What is it with romances between a generic as fuck high school dude and the undead this season? Kore we Zombie Desu Ka? Of the Dead, Tasogare Otome x Amnesia and now Sankarea. Is… is this a thing in Japan?
With an ex-SHAFT director (yay!) and produced by Studio DEEN (balls), Sankarea is about a guy and a girl and the girl becomes a zombie. Woo?
Chihiro Fuurya is our protagonist, and he’s a loner freak who is obsessed with zombies to the point of having a sexual fixation on them. I… I don’t even know what to say. His fantasies involve the flesh-rotting, shambling monstrosity kind of zombies, so it’s not even like he has a different interpretation of what a zombie is. He literally wants to fuck a reanimated corpse.
The series starts with his cat getting run over, and he’s obviously distraught. But obviously not distraught enough to think twice about exhuming the corpse and trying all these weird mixtures he got out of an old book in an attempt to reanimate it. He does all this at night, in an abandoned bowling alley. It’s here where he meets the love interest, Rea Sanka. Or to be more precise, he meets her outside after she’s been shouting down a well in frustration.
Skipping forward over a few details, she’s frustrated because she’s the daughter of a very wealthy and influential man in the community, Danichirou, who is controlling over every aspect of her life. He also likes to take nude pictures of her, so all in all it’s not exactly a healthy relationship. Her mother (later revealed to be her stepmother) is emotionally cold and distant, even verbally cruel to Rea, so yeah, not a happy household. Rea has had enough and needs to vent. She finds out about what Chihiro is trying to do, and for whatever reason agrees to be turned into a zombie if Chihiro succeeds. Some drama ensues, she takes a sample of the probably poisonous tonic he has created one evening, consumes it after a particularly bad fight with her parents, but only passes out. The next day she ends up falling off a cliff after her father pursues her after she runs off, and then she dies. And then comes back to life.
The rest of the plot revolves around Chihiro keeping Rea in his house, Danichiro trying to get her back after he finds out she rose from the dead, and Rea just trying to do normal person things for a change. There are some other characters too, and a bunch of filler, but that’s more or less it.
The story as a whole isn’t terrible, but there are problems. As mentioned, there are filler episodes which only serve to flesh out characters completely incidental to the rest of the story, which is concerning for a 12 episode series. While some episodes were truly excellent (the episode where the stepmother revealed everything to Chihiro springs to mind), there are a few pacing issues (Chihiro pratting around for 2 episodes trying to find a way for Rea to keep her self-awareness when the solution was apparent right from the start was probably the worst) and some decisions about episode ordering were quite bad (most of the final episode could have happened anywhere else in the series, it really didn’t add much), but on the whole I don’t have any major complaints with the events of the plot itself.
Except for the climax of the series, the penultimate episode.
Danichiro has been established as a reprehensible character – from the controlling aspect of his relationship with Rea to the distant way he treats his wife, and of course the fact that he is a fucking paedophile – and so the final confrontation between him and Chihiro, who is basically in love with Rea, should be pretty big. But, uh, it isn’t. And it’s actually rather troubling and quite bad. Chihiro doesn’t really chew him out much for the whole ‘taking nude, sexual pictures his underage daughter’ thing. In fact, he pretty much barely cares, and the end result of the confrontation is that Danichiro decides to go to America to look for a cure for Rea. And Chihiro just lets him go. Doesn’t call the cops on him or anything. He basically just lets her father get away with everything he’s done. And it’s not like the end result is even reached in an exciting manner, it’s all just rather bland and boring. The climax is at the wrong place, and it sucks pretty bad.
Of course, those are not the only complaints. The animation isn’t particularly good, but then lol DEEN. While there are some SHAFTy visual things going on at times, they aren’t frequent or strong enough to stand out (although the composition of some scenes are very nice) The BGM is unremarkable, although I did like the OP (albeit not so much for the vocals). The characters were more or less all pretty bland and generic, and if there’s character development I can’t say I noticed. They start out one way, change to be a little more outgoing later on, and that’s it.
But the biggest problem in my mind is the fanservice. No, not all of it – I didn’t really care about the fanservice Ranko delivered, because she was pretty much established to serve that role from the start – just one aspect in particular. Namely, when Rea gets used for erotic fanservice. One of the key, driving aspects of the story is the photographs her father took of Rea. He is set up to be this disgusting person because of how he turned Rea into a sex object for his pleasure, so when the show does the same to her for the audiences expected pleasure, it feels really wrong. And the producers obviously had no self-awareness, because they had put a scene condemning Danichiro right before a scene where Rea is used for fanservice. And in the penultimate episode, it literally just creates an excuse to force Rea to get dressed as a bunny girl. How are we meant to take the final confrontation, caused by Danichiro’s sexual objectification of Rea, seriously when Rea is being used like that? It’s jarring and completely undermines what the show is trying to achieve and the message it’s trying to give.
Despite all the issues I have, Sankarea isn’t necessarily awful. While the characters aren’t memorable they can at least be amusing; the story itself is nothing special but it isn’t outright bad, just hampered by some bad decisions; the objectification of Rea isn’t actually pervasive so can be forgiven at times; and it does at least attempt to stand out visually. It’s not unenjoyable and certainly isn’t boring, but it’s definitely lacking in a fair few regards.
6/10
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