Another

Horror is a genre that many people seemed to be enthused with. Between the suspense of what might happen next or the jump scares that some movies use,or the combination of both, it is a very appealing genre. However, there are times when the suspense makes little to no sense or the jump scares are used so much it is repetitive and boring. The anime Another tries too hard to be suspenseful and while in some cases it succeeds, it doesn't quite get there.



The anime Another starts off with a kid named Sakakibara Kouichi that moves to the small town of Yomiyama due an issue with his lungs. At the hospital he is staying at,he meets up with a girl named Misaki Mei, a girl who is abnormally quiet and wears an eye patch over her left eye. When he transfers into the local school's class 3, Misaki Mei is in the class, but no one seems to notice her, even when he tries to draw attention to her. However, people in the class and their family members start dying from freak accidents, and as it turns out class 3 is cursed due to an extra person showing up on the class roster who in actuality is dead and it is up to class to figure out who is dead in order to stop the calamity. One of the charms used to keep the calamity from happening is for the class to make the class roster numbers right by acting like a person in the class does not exist, whether they're the ones that are dead or not.

The plot of this anime has so many holes it is not even funny. First of all, they say they can't ever get the desk count right at the beginning due to the person appearing randomly,and the fact that when the person does show up, memories get altered, but yet they know an extra person will appear. Another plot hole is the fact they even said in the anime and in the manga this curse is like a cell phone to a cell tower: if you move away from the town, the curse has little to no effect on you and almost everyone knows rumours of this curse though no one is allowed to know specifics outside class 3,so why don't the local people move out of the town? Also the part of no one allowed to know specifics is annoying because literally for the first five episodes Sakakibara is not allowed to know the exact curse but trying to find out because his classmates would not tell him the curse.  You can not tell someone in a show for a god amount of time with out sounding like complete idiots, and that's what happened in this show: his class mates not telling the information and basically being sketchy about was intriguing at first,but got redundant real fast. Worst yet, Misaki Mei knew who the dead person was,and she doesn't say anything.

The art of Another is actually pretty decent, given the abnormal amount of plot holes. The characters are well drawn, though my only complaint is yes you have your two main characters, but amongst other anime, the character designs are not unique. If you try to make the case for Misaki Mei, I might give you that one, but only because Takanashi Rikka's from Chunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai eye patch is on her right eye,nother left.  Another weird thing I noticed about the animation is at the beginning of the anime,the animation does random cuts to pictures of creepy dolls. This is not a SHAFT work, so the random cuts literally did nothing for me because at least SHAFT uses them tastefully; Another uses to the point I actually had to wonder if my video player was glitching.

The characters, like their designs, were not distinguishable or interesting. Misaki Mei is the most interesting character, and she doesn't even have that much of a presence. The classmates of Mei and Kouichi try their best to be interesting, but it turns into their bland and forgettable. In this anime everyone follows a ridiculous stereotype i.e. Misaki Mei is the quiet mysterious girl, Sakakibara is the boy that moves to a small town to recover from illness, the class representative, Akazawa, is a tsundere in a twisted sort of way. I do think this anime suffered from what I have to call "Game of Thrones Syndrome": Do not get too attached to the characters because they might die in the next episode.

Overall, I admit, I enjoyed the anime if only for the plot holes and the ridiculousness of the deaths. If I have taken any one thing away from this anime is the fact that panic will make people do things that are outside of their normal character. Otherwise, this anime,while it was trying to be serious, it became laughable by the end of how bad it actually was.

C³~CubeXCursedXCurious~

It is a given that every season needs an anime with a loli in it. It is almost undeniable fact. In the Winter 2011, it was the loli, Fear, who brought love to our hearts. Her story is unusual, for being a type of yandere loli, as well as a bit of tsundere. Her past is dark and bloody, and her friends' pasts seem to be equally so. C³ is a tale of despair, curses, magic, and perhaps some blood shed.

The story starts out with Yachi Haruaki, your normal teenage boy, living at home (because kids seem to do that a lot in Japan now a days), just living the normal life. One day, a package arrives from his father, a cube of some sort. He puts the cube in his house, only the next morning to discover a naked girl has now taken the cube's place. She seems to know nothing of how the world works, though she is trying her best to learn the ways of the world, even if it leads to her destroying the house in the process. One of Haruaki's friends, Muramasa Konoha discovers the girl, and rivalries ensue, of course in a harem like fashion. As it turns out, along with Konoha and Fear, it seems that sometimes curses take human form. It is revealed that Konoha can transform into a sword and is able to be used by Haruaki in order to defeat the bad guys, and Fear is the human form of the Black Cube, a torture device, and her weapon is the cube of which she is named. She can use over twenty different torture devices, but wishes to be rid of the curse. The anime follows Fear, Haruaki, Konoha, and later Ueno Kirika, the mysterious class president, in their adventure of cursed objects, and protecting, and hoping ridding the objects of the curse.

The art in C³ is actually rather quirky, but in a good way. Sometimes, the color shades will change on you, just like in a SHAFT production or like Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. With that, the art work also tends to shift to what they are talking about, like when Fear mentions the fact Konoha has bigger boobs than her, they show her boobs in a way that is sort of mocking. Also, they tend to handle the serious situations with serious art work, and the light hearted ones with lighthearted artwork, such as flowers and over expressionate faces.  The art work, with the mood and quirkiness, is very consistent and fluid.

As basically a harem anime, each girl sort of fell into a stereo-type. Haruaki is one of these male leads that had some unknown power that seems to draw the girls in, and looks like just like every other male lead in existances: Brown hair and brown eyes. Konoha takes the role of the child hood friends, and also the sort of the main girl that Haruaki would pursue. Kirika is the definite tsundere, being that some of the stuff that Haruaki does kind of turns her on, but it comes out as fustration. Fear is definite tsundere, but she is a loli tsundere, meaning that, like Kirika, she get turned on in the same way, but she is too adorable about it. Also, she is sort of a yangire, due to her dark past and the fact she is a torture device.

The characters I think could have done with a bit more development. For example, I want to know more back story on Fear, and i thought I could see some more, besides the fact she was a machine used for killing and torture, but they kept adding new characters, like Sovereignty and Shiraho. It seemed as with the case with Sovereignty, even though her arc was done, I still felt incomplete with her character, and the characters that were introduced at the end hardly had any development. For a character cast like this, they probably needed to extend the anime to twenty-four episodes, or perhaps a second season. But as the loli of the series, Fear was very funny, where as the other characters were amusing, but didn't have me laughing like Fear did.

On the musical side of things, the first opening theme was amazing. The way Fear sort of danced at the beginning was super cute, and well coordinated. The same goes for the second opening, though with Kirika was more elegate than cute, but all the same, well coordinated. The songs for both will most likely end up on my iPod due the cuteness of the first, and the darkness of the second. Also, the voice acting was well done, especially Fear's "I'll curse you!" is super cute.

Overall, it is an excellent watch, despite what people might say. Lolis, cursed objects, and some what of a harem make this an excellent anime, though thankfully they don't concentrate too much on the harem aspect, just mostly the cursed object. Also, a word of advice when watching this anime: Watch until after the credits, some hilarious stuff happens then.