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.