Zakuro – Prepare to be Bewitched

Production

Otome Yokai Zakuro looks a little dated. Actually, let me go check when it came out. 2010, I see. I should clarify what I mean by dated. I don’t mean Zakuro looks bad, because it doesn’t. In fact, the characters look 👌. Hopefully, this emoji will show up.

However, it’s an art style that was a lot more popular some years ago. How can I describe it? Everything is long. The characters are long, with long legs, long eyes and very long and pointy noses. The girls are a bit more rounded off, because that’s cuter, but compared to more contemporary titles, they’re still a bit long. Also, the colours look all faded. As such you get the impression that it’s not a recent show.

That’s not actually a bad thing, mind you. What could be seen as more of a flaw is the backgrounds. Like I  said, the character designs are great but I  found d the backgrounds a bit disappointing. There were plenty of opportunities to create very elaborate or just strikingly unusual backgrounds but most environments look very plain and they repeat a lot.

Story & Characters

Zakuro is not a reverse harem. It’s not a harem at all although it does have some things in common with one. Namely a whole bunch of characters falling in love(?). There are two pairs and a potential thruple that form during the series. That’s a whole lot of lurve to cram into 13 episodes and if you are a fan of traditional romance then Zakuro has got you covered.

I’ll be perfectly honest with you guys, I was a little bored by the romance. That’s more of a personal issue than any fault of the show. It was pretty cute and generally healthy in the way it showed relationships so I have to commend it for that. Well except for all the incest at the end there…we’ll get to that. It’s not shown as romantic.

This said, even for those who like me are too immature to appreciate a fine tale of love, there is a whole lot of action in Zakuro to keep you busy. And feet.. A lot of focused shots of feet. Very Tarantino of them.

You could see Zakuro as kind of a classic magical girl show. Zakuro and her friends are half spirits and therefore have certain special powers that allow them and only them to fight other spirits. They fight with sakura branches they keep in their garters and chant this really cool song whenever they go into combat mode. It’s clearly a magical girl transformation sequence even though they don’t actually change their appearance in any way.

As for the boys…well they’re sort of decorative. Most magical girl shows have love interests for their characters, at least the ones that have male characters at all. It’s just that we don’t usually see them all that often. In Zakuro they are front and center the whole time, being all handsome and kind and stuff. 

And that’s about it. Oh wait, I  said I would get to the incest. There’s a pretty dramatic ramp-up in stakes that takes place in the last three episodes. For me, it was just short of a shark jump. Things got really dramatic and a bit cuckoo all at once. Let’s just say your mileage may vary. There’s always been a melodramatic or operatic side to the genre, and some people quite like that. Let’s just say that for my part, I found the action engaging but I  could have used less incest and the mother’s story was a bit too tragic. It got sort of funny for me because they were laying it on so thick. But otherwise, I thought the pacing and suspense surrounding the ending were well done.

Even though I personally thought Zakuro was a pretty standard magical girl show just with Yokai, I also realized that it had been years since I had seen one that wasn’t just torturing the characters the whole time. It was pretty refreshing to see a straightforward application of the genre and as far as I’m concerned, pretty enjoyable too.

I don’t think Zakuro is a must-see show but I do think it’s a pretty good maho shoujo if you’re looking for one!

You might like this anime if:

You want to watch an action-packed romance with a touch of magic

I save all my screencaps on my Pinterest and you can find more there if you are interested. But I still like to show you a few in the post. If you’re like me, screencaps are something that really helps you decide to watch an anime or not.