Another

Irina

7 years ago

Genre : Horror, Supernatural, Mystery
Episodes: 12
Studio: P.A. Works

Koichi is starting to notice something strange about his new high school. Since his father had to take a job overseas, he was sent to live with his grandparents and attend his mother’s old high school but had to start late due to illness. Now it seems there’s an invisible girl in his class. Why is he the only one to see her? Does she have the power to make herself invisible? Has Koichi’s illness affected his mind? Nope, none of that… I didn’t really know how to make a spoiler free summary…. There’s blood – lotsa blood!

I hate to admit it but I’m that jerk. You know the one. The one that really likes horror movies but is such a coward that they either talk through the whole thing making dumb jokes to break the tension or spend the entire time flinching at literally everything. Also the type that then doesn’t sleep for a week and constantly complains about it. My friends are saints – I don’t deserve them. Keeping all that in mind, a while ago I decided that I was really in the mood to watch a horror anime, at home, alone (my dog is also a saint) – and set out to find a good one:

What I did find is that there isn’t exactly an overabundance of choice when it comes to this particular genre. My friend google kept coming up with the same handful of titles and “Another” was available on Crunchyroll. It was as exhaustive selection process. Having a modicum of self-awareness, I turned on every single light in the house, got all my most ghost-proof blankets together, grabbed something sweet for good measure and got ready to cower in terror while lamenting my poor decision-making skills.

Another starts off promisingly enough. The visuals aren’t exactly notable but they’re not bad either. There’s a hot girl with an eyepatch of power, so I was pretty stoked about that. The set-up is appropriately unsettling and really had me wondering what the hecks was going on and who/what exactly Mei was. The slow burn of those first episodes did a great job hiking up the tension and in my opinion this is when Another is at its strongest.

After the first “reveal” – which is really more of an exposition dump to explain to Koichi, and by extension the audience, the actual premise of the story – the narrative becomes more of a mystery in structure, as the characters start trying to unravel past secrets in an attempt to escape their fates. There’s a reason why this anime has been compared to Final Destination so much – there are indeed quite a few similarities, but Another tries to incorporate some “poltergeist” in there as well. As far as horror narratives go, much like the art and animation, it’s hardly anything exceptional but it serves its purpose. Unfortunately, the slow pace and long silences of the first act, are kept through this part of the story as well and are much less effective once the details are known. Rather that add to the creepy atmosphere, they seem to drag the show down and some of those middle episodes got sort of boring.

Personally, I think they should have just crammed in more gore, which is something that Another handles spectacularly. The deaths which start soon after we get an idea of what’s happening, are for the most part very disturbing and quite sensational. I am as desensitized to violence as the next guy and I have zero issues with blood (it’s ghosts that are scary) but I was peaking at these scenes through my fingers and holding my breath until they were over. Trust me, these are some intense sequences. If you’re not affected at all, you should probably talk to someone about it. Someone qualified.

Like most horror movies, the story eventually traps everyone in a secluded house in the woods were the climax consists of a huge bloodbath during which the “killer” is finally unmasked. There are a lot of kids getting bludgeoned at this point and the show doesn’t really have the time to develop most of them. I could only keep a headful of them straight in my mind, the rest were just an indistinct mass as far as I was concerned so I didn’t really care if they died. And died they did! There was so much dying that I got a bit overloaded. Of course, the same care and attention to detail can’t be given to each individual death at this point so these poor students’ demise really paled in comparison to the earlier ones. In fact, even without the comparison, they’re pretty run of the mill. As for the identity of the big bad, I saw it coming. I don’t see things coming – I mostly rely on my looks in real life. It hasn’t worked out so well but I’m not giving up. This said, it’s fairly par for the course that horror movies start of scary and then flounder in the end. Very few can actually give you a decent scare after all the action is over. So if you like the horror formula – this show follows it pretty closely with a very strong start and some fantastic gore.