Anime Thought: Another
Oct. 31st, 2015 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOctober seemed the appropriate month to watch something scary, so I dug into my piles of anime and located my Blu-Ray set of Another. It was one more of the cheap Sentai releases I take a chance on sight unseen to fill out orders to the international free shipping threshold when what comments about them I do happen to notice seem more positive than anything. My attention might have focused on it because I'd "doubled down" on its story by also buying the manga adaptation of the original novel, collected in a thick volume by Yen Press.
The series did seem able to make the everyday settings of its small-town location subtly disquieting to start with without laying "backwater decay" on; the bursts of grand guignol to establish the curse at the heart of the horror also fit in their own way. Beyond that, though, I did come to think the story managed to set up some expectations and then force me to face other possibilities without sudden reversals, and in that I can think I can't say too much more without giving things away. I did in any case reflect a bit on the white eyepatch bandage of the important character Mei Misaki, having previously understood it to be a minor fetish in other anime series only to then see it made a joke in "Love, Chunibyo, and Other Delusions."
Aware this story began as a novel, I sort of shrugged off lengthy discussions of just what the enigmatic rules of the curse might be as inherited from the original, and wondered how they would come across and maybe be clarified by repetion in the manga. In thinking that, I did seem to accept the series as indeed appropriate to the month.
The series did seem able to make the everyday settings of its small-town location subtly disquieting to start with without laying "backwater decay" on; the bursts of grand guignol to establish the curse at the heart of the horror also fit in their own way. Beyond that, though, I did come to think the story managed to set up some expectations and then force me to face other possibilities without sudden reversals, and in that I can think I can't say too much more without giving things away. I did in any case reflect a bit on the white eyepatch bandage of the important character Mei Misaki, having previously understood it to be a minor fetish in other anime series only to then see it made a joke in "Love, Chunibyo, and Other Delusions."
Aware this story began as a novel, I sort of shrugged off lengthy discussions of just what the enigmatic rules of the curse might be as inherited from the original, and wondered how they would come across and maybe be clarified by repetion in the manga. In thinking that, I did seem to accept the series as indeed appropriate to the month.