Story Concept
Somewhere in Japan, we have a little town in the middle of nowhere called Yomiyama（夜見山）which is your plain, rural town. Then we have the protagonist, Sakakibara Kouichi（榊原恒一）, which is a guy with a disease called pneumothorax, which is why he goes to Yomiyama. Or maybe he went because his father was working in a research in India…? Well whatever it is, it’s not actually the focus of the series (I think). The thing is, he’s transferred to a Middle School in Yomiyama, and that’s where the story actually begins. The issue with the classroom that he gets transferred to is, it’s a cursed classroom. Meaning, real gruesome deaths of adolescents because of the curse. Anyway, we also have Misaki Mei（見崎鳴）, a heroine loli that has deep meaning in the story. And she has an eye-patch. There are also a whole cast of classmates, their relatives and the protagonists’ relatives, but of course I won’t name all of them. Specially because they are not that important anyway.
Now then, the concept of a cursed classroom would not be bad, until the moment you notice that it makes no sense to have a dozens of deaths of children (and their relatives) from the same classroom and nobody actually giving a crap. Well that’s what happens on Another. For some reason, every death goes unnoticed by everyone besides the characters of the story, as if it’s a given that, if you are in a cursed classroom and you might die, you have to keep on that classroom. Couldn’t the school just close down and the students go live in Another city? Noticed the lame pun?
What I’m trying to say is, the anime itself states that you the curse only affects those in the perimeter of the town, so yes it would be completely okay to blow up the whole school building. It can’t be that it’s the sole school in the whole town. But then, maybe I’m misunderstanding the concept of the curse, and it would actually pass on to the next classroom/next school building. Whatever is the “rules” of that game, it feels stupid anyway when you have a dozens of children and 3, 4 adults in a situation of life and death every god damned year and still no one in the rest of the city ever realizes or helps. It’s as if it’s a secret. Now that’s something I take my hat off for Shiki; even being the slightly rushed adaptation that it was, it had that awesome moment when the villagers finally realized and accepted the truth of what was happening, and reacted to it. In a gruesome manner. Anyway on to the next part.
Art Concept
It’s anime, so I believe it goes without saying how the characters’ art concept is. And yes, sometimes the art gets really bad, and you can easily spot deformed characters in the background. Or maybe it was intentional for the freaky effect?
The scenarios are okay, actually. I’m no art specialist and I actually don’t have much of an opinion, but I don’t remember backgrounds being bad.
On a fast note (since I’ll be talking about this on a special part), the deaths have no censoring as far as I recall, so yea lots of blood on your screen… Sometimes a bit too much. Not that this is a bad thing, of course.
Audio Concept
I am, once again, no specialist in this audio thingy, but I can tell you that, being death as the nature of the anime, it has really dull and unimpressive BGMs throughout the whole time, except when someone’s dying. Usually you get a really drastic change of music, which may or may not scare you (mostly for it’s 140% increase in volume), and that music is usually fitting for the death scene. Wait, I like the ring “Death Scene” has. From now on I’ll be referring to the deaths as Death Scenes.
Death Scene Concept
Let’s be frank out of the bat. Most of the Death Scenes are ridiculous, not to say obvious. I mean, the protagonist talks to a girl that has no name (or at least is not important at all, because I don’t remember it) beside a truck with a big window glass on it… Oh, don’t forget the glass was not fastened on anything. Yep, the moment you see it, you’ll immediately notice a Death Scene is coming― except it had no death! What a combo breaker, for a series that kills a character per episode.
Death Scenes, besides being quite weird and ridiculous, are also forcibly gruesome. In most Death Scenes, the dying character will agonize and agonize, and you don’t know if you should smirk at the silliness or be horrified at the fact the Death Scenes are actually well-looking (as in, good art) while the plain scenes are not. Well, I just generalized. Like I said in the Art Concept part, it’s not a bad-looking anime. It just suffers the same problem as every other anime: low budget. So they pay more in the Death Scenes, and less in the other scenes. Happens all the time. Anyway off to the next section.
Living Zombies in the (Burning) Cursed Inn!! (some spoilers here, you’ve been warned)
…Yea I just wanted to go for a weird name. Truth be told, most of Another was the horror of “dying at any time, being hopeless before death”, which might also be the sole redemption of the show itself. But then, because of story details I can’t spoil, you get a whole classroom of students walking like zombies (not in the literal sense) around the inn, trying to kill you with brooms and… whatever happens to be in their hands. Of course I understand the purpose was to show what a human being can do when facing imminent death but… please, could you walk like you actually want to kill? Felt really preposterous when dozens of students started to close in around the protagonists like zombies. Or maybe I’m just out of the loop and zombies are really fast? I haven’t really played any new zombie games after Resident Evil 4 (lol quite some time, I know).
And then, on the very last episode, we get the epitome of nonsensical happenings and a exploding inn. By the way does that inn have gasoline inside it's walls or something? I can't see Another way (Another pun!) to have it so explosive. Even the lightnings were overboard, and in the very end I expected more of a drama than what we get. To be honest, there's not much to say about the last episode; it's just weird. Well, I've seen worse, and I'm sure everyone did, too, but that doesn't mean I should just say it's fabulous. Because it wasn't.
Conclusion
This anime doesn’t deserve more than 6/10. It does have it’s ups and downs, but it quite lost it's way twisting around the mystical and the horror, and in the end I would've been happier if the protagonist went Chris Reddfield mode and shoot everyone in the head while running around the explosive mansion with his girl. Oh yea that would've been one awesome ending. Nothing like sarcasm to finish a review. :P
