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Eye Full of Horror Part 1-Introduction, Demon Prince Enma, The Drifting Classroom and Princess Resurrection

Anime Spotlight: When They Cry Volume 1 Released by Geneon

The live action Battle Royale started with a quick slap in the face. The infamous movie, in which a classroom full of students are forced into a last-person-standing death-match, established its maniacal sadism with a shot of the competition's previous "winner": a normal looking, kindof cute, innocent girl. Despite being covered in blood, she shines a cracked smile. And, the sharpest weapon held by When They Cry falls into that category. The appeal of the anime is the shock of seeing a fancifully animated young girl covered in her own blood or some one else's. It is the cute ideal ("moe" in anime terms) fractured into something frightening, and it's created from pieces that are more recognizably human than the stand-by of a Hello-Kitty like figure with her paws covered in blood. When They Cry's first scene is a horrible bludgeoning double murder. Diffused in an oil-slick haze, a teenage boy almost whimpers as he continues to strike the unmoving bodies of a pair of girls. As the pulsing irrationality and the literally twisted, literally splattering, brutality sinks in, the anime cuts to its psychedelic opening theme/credits. As if to detached the entirety from reality, kaleidoscopic flowers fill the screen, along with shots of a primordial forest and symbolism overloaded images like a girl in a kitsune/fox spirit mask. Once that opening divide has been breached, the anime shifts into a third perspective, a kindof bland, kindof cutesy anime imagining of regular life. When They Cry is sort of Love Hina crossed with Junji Ito's Tomie. At its best, a slight fictional/supernatural conceit taps through a homicidal breaking point. The petty power games of school life or an offhand slight irritate the fissures of deeper wounds and insecurities. Soon, needles are being hidden in food, strange drugs are being administered and the whole path leads to a victim driven to ripping out their own throat. A young guy moves into a new community. In this case, rather than being the lucky guy who moves into the girl's dorm/hot springs, he's in the isolated village of Hinamizawa, where he's the oldest male student in the town's one room school house. In this close knit community, he falls into a circle of female friends that includes an older chesty / rambunctious tomboy, the queen of cuteness, a demure girl from a proper upbringing and the rowdy wild child. The protagonist is explicitly warned about his new friends, but even before that, he starts receiving broad hints that his sitting on a time bomb. Emotionally, protagonist Keiichi Maebara is already veering wildly. He starts off at home almost archaically polite. By the time he makes it to school in the morning, he's passed through the role of screaming, put upon sap and tried to be cool. A bit of day in the life involves going on a picnic with the clingy Rena Ryugu, whose casual attire consists of a costume-like puffy dress. This picnic meeting showcases goofy speech mannerisms, dusted off old sight gags, eating jokes, and old-school, big head "super deformed" sequences. As the pastel colors of the characters in daylight fade into the orange hues of dusk, Keiichi and Rena drift to the garbage dump, where Rena has her heart set on digging out a KFC Colonel Sanders statue. Keiichi stumbles on a photographer, and caught off guard, jokes that Rena is looking for the dead body she buried. Without missing a beat, the photographer says "that was a terrible crime, they're still missing an arm." And just as quick as the anime turned serious, it steps back onto its joking footing. Keiichi's second cause for concern is his friends' love of games of wit. It starts with playing Old Maid with a deck of marked cards, a competition that results in Keiichi spending the afternoon with a magic-marker adorned face. The cheating sets a precedent, where the truth looks like a lie and vice versa. Disappoiningly, the anime passed a critical point without recalling this, but when the stakes didn't matter, Keiichi did demonstrate an admirable ability to adapt what looked like an unwinnable game. Whether this character turns into an active thinker remains to be seen. So far, his blindness in walking into the severe pitfalls has been a detriment to the series. When They Cry, originally Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (a name comprised of a number of multiple-meaning terms), was originally an interactive story PC game (referred to as a visual novel) produced by the amateur team 07th Expansion. There are moments in When They Cry in which a swooning character's effusive mannerisms will turn 180 degrees, from exaggeratedly pleasant to violently unhinged. Seeing that, and seeing how this televised anime shows the horrors of inhumanly violent crimes, and suggests even more,the anime is striking with its percussive beats. Though the story is built around mysteries, for viewers who might not be connoisseurs of the mannerisms of anime character types, much of the When They Cry experience is anticipating these revelations as drops on the horror roller coaster. When They Cry, like the similarly visual novel based Fate/Stay Night or Utawarerumono, has proponents that praise the richness of its story. However, there are qualities to visual novel based anime that detrimentally effect When They Cry. Often, there is a flat lead on which the viewer can project themselves. Often there is a cadre of characters around the lead who fall into his gravity and find themselves vying for his attention. The madness that grips the characters of When Whey Cry is a relatively gutsy move. You will not find many parallels, and as a result the series has justifiably earned a mythic quality. However, compare it to manga like Junji Ito's Tomie, the story of the homicidal emotions provoked by teenage girl who will reconstitute herself from her own murdered corpse. Here, the sense of human fragility and the volatility of teen uncertainty and hormone drive emotions, is a shadow of Ito's work. Working off the conventional visual novel character model, When They Cry's outlook does not approach the provocative politics or social agenda found in the classic works of horror manga. With a foundation that, so far, looks like a bit of mistrust of isolated people and places, mixed with "girls are scary; even/especially the ones that seem nice", the horror anime is in a sense conservative. The challenge to re-evaluate something larger than the anime itself never comes. Even when it effects the protagonist, it is external. The effectiveness of the anime's paranoia is despite underpinnings that are conventional or, ironically, safe. A raving girl carrying an axe is a just cause for panic. Some one who has lost the ability to reason and who is gripping an implement that could cause grave injury is an unnerving sight: scary to look at and scary to think about. However, it is rabid dog scary This is the brand of fear of contending with the unreasoning. Other than the fact that the threats are impaired through tempestuous emotions rather than being unthinking or undead, the function of When They Cry's menace almost acts like zombie horror. The added twist to When They Cry is that its characters are anime conceits, made to invoke other anime conceits, then held in front of a distorting mirror. When these characters are murderous, or even when they are just menacing, they are disconcerting. Killer clowns are a scary, nightmare inducing concept, but not one that has the advantage of broader implications. When They Cry could become a deeper show. It could allow the viewer to deduce something of the mystery. Keiichi could think through something more significant than joking competitions. And the anime could tie its drama to something with real relevance. It has the workings to approach the first two. It needs the third to work into the same level as classic horror manga, but so far, the anime has not suggested that that is an intension.