Okay, so apparently Urban Legend Story Hikiko was an OVA, released about a year ago. It’s a fully CG-Rendered movie done by some guy who also seems to have worked on Catblue Dynamite. Since I’m always in for a bit of good horror, especially since the past spring and summer season didn’t have any of it, I decided to give it a shot. So, did this movie do its job and give me a good scare?

Well, it did give me a good laugh…

This OVA is THE example of why 3D-rendered movies have a looong way to go at this point. While in theory, it seems like a logical thing to do: you can get smoother animation, there is more detail, you can get a more dynamic background and a more realistic set of character-designs than the drawings of traditional anime. It sounds all nice in theory… but this movie just looked so incredibly fake.

It’s a shame, though: this OVA does have a very neat story: there’s plenty of build-up, a deep main character, a nice set of plot twists. In traditional 2D animation, it would have been a pretty good horror OVA. The big problem however is that the characters’ expressions and motions look incredibly unrealistic. So unrealistic that they’re nearly impossible to take seriously. This may be because I’ve been too much used to anime, but even though there’s plenty of animation in this, but all the animation feels jerky, and especially the facial expressions of the characters look nowhere near accurate and more like a bunch of puppets.

There’s a saying in art that goes as follows: “if you can’t make it, fake it”, and 2D anime has become very good at this. It knows that its artwork is very detailed for animation standards, and that there’s no way to continuously animate everything in drawings, and so over the years they’ve perfected the art in simulating movement even though there isn’t any. As long as it doesn’t stand out as “fake” or “too much” in any way, these cinematic effects really work.

3D animation has yet to discover these techniques, and instead just try to… animate. The thing is, that unless you’ve got the budget of a small country or the imagination of Hayao Miyazaki, there is no way to perfectly emulate every subtle nuance in human movement, and this movie especially fails at it. The few attempts it makes to make up for the lack of movement are some of the most pathetic cinematic techniques all around, like a couple of cheap but loud sound effects during the intense part, and lots of shaking the camera around while looking at the characters with extremely scared faces.

The thing that 3D animation is going to have to learn is the art of cutting corners. American 2D-animation does this by extremely simplified drawings, Japanese animation does this by trying to limit the number of frames that need to be animated. At this moment, there’s nothing wrong with the artwork: show any still frame in this movie, and it looks gorgeous. Combine them… and they don’t.

According to tealovertoma, this episode was supposed to be mediocre, but I can’t see why. It yet again was a standard episode for Umineko, but the mystery yet again deepened, it gets harder and harder to explain everything with simple logic, which is exactly what the witch wants, and the situation gets more hopeless with every single episode. Sure, this show isn’t as good as Higurashi at this point, but what exactly is turning this series into a disappointment?

I mean, seriously: what the heck is going on here?! At a certain point in this episode, the characters split up: Maria, Battler and Rosa go off in one group. Gouda, Sharon, Genji and George go off to the other room. At one point, Genji stays behind because he has to keep alert for any requests of his master. After that, Gouda, Sharon and George get attacked by the supposed “Beatrice”. Rosa, my prime suspect behind the murders, could not have done this, because she was with Battler all this time. Gouda (who I also suspected as the culprit) at the same time could have done it, but he got killed off at the end of this episode. It could be a big illusion, though. At the same time, we have Genji, whose whereabouts are unknown. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t have been the killer because he died in the first arc. Either that, or that was an illusion as well.

But then again, there’s a good chance that the murderer is some sort of a magician. He could have pulled a fake body in any of the occurrences. What about Kinzou? All we saw was his dead body, but he at the moment is the only one who has the freedom to move through the entire house without being detected. He’s the one with the master key, right?

It’s also interesting how the Battler in this universe is the complete opposite. While I called Natsuhi unstable at one point, she was like a sweet little kitten compared to Rosa. Because of this, I think that he gave in to the witch in this case. Or that could have been yet another illusion by Beatrice to get him to break down. I have no idea what’s real anymore: we know that the red texts are true, but is there any other part that we can really trust?

I’m really starting to see the appeal of the Umineko series: it really builds further upon the first arc of Higurashi: mad, twisted, and nothing is really what it looks as things start looking more and more impossible to have happened without any sort of magic. Sure, this series isn’t anything amazing as of yet, but hey: we’ve still got tons of episodes left. Right now this series is quite likely building up.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh, what a powerful episode this was. It was entirely quiet: no overblown or forced drama, nor an overemphasis on angst whatsoever. I believe that this episode was the most subtle of the entire series, and with Aoi Hana, that has to say something.

The first half showed the wedding between Yasuko’s sister and teacher: this sealed the deal, and her teacher has now officially become impossible to reach. It really was a time in which Yasuko was finally able to close off a big part of her teenaged life. After that, we see her telling a bit about how she originally came to love her teacher. We also see how she cut her long hair short, as a means of symbolism. At the same time we see her befriend Kyouko, who also cut her hair short in response. With this, I’m beginning to see the relationship between Yasuko and Kyouko: Yasuko really does like Kyouko as a friend, but has gotten annoyed with Kyouko’s obsession over her.

But the really good part of this episode happened in the second half, in which Fumi (who was absent at the wedding) invites Akira over, and Akira’s brother and Yasuko end up tagging along. What follows is a very awkward scene, in which Fumi tries to distance herself as far away from Yasuko as possible by using Akira, and Akira’s brother keeping Yasuko a bit busy by telling her about how Akira used to be in the past. I especially loved the last part in which Yasuko tries to apologize to Fumi, and then getting rejected. You can see that she really broke up with Fumi in a tantrum. She ruined things between the two of them herself, because she should have known that Fumi is a really emotional person who takes what people say to her very seriously, especially since she was heart-broken once before.

In a way, Fumi has grown out of this as a stronger person, but at the same time it’s also sad to see that she’s completely shielding herself away right now, afraid to be hurt for a third time.

So, with one episode left, I really wonder how the creators are planning to end this series. I really hope for a “life goes on”-ending: an ending that’s just going to show a final part of the characters, and what’s going to happen to them after that is just going to be left to the viewer’s imagination. Especially since it’s very unlikely to see a second season of this, it would be the perfect ending for such a small little series.

Just one thing: PLEASE don’t end the series with Fumi and Akira falling in love with each other. This series has done SO WELL in avoiding just about every romance cliché in the book, it would be such an incredible shame to ruin it at the last possible minute!
Rating: ** (Excellent)