KyoAni have had a bit of a busy year, releasing 3 whole series over the course of it! What’s pretty interesting about it is that they all represent a departure from their standard fare: Tamako Market was their first original series since Munto; Free! is about a bunch of cute boys doing cute things (well swimming things); and finally this, Kyoukai no Kanata, a series which billed itself as a “dark fantasy”. Dark fantasy! Not a cute high school slice-of-life! Not a cute high school gag comedy! Not a cute high school rom-com! No, a freaking dark fantasy! …that is admittedly set in high school and is (spoilers) kinda cute.
Kyoukai no Kanata’s premise is that there exist spirits – or dreamshades or however you’d prefer your translation to read – in the world, invisible and largely intangible to the average human but very much visible to special individuals, typically so-called ‘spirit hunters’. These dreamshades can cause harm in the real world, however, hence why they’re hunted. The story chiefly follows two high school students: Kanbara Akihito, a curious individual who is half-human, half-dreamshade, and as a result technically immortal; and Kuriyama Mirai, the last descendent of a cursed bloodline of spirit hunters, who as result has the unique ability to manipulate her blood. Together, they fight crime hunt dreamshades hang out with some friends (also spirit hunters) at school. And occasionally hunt dreamshades.
Kyoukai no Kanata… has some issues. It gets some things wrong. It also gets a lot of things right! One thing’s for certain and that’s that the first half is significantly weaker than the second, for the most part.
It doesn’t help that the opening sequence is incredibly goofy and laughable. “The dictionary defines sucide as…” is pretty much the very first line, and it all comes across as dumb, pretentious and like it was written by a high schooler (somewhat suitable I guess, because the character speaking it was one). It’s relevant at least in that Akihito happens to spy Mirai on the edge of the school roof, as if she was about to jump, and he rushes to go save her… because she’s cute in glasses. She responds to his little speech by stabbing him. Gasp!
To be honest it’s not a bad opening, awful internal monologue aside, as it sets up the characters roles and powers and the seriousness it’s presented in adds to the humour of what follows – half an episode of Mirai stalking Akihito after school in an unbelievably unsubtle way in order to find an opening to fight and kill him (again). It’s been going on for a week or so, even. Turns out she’s a spirit hunter and because Akihito is a dreamshade (sort of) she feels obliged to try and kill him.
What follows is a chase sequence that’s all rather light-hearted and comedic but… there’s one major problem. If you’re a fan of KyoAni series you’re undoubtedly aware of the cute clumsiness many of their characters has, because that’s hella moe. And normally KyoAni pulls it off pretty well; it’s obvious what they’re doing, but it works anyway. Unfortunately here, the timing, the things Mirai does, and the fact that during the chase sequence she’s also incredibly nimble and athletic means that it instead comes across as utterly forced and contrived. She opens a locker and a bunch of brooms fall out on her head? It lacked poor comedic timing and just wasn’t funny. She trips and stumbles over a stand? We had just seen her do some sweet jumps and dodges and stuff. It didn’t work at all.
It’s emblematic of some other issues early on, in a way. For a good few episodes the characterisation is pretty weak, and while we see the characters interact and converse start caring for each other and reveal their little quirks and running gags there’s not really anything given to the audience to latch onto, to allow them to really feel for the characters and get some sort of investment in them. For me, at least, this is really unusual, because something I’ve always felt KyoAni have been good at is making characters likable and relatable in short order and with little material. But here, in Kyoukai no Kanata? The attempts just fall a bit flat. It’s not that the characters were unenjoyable or off-putting; it’s just that I didn’t feel any significant engagement with them, not for a good few episodes at least.
My biggest complaint exclusive to the first half is the sense that it tries to have its cake and eat it too; that KyoAni wants this to be serious and dramatic, but also that it doesn’t want to give up the comedic slice-of-life hijinks its known for. While it mercifully avoids mood whiplash, the way these two sides of the series are presented and executed means that they fail to complement each other at all. By failing to commit to one or the other it ended up feeling unfocused and inconsistent, and both sides suffer for it.
