Shigofumi, at a glance. Suddenly, yandere!
January 19th, 2008 by Shirukii
OSHI-
Wow, yet again blindsided by a show that I knew nothing about. The winter season is actually shaping up to be quite decent, now if only we could get ourselves some Minami-ke O subs and a faster group for ARIA.
Shigofumi is about a service for the dead where they are allowed to write their final words in the form of a letter from beyond the grave, a shigofumi. The story follows Fumiko, one of the spirits given the task of delivering these letters, along with her sidekick in magical staff form, Kanaka.
The first episode started off with a bang, following the lives of two seemingly normal high school students, Shouta and Asuna, who had a chance encounter and have since become very good friends. Shouta is somewhat of a kid genious, only in high school but immersed in aerospace engineering and all the wonderful calculus and physics that accompanies it. Asuna happens to stumble upon his test site and working area and instantly became fascinated by his work.
However, as the episode goes on it becomes clear that this isn’t your typical high school romance. Asuna’s father had recently been murdered and without a mother, Asuna and her little sister have a tough life ahead of them. Things then go from tragic to outright weird as Shouta is approached by a spirit who claims to deliver postmortem letters from the dead with a letter from Asuna’s late father addressed to her boyfriend. Shouta doesn’t necessarily believe her and her floating staff, but thinks that it would be terrible if her father’s last words fell on deaf ears, but the problem is, Shouta isn’t Asuna’s boyfriend…yet. He builds the resolve and says that he will become her lover without fail, and binds the success of his confession to the successful launching of his model rocket.
Days pass by as Asuna struggles to move on with her life while Shouta pours his soul into his rocket. However, everything falls apart when Shouta gets a hold of the shigofumi, the message inside reading that the one who murdered Asuna’s father was none other than Asuna herself. Refusing to believe it, Shouta goes to speak with Asuna and confesses to her, she’s happy for the sentiments but declines. Suddenly Fumiko shows up and Shouta lashes out at her, saying there’s no way that Asuna could be the culprit. However, as he turns to face Asuna, she stabs him in the chest with a knife and leaves him to bleed to death, Fumiko watching on, lamenting the deceptive nature of the living as compared to the dead who tell no lies.
Thoughts
Damn good opening episode. It seemed sort of generic at first, like some weird merging of Jigoku Shoujo and Shinigami no Ballad but the WHAT A TWIST ending was very well done. I thought the letter was going to have some sappy feel good message along the lines of “please take care of my daughter”, but instead it carried a much more grim fate for Shouta. They did a great job at hiding Asuna’s true nature too, I was thinking that she was surprisingly unaffected by her father’s death, but until the contents of the letter were revealed I never thought that she would be a yandere.
Speaking of yandere, there seems to be an increase of them as of late, starting with Katsura and Sekai in School Days, then there was Hoshino in Myself; Yourself and well…pretty much everyone in the Higurashi series, Hinata from H20 is showing the early signs as well. While they’ll never replace the classic tsundere archetype in my preferences, they’re fun characters to watch and can be quite lovable, plus, it’s exiting to have the looming threat of death hanging above your head at any given second.
It’s too bad that Shigofumi will probably be a lot of hit and miss. It the first episode is any indication, each episode will have a separate story with a very loose overlying plot element tying the whole series together. While this means that there’s a lot of room for creativity, we’re not going to be seeing a whole lot of character depth, and they set the bar pretty damn high with their opener, anything less will be a disappointment in my eyes. I guess we’ll just have to pray that the writers for Shigofumi are good at what they do.
Technicals were decent, sufficient for the feel of the series at the least. The animation was good enough that I don’t have anything to nitpick about, and more importantly it was consistent through the majority of the episode. The character designs are a little weird though, the proportions are slightly skewed and overall they’re awkward to look at, but nothing that I can’t get used to given another episode or two. Music, as usual, gets a “meh” from me, the background music was largely ambient, nothing much going on there. No OP, but the ED was oddly soothing, so I sat through the whole thing, probably won’t next time though.
Edit: Just heard the OP in episode two. Uh…wth? Sounds like something that belongs in Rozen Maiden, weird.
