Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

Summary: alternately super-cute and hideously disturbing, deep plot
Based on: 51 episodes
Series info: at Anime News Network

This refers to Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai (season 2). A third season is on the way. It consists of a series of arcs, all of which center on the same time period (June 1983) but act out differently.

Higurashi manages to violate the game anime sucks rule. It’s based on a series of games, manga, and light novels whose story is much deeper than any anime usually manages, so it doesn’t suffer because of it. It also violates the one episode rule and harem rules: based on the first episode you would think this was just a low budget school harem anime. But it slowly starts undermining your certainty, and by episode 8 this was the most intense and disturbing anime I’ve ever seen.

The first three arcs basically leave you hanging, asking questions about what’s going on. What’s with the Groundhog Day thing, and why are these cute school kids going violently insane? After that you start getting some answers. Higurashi Kai gets a significant animation upgrade but is significantly less disturbing and intense as (almost) all your questions are answered.

Be warned: there is intense gore and brutal slayings, and even torture of young children.  For this reason it’s often compared to Elfen Lied, another anime with excessive gore and killing, but they’re only the same if you’re a kid who can’t tell the difference in purpose – they are in service of different goals. Still, if you have a weak stomach you may not be able to get through this. Or maybe the bad animation in season one will turn you off.

There are three things that cause this series to exceed the usual anime tropes:

First, the characters and the series itself are unreliable narrators. This alone makes it a different animal. You have no idea how much confusion this causes on anime message boards, since kids used to being spoon-fed plot don’t even have the concept of not being able to trust the anime. The furthest anime usually goes is hiding secrets from you then suddenly revealing them, or the ’surprise’ revelation that The Church of Foobar which everyone reveres is really an evil organization. This series will outright lie to you. In particular, the ending of season one reveals a ’secret’ that is so stupid that some people give up watching. Rather you should think about it yourself. And the first arc… well I can’t say more without spoiling it to much. Draw your own conclusions.

Second, it will lull you into complacency with your own complicit knowledge of the anime tropes. These exist as a useful shorthand between the author and viewer but are also by definition cliche. This series knows that can be subverted – these cliches go right to your brain, bypassing your defenses. It will tug at your heartstrings and instill sympathy for a character, then slowly ramp up the heinous acts the character commits, all in a somewhat reasonable progression, and ask you if you still sympathize. After a while the impact is lessened because you know this is coming, so the second season is unfortunately much more direct.

Third, it lets you do a lot of the detective work yourself if you want to. There are hints planted from the beginning andyou can figure out yourself what’s going in in a lot of cases before it’s revealed in later arcs, but only if you want to do the work. If you can’t, then eventually it will tell you (which I actually found disappointing).

Yes, there are flaws: the first season animation is shoddy, there is a lot of fanservice and resort to cliches during the ‘cute’ phases, sometimes the ‘power of friendship’ thing is too pat, it eventually tells you too much that should have remained implied, and the penultimate episode of Higurashi Kai exceeds even my believability threshold for the ‘elite military squad’. But this still remains the most disturbing, intense anime I’ve ever seen.