I highly disliked this film.
It was around the beginning of my middling anime watching experience. I have watched a range of others before it - Sailormoon, Rurouni Kenshin, X-1999, Eva, Magic Knight Rayearth, etc. - and at the time I thought this would have been interesting change of pace, considering the rave reviews it got, online and off. However, when I watched it, it did not please me.
Okay, first things first. The art is very good for its time and realistic. I don't particularly enjoy this particular style but I do acknowledge it is done with skill and suit the subject matter. However, some scenes became all the more sickening, in a mental way, and made the film feel harsher to me as a viewer because of the style used. The music was alright, I took no pleasure in it but it added to the mood and was suspenseful when it was supposed to be and gripping when it needed it. The story was decent, except that it was highly convoluted and the subject matters it took on were difficult and did not allow me to enjoy any element of it.
The characters, to me, were not accessible and hard to sympathize with. Or you sympathize but it's just painful. Their actions and the actions of the general ppl in the story were constantly brutal, usually with blatant sexual violence, but it was fairly one-sided, leaving me with no room to describe the experience with "enjoy" or "like". I also did not like how loneliness became shameful and criminal, and seemed to be a theme that had no other dimension... maybe delusional... but nothing that just is. Everyone get lonely, I don't understand how EVERYONE becomes warped by this isolation. It's like the movie is crying out that isolation, from society and others, will always lead to the path of deviants. At least, this is the impression I get from it since the clearest recall I have of this all lead to some form of eventual criminal deeds. The story was also convoluted enough and the characters were shown in such a way that I only felt I was taking bad things from it because it only had bad things to give. I can see the darkness in society but it was almost like the world was devoid of any goodness and decency, or at least, it is so overshadowed by falsehood and madness that it can't be counted on to be real. When I think on this anime I only vividly remember the terrible sexual violence, the humiliation and fear of the main character and the villains. These are not things I want to take away from anything I watch but these are the ONLY things I feel I took away from this film, at least they overshadowed all else.
The main character only resounds with me at the ending act, but fails to connect me to her throughout the movie as a shining light and more as a constant victim that struggled... somewhere that doesn't feel like triumph and isn't exactly defeat. I don't enjoy watching an entire movie about someone who is defined by the entire show as a victim, and while some people may feel she overcame her obstacles, I did not feel that way at the end of it.
Was it a well done anime? Visually, yes. But did I enjoy it in any way, no. I can only think on this anime and say I really hated watching it. I don't mean it bored me, I mean I disliked the characters and were genuinely disgusted at points in the story, I did not enjoy the story in any way, and in the end, it just leaves a bad impression in my mind as a whole.
I would not watch or recommend this anime. It is a singular opinion, but I did not feel that the marriage of crime to surrealism in this case worked for me in anyway. And well I can stomach violence and human folly, this one was the entirely wrong mixture for me to like or even feel tolerably toward.
I gave it a 3, on the merit that it was well made but having seen it and processed it, I did not in any way enjoy the story it had to tell or the way it was told.