Overall a very promising series, a lot of potential for a collection of interesting mini stories. But again, that nature has the danger of being very hit or miss. Of course I could be completely wrong again and the story might turn out to be linear, with my terrible penchant of screwing up predictions, you can never be sure. But in either case, with such a great opener, I’ll be looking to this series in hopes of many more WTF?! moments to come.
Kanaka for SaiStaff 2008!
~ Shirukii ~
15 Responses to “Shigofumi, at a glance. Suddenly, yandere!”
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That was a pretty cool twist with the psycho chick and all, but I’d rather not have the messenger as the main protagonist, it’d make this show into a crappier version of Jigoku Shoujo (sp?) But if the rocket guy really is the protagonist then it’d be cool to see what he does after getting butterknifed.
Another character for me to enjoy! GO YANDERES! :D
>> “I’ll be looking to this series in hopes of many more WTF?! moments to come.”
I want more of those.
I think the story line is great and if their willing to go that far to develop the story line in the first episode it can only get better right?
This is my favorite show this season. I’m a resident yandere fan, but there’s something even better in this show. BOKUUUU~
And the black blood trend continues lol :P…….Why the concern over censorship all of a sudden???……I mean, it was only some three years ago that Elfen Lied was made….and thats by far the bloodiest show I’ve seen……
Even Claymore started off red and then went to black ’round mid season…mind you a lot of those scenes were at night, so they didn’t bother with red colour……but wtf?
Aside from the girl axing her father during the School Days run, did something happen in Japan I’m not aware of????
Anyway, this looks like a great show……and in all honesty, I’d kind of like a show that has a different story every week…..be a change of pace :)
This show > Jigoku Shoujo and Shinigami no Ballad
I love the animation quality.
The only way I knew the yandere was coming was from other blog posts that posted it up front instead of concealing it (ie. I didn’t want spoilers but got them anyway).
yay go staff-san!
And ALI PROJECT doing the opening seems both surprising and fitting at the same time.
wow great episode i think O_o that was the most wtf 1st episode ending in my life… wow that is one crazy biotch..
episode 2 doesn’t disappoint even more wtf is wrong with this crazy bitch
im loving it :)
umm finish watching the 3rd episode….. im done with this series it is a little to episodic for my taste T_T
Hell yeah, and I thought this anime season gonna be bad. It turns out to be better than I thought. The series is surprisingly awesome. The sub for second one just came out and it was superb. This may be one of my favorite of this season if it’s continue to be as good as the first two episodes.
Even though, this is a great series; however, there are a lot of other website that will blog this series. By all mean, Shirukii, please blog Aria (because of its awesomeness) and True Tears. As much as like Spice and Wolf, I like True Tears way more. I hope most people thought the same way.
Done with the third episode, and I have to say that they have yet to disappoint. Considering it’s only 12 or 13 episodes (I think), it doesn’t look like it would suddenly go filler or bland episodes.
Man, I hope that rocket flies…
Kanaka reminds me of Minami-ke Okawari for some reason, that and I dont think its healthy for me to stare at the screenshots Okawari anymore than I already have, subs…where are you?…
Maybe Kanaka should have a “I AM BOSS” stamped on the staff hand bar.
OOOH wow being able to edit comments is incredible fan service Shirukii, THANKS!
@ Michael: Uh…he’s dead.
The messenger and staff aren’t exactly protagonists in the true sense of the word, the story does not revolve around them, they are just a means to link the individual scenarios together.
@ Kari: It’s too bad Show ▼
@ Siva: Episode 2 had another great twist, looking good.
@ Fuzzims: The storyline in episode 1 is concluded in the second, episode 3 starts a new one.
@ Totali: Wait, who’s the boku character? Fumiko? I forgot already, heh.
@ Kanon_fan82: Yea I didn’t mention that because I thought it would cause of flood of “NICE BOAT”, which despite contributing to the spread of, I’m getting rather sick of that meme.
Episode 3 was censored as well though, which sucks.
@ Avisch: Yea I’m liking this much more than jigoku shoujo as well, which had too much of a “monster of the week” repetitiveness going on, and ended with the exact same lines every week.
@ proxyman: Hey, I found Asuna to be quite pitiable in the second episode, under the circumstances, I think the murder of her father was justified. And she redeemed herself in the end.
@ kenshin514: I’ve pretty much made up my mind about blogging schