Kara no Kyoukai Part 2
Flashback time, y’all. We return to Shiki and Mikiya’s high school days, when Shiki was a schizophrenic serial killer and Mikiya was…well, the same as ever, really. This film in a nutshell is Shiki killing some people to stop them exposing that she’s schizophrenic, and Mikiya not believing it’s her until she tries to kill him.
Whilst this film is significantly less pretentious than the first part and much clearer about what’s going on, it’s significantly more boooooring. For all of the fancy playing around with chronology Kara no Kyoukai’s been doing it still can’t disguise the rather flimsy storytelling - this part feels extremely padded, with endless slightly cryptic conversations that mostly say the same things over and over again.
It also reiterates how phenomenally stupid Mikiya is. I can get that he’s blinded by love or whatever so that he thinks that Shiki can’t be behind the murders, but when she repeatedly tells him that she (or rather her “male” personality) is the killer he just point-blank refuses to believe her for no real reason. It doesn’t help that the story tries and fails to present Shiki’s precarious psychological state as being something more supernatural; she’s just a homicidal maniac, really, and it’s hard to really get behind a character as cold and messed up as she is.
The same positives from the first episode apply here - it looks beautiful, the acting’s great, Kajiura plops more of her atmospheric identikit compositions in at the right times. The animation isn’t as interesting (there’s a lot of Mikiya running like a spazz, but it’s not particularly exciting), but I suppose with the director changing every episode we’re always going to get a slightly different atmosphere.
I will, of course, still watch the third movie, because I want to see what the point of this whole thing is (and the trailer makes it look good, which is probably bollocks but we’ll have to wait and see). Maybe it all works better as a book, I don’t know.
June 29th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
…i tried to have spoiler tags in that last comment, but failed horribly. Please delete it and try to forget it ever happened. Very sorry. >_
June 29th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
It’s deleted.
But an interesting spoiler. Not a major one, but an interesting one.