6 out of 10 because, though I found it intriguing as a whole, I wouldn't place it as one of the best I've ever watched. I'd definitely recommend it to those who enjoy this style of anime or perhaps a sample of psychological anime for those who are wondering if they might like the genre, but don't want to sit through an entire series.