Short Synopsis: Kurou remembers what happened to Kuromitsu, and the story takes an interesting turn.
Highlights: Matrix, anyone?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
I remember that during the winter-season, I was very annoyed with Madhouse for some strange reason. If I recall correctly, then apart from Mokke and Ooedo Rocket, every of their recent series at that time had some sort of annoyance that brought it down: Dennou Coil and especially Saiunkoku Monogatari had their endless amounts of hiatuses, Shigurui and especially Claymore had their disappointing endings, Death Note was unbalanced, Kaiji dragged on and Devil May Cry, Maple Story, Nougami Neuro, Kaibutsu Ojou were just badly written.

And here I am right now, seeing them continue to churn out hit after hit, for three consecutive seasons. Is this really the same Madhouse we’re talking about? I’m not sure what happened, perhaps some high-ranked official found it a good idea to put more emphasis on quality and originality, perhaps it’s just chance, and they’ve chosen a string of excellent series to animate (in a way, it’s like Gonzo’s string of excellent series from 2006 till Summer 2007). In any case, whatever it is, I really appreciate it, and I hope that this string of excellent series will last as long as possible.

This episode of Kurozuka again adds a whole new dimension to the series. We learn that when the screen turns funky, it’s not simply because of the visual effects, but at that time Kurou can also slow down time significantly. We also learn that Kuromitsu has been kidnapped by the strange enemies, but the end of the episode reveals that it was Karuta’s allies that took her away, making this not just a story of good vs evil anymore. It does make me wonder why they were walking around in enemy-suits, though. And why the heck the enemy’s after them, and why they needed Kuromitsu in the first place.

One problem that I have with the series is that it’s aired a bit too soon after Ultraviolet. I just can’t help but think that Kuromitsu and 044 are alike: their character-designs are so similar, and Paku Romi uses nearly the exact same voice for them. She’s going to have to be fleshed out a bit more if she really wants to stand apart from her Ultraviolet-counterpart, especially since their roles seem to be completely different. Ultraviolet was a strong-minded killer on the run, while Kuromitsu feels more like a damsel in distress (please don’t let her end up captured for the rest of the series).

Short Synopsis: Not just heads get cut off in this series.
Highlights: Awesome use of different camera-angles.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Those creators really are out to get me with their incredibly complicated dialogue. Heck, the website even refuses to list the name of the different characters in anything else but Kanji, making it even more difficult to try and put combine the names with the different faces, especially since half the cast doesn’t seem to be introduced yet (Yoriko has a sister?).

So, the beginning of this episode shows the main character with glasses, apparently Tatsumi Sekiguchi is his name, as he’s just cut up several bodies, commenting on how he just can’t get them right. Later in the episode, we see him again, showing a novel he’s writing. We don’t know whether his “failure” refers to his novel, where the cut-up body was just a visual metaphor, or whether he really does have a secret. Yoriko’s sister Kimie is apparently much older than she looks on the official website, and my guess is that she works for the ones who plan to publish Sekiguchi’s novel.

And at the same time, we see Kanako in a strange bed as she’s lost all of her limbs. There is someone who watches her, who I suspect to be the guy with glasses who left a bit earlier and whose name was Noritada Amemiya, I think. Later, strange limbs are found all over the country, but the DON’T belong to Kanako. The detective acts shocked, while the chief policeman in charge (at least, that’s what I thought their roles were) doesn’t act surprised. Suzaki (the most important doctor) then gets killed (probably to make sure that he doesn’t find any weird stuff) and the biggest enemy of Yoko is the detective Kiba. Yoko in some way has a very big role in this, but what exactly is it? For some reason, she also completely flipped once she found out that Suzaki was dead.

Then, a random teenaged girl gets kidnapped, cut up and stuffed into a box, I’m not sure who the guy was who did that. What I guess are a few months later, a new detective contacts Kiba, probably to team up with him, and he tells him about the four limbs that were found, and even though htey weren’t Kanako’s, he believes the two cases to be related. He seems to think that Sekiguchi is the victim, and the night he ran into them in the hospital wasn’t a coincidence, it seems. I wish I could remember who those others were who were with him in the car.

He points Kiba to some guy that Yoko got affiliated with when she was still an actress. Minami Kinuko, could that possibly be her stage name? It doesn’t appear anywhere on the list of names for this series. This is where Amemiya pops up again, apparently he was the one who forced Yoko to retire from her job as an actress. The guy also tells him about a certain doctor “Amakasu”, who is trying something like the doctor Frankenstein: he’s trying to create the perfect soldier that won’t die, explaining why in this series bodies have to be cut up.

What really strikes me so far is that this is a 13-episodes, and yet two of the five main characters haven’t felt like main characters at all (they only popped up once or twice) and two haven’t even appeared yet! I’m really curious to see what this series is going to turn into once it hits its second half, but so far I’m already loving every second of this. I’m in for lots of convolution once in a while, and this series is exactly what my inner mystery-fanboy needs.

It’s also interesting that this series shows the power that still frames can have. Especially that sequence in the beginning: it just consisted out of about ten drawings, there was no movement, and yet it perfectly showed what was going on, it looked excellent, and it set the mood. Madhouse really is an excellent studio when it comes to proving that you don’t need the budget of a small country to make a series look beautiful. You can easily try to save budget by simplified drawings (á la Kaiba) with lots of motion, or go Shigurui and have very detailed drawings with hardly any motion, but as long as you put enough thought into the artistic direction, you can make anything look good this way. This is exactly why I’m a big fan of series that experiment a bit with their graphics. It looks much more interesting than the straightforward drawings that just go with predictable poses and camera-angles.