Cinnamon Ass

OP - Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (Eiko Shimamiya) - I’ve-tastic! Actually, I really like this song (it has random chanting, of course I do…), and the OP is awesome (as I’ve come to expect from most Studio Deen shows) - it’s really freaky and well directed in their usual “grainy music video” style.

ED - why, or why not (Hiroyuki Oshima) - Hiroshi Watanabe HAD to get in somewhere, didn’t he? The song is an abysmal, saccharine, Engrish ballad, so I’ll pretend this doesn’t exist.

Hinamizawa Village, Showa Year 58 (1983). We open with a boy beating two girls to death with a club and looking distinctly deranged. Nice.

Of course, we then go into the episode proper, and Keiichi Maehara wakes up and meets his childhood friend Rena, and quite quickly everything comes across as a harem show; we’ve got a whole host of girls with randomly coloured hair that Keiichi hangs around with and they’re all either painfully quiet or tsundere.

But then there’s some more interesting stuff - Rena drags Keiichi off to a rubbish dump where she’s searching for a lost toy doll when he meets an odd cameraman, Jiro Tomitake, who tells him about some bizarre murders that happened in Hinamizawa where all they found left was an arm. Keiichi later comes across a newspaper report of these murders, and then Rena starts wandering around with a hatchet smiling evilly.

Eh?

I’m really in two minds about Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. First off, the character designs are crap; it’s hard to believe this is the same Studio Deen that made Type-Moon’s unwieldy character designs work so well for Fate/Stay Night, as these ones look amateurish and silly (the colour palette doesn’t help, I suppose, and obviously it’s a different team; I think the Jigoku Shoujo staff probably moved onto this project, it looks and feels quite similar). The standard harem-ish elements like the game of Old Maid they all play (which, in a nicely ironic twist, is called “Demon” in Japan; of course, the whole point of the game is to avoid the hidden demon, a la the episode title…) and the slightly forced comedy do nothing for me either.

But damn, I’m interested.

Mysterious murders, harem girls with murderous hatchets/odd disfiguring marks on their backs/kitsune masks (thanks to the OP… I have a feeling that I’d love the plot if I stuck with this show. Also, is there any actual reason for the “na” of “naku” in the title to be red, or is it just to look pretty?

I’m tentatively keeping up with this show; as long as they don’t kill the story with pacing problems like the Type-Moon adaptations (as much as I enjoyed Tsukihime…) and emphasise the murder and intrigue over the happy-go-lucky stuff, it’ll appeal to the morbid weirdo in me!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 8:26 am and is filed under Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.