Kara no Kyoukai ep 2, 3
After the disappointment of Mnemosyne, it’s been a rather slow month as I rummage through the new season for something that will satisfy my craving for cool, strong female characters in a dark violent setting. Yeah, I know that sounds so wrong, but that’s what floats my boat. I love well-made anime such as Mushishi and Seirei no Moribito and Patlabor and Escaflowne etc etc, but I will always crave straightforward kickass female noir action.
With Kara no Kyoukai ep 3, it seems that I have found my new pick. I saw ep 1 about a month ago, and it was okay. I was more impressed with ep 2, which features Shiki’s back story (part of it anyway) and sets out the series as a mix of “monster of the week” coupled with non-linear plot advancement. Well, not so much plot, as the telling of the story of Shiki and Kokutou.
The only problem with ep 2 was that I still wasn’t terribly interested in Shiki nor her relationship with Kokotou. It appears that Shiki is a split personality and one of them is a killer who harbours a sort of affection, as far as a sociopath can, for Kokutou. We don’t know why Shiki kills, or who Shiki is, really, but the ep ends with Shiki about to stab Kokutou.
Ep 3, the one which I found the best of the lot, is set between ep 2 and ep 1. Now we see the connections lining up, and Shiki and Kokutou both start feeling more real, less 2-dimensional. The focus of this episode is a girl named Fujino who has been killing members of a gang. Shiki immediately identifies her as “of the same cloth” as herself, ie a killer with an unstable mind, and is quite vehement in her hatred of the girl as Fujino appears to be an indiscriminate murderer; as Touko says, Shiki herself still holds on to certain codes of morality.
This fleshing out of Shiki’s personality makes her more intriguing to me, and the revelation of how she got the puppet arm in ep 1 is also a nice tidbit that I eagerly devoured, as was the nature of her psychic abilities. However, perhaps the best part of this story is Fujino herself, who is a very interesting victim. Her actions are murder, and Kokutou, ever the idealist, still considers it wrong, but he adds that he feels nothing for the men she murdered. Fujino could have been a flat character acting out her brand of insanity, but we are made to feel both sympathy, in that her pain is caused by something out of her control, as well as condemnation, for she is a murderer who denies her own guilt. My favourite part was the very end, when she cries that she wants to live, a sequence which suddenly restores to her a modicum of humanity. Although there seems little chance, for me the ultimate fanservice would be Fujino appearing in later eps to seriously massively kick some bad guy ass, heh.
I liked this part also because I liked the character design for Fujino, and I was very very drawn to her voice. At the end, I noted with pleasant surprise that her VA was Noto Mamiko. That’s just ridiculously good casting :) And again, I had forgotten that Shiki was played by Sakamoto Maaya. Yes, she’s that good.
All in all, I’m very happy with this series, and hope the remaining parts will be as good or better. As long as there’s no romance between Shiki and Kokutou, I think I’ll be well satisfied.