There are still some entertaining sequences amongst all this – including both great comedy and drama – but it’s not until the conclusion of the ‘Hollow Shade’ arc that the series really starts to pick up.
The conclusion of said arc was surprisingly powerful, and did a LOT to make both Mirai and Akihito far more likable and believable, as well as making their budding relationship seem more plausible. It opened the doors to a lot more character development and plot progression, and just really gave the series a greater sense of focus. It helped that it was also very action-packed, with great choreography, imaginative design of setting and powers, and beautiful animation, all traits which later action sequence would share.
But even so, some of the problems still persisted, and a new one suddenly raised its ugly head – Kyoukai no Kanata started getting kinda fanservicey.
Not in the sense that it had become an ecchi series overnight or anything, but it certainly had an unexpected skeeviness to it. Mirai got involved in modelling for some photographs for the woman who runs the shadestone exchange service (the service that allows spirit hunters to make a living). Why? Because she desperately needed the money. And the photos are often done in costumes to appeal to prospective buyers. And there were some that were apparently nude, but don’t worry, they won’t be sold! We know that because she hasn’t sold the nude photos of her kind-of daughter… y’know, the one that is basically a child?! Hurrah for implied paedophilia!
Oh, and then we get the episode where the Literature Club becomes an idol group briefly to defeat a dreamshade (p.s. other than this complaint, that episode is gloriously and hilariously entertaining), which more-or-less opens with the girls in the showers. And while how it’s handled is far from the most fanservicey it could be, it’s still WAY more than you’d expect out of KyoAni.
One of the (many) reasons I like KyoAni as much as I do is that they generally treat their female characters with a fair bit of respect. They may be moeblobs, but they’re never really objectified in such a manner! It’s just not something KyoAni ever really do even though they easily could, and it had become something I expected of them. For them to go out of their way to include fanservice like this, especially considering their track record, it just left me disappointed in my favourite studio, and made Kyoukai no Kanata feel a bit cheaper and tackier as a result.
During the second half there’s marked overall improvement in the series, to the extent that my opinion went from it being “decent” to “actually, pretty damn good!”. The story really starts going places and pulls the various plot threads it had already established together, and in the process giving and even exploring various complex characters motives and desires. There’s even a lot of ‘grey area’ with the various characters, namely whether Izumi is with or against Akihito and Mirai. An easy solution to the various conflicts that arise is never clear, and the various factions all try to manipulate the primary characters for their own ends. And amongst all this, some surprising revelations surface that lead to even more moral dilemmas and the like.
Not only does the plotting get better, but so does the emotional component of it. The underlying romance between Akihito and Mirai had been developed enough for their mutual attraction to not only be believable, but to also be something worth getting emotionally invested in and caring about; an element the narrative took full advantage of in some later episodes.
The episode where Mirai was forced to fight Akihito after the Shade from Beyond the Boundary took over him for the second time over the course of the series is the highlight of the series for me, and a wonderful example of how much better written the second half was. For various reasons Akihito would likely actually die after this encounter, but he has to die to prevent the shade that had taken over him from consuming and destroying the world. And thanks to her cursed blood, Mirai is the only one who can kill him. And obviously she doesn’t want to, but has no choice but to fight him. It makes for a really powerful episode, and all the more so when it ends on Mirai just about to land the killing blow.
A lame and clichéd way out would have been Mirai to be all “I can’t do it” and then for some magical bullshit way out of the situation to emerge and everyone’s happy, but instead we see her being incredibly strong-willed and capable of doing the necessary thing, no matter how painful it is for her. Of course, the actual resolution is not quite that straightforward, but either way it’s some fantastic characterisation and writing, and really quite emotional.
This carries over into the following episode, which is partially a series of flashbacks and partially Akihito’s dream. Some brilliant characterisation and development of both Mirai and Akihito, a lot of bittersweetness and sadness, and the presentation of all of it is phenomenal. The direction is just… from the amazing, seamless and subtle transition into the OP to Mirai’s farewell to Akihito to seeing many previous scenes but from Mirai’s perspective, the direction was just astonishingly good. The visual direction was generally great over the entire series, but here it was just elevated so much higher.
