Cinnamon Ass - Reborn Like a Zombie

Monster Episode 1 - Herr Dr. Tenma

Brief note before I start - for all the new shows I start on, I'll put a brief comment on the OP and ED. Maybe even video downloads for a short time, if you're lucky and I bother finding the raws.

Opening - Grain - fantastic. Spooky chanting and treble(?) singing with a creepy industrial-sounding drumbeat and downbeat visuals perfectly capturing the dark mood of the show - I'm wondering who the small boy that appears in the bloody silhouette is between Eva and Anna, unless it's supposed to be Johan. Perhaps slightly spoilery for the first few episodes, though.

Ending - for the love of life (David Sylvain) - languid English vocals and a picture of a "monster". Bit dull, but fitting I suppose.

I found only one other anime blogger watching this, so I must announce its glory to the world at large if anyone bothers reading this. Monster is based on the circa 20 volume manga series by Urasawa Naoki, the original artist for the anime series Master Keaton and Yawara!. Monster is a labyrinthine tale of conspiracy and human evil - I've only read a couple of volumes of the manga, and I don't plan on reading any more given the quality of the series thus far.

It's 1987. Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a leading brain surgeon at Dusseldorf Hospital with his life going great - he's on the way up through the higher echelons of beauracracy, his girlfriend is his boss's daughter, and he's just won massive acclaim for operating successfully on a famous opera singer. However, he faces a crisis of conscience when he meets the wife of the man he SHOULD have operated on that night before he was forced to operate on the opera singer. This causes him to disobey the director's orders to operate on the Mayor when a young boy is brought into the hospital after a grisly serial killing at his home. Yet why does the boy's twin sister, incapacitated with shock, only say the word "kill"?

The series is scheduled to run for around 80 episodes, and as such is pretty glacially paced. You can see where it's going though, especially from the OP sequence, and it's SO worth the wait. The first episode perfectly captures the first couple of chapters of the manga, with lovely animation and fitting music. Definitely a keeper, although it'll be difficult for me to keep up with it at such length - I pray the DVD release goes to someone with a decent episode count per disc, because judging by the first episode I'll be picking this up for certain.

Posted by BluWacky at April 18, 2004 06:01 PM