It’s a shame then that after this pretty great rise in quality towards the end, the actual ending itself was deeply unsatisfying.
The bulk of the episode itself felt disjointed and unfocused, as we jumped from action scene to narrative scene with a poor sense of timing and progression, leaving it not so much hard to follow but rather with little reason to follow some of the subplots. And some of those subplots were just rushed to their conclusion and resolved with an infodump – namely, the conflict between Izumi and Fujima.
That in itself wasn’t too bad, just kinda sucky. The bit where it goes from “meh” to “wow that was disappointing” was with the closing sequence. Mirai had essentially died, and it looked like the actual ending was going for an incredibly bittersweet one, where Akihito is forced to live on like Mirai wished, despite having previously refused to do as such. And that would have been a surprising and, frankly, really good ending. It may not have been a ‘happy’ ending, but it would have weight, it would feel like something truly meaningful had happened. And it went that way… right up until the last few minutes, where Mirai had reappeared on the rooftop where they first met. For absolutely no reason. None. None given. There was nothing to indicate that this would happen, and no explanation is given. It was just such a massive copout, such a clichéd and ultra-lazy way of having a happy end. Such an awfully written ending.
So yeah, an outstandingly dissatisfying ending to what was otherwise a series that had very quickly climbed in quality when approaching the end. But it forced me to reflect and think back over the entire series, and some overarching issues became quite apparent.
The pacing was a bit of a problem throughout. A LOT was crammed into only 12 episodes, and as a result a lot gets rushed through and resolved before it could be adequately built up to. It makes for something of an inconsistent ride, but this wasn’t too much of a problem from the perspective of the narrative progression in the final third – and even the middle third didn’t suffer too badly. What it did hurt was the side characters and their subplots. Izumi’s motives in particular were never really apparent, and similarly with Fujima’s plans. And there’s a lot of other minor stuff that just wasn’t explored in the detail it needed to be in. And then when you consider stuff like all the photoshoot scenes that were fairly unnecessary, a sense of misplaced priorities in the creation of this series surfaces. The end result is a narrative that, outside of the core plot thread, feels somewhat incoherent and often overcomplicated.
One thing that NOBODY can criticise is just how goddamned pretty this series is. KyoAni’s animation is always superlative, there’s no doubt about that, but seeing them do fantasy action sequences or spiritual dream scenes is absolutely wonderful; so much of it is simply breath-taking. It’s energetic, it’s detailed, it’s stylish as hell, and it’s fantastically choreographed; it’s just an all-round visual treat. But were you expecting otherwise? We had already seen hints of this in Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! during some of their little fantasy fights, so to have an entire series of this was incredibly satisfying.
In fact, no aspects of the visuals are really up for criticism. While the writing and narrative direction occasionally left something to be desired, the artistic and visual direction was stunning. The composition and presentation of just about every scene looked great, and the fantastical touches they added throughout added a great sense of atmosphere. Kyoukai no Kanata had no problems conveying that spiritual, urban-fantasy style that it was going for, that’s for certain.
So in the end, Kyoukai no Kanata is a bit of a disappointment. It starts out a little weak (mostly just unsure of itself), but gradually improves to the point where it had seriously gotten great… and then it had an amazingly disappointing ending. While far from unenjoyable (I definitely liked it more than all the criticism I’ve been levelling at it might have led you to believe), it is a notably weak effort on KyoAni’s part, with awkward pacing, some poor writing and a certain amount of tackiness that I had come to not expect from the studio. The actual action scenes are rarely anything less than great, but the context for them (at least in the first half) makes them all a bit uninteresting, albeit visually arresting. A really strong ending, coupled with the fantastic second half and overall nice atmosphere, would have made me consider this series “flawed, but generally really good”, but as is it’s just… it’s good, but far from great.
7/10
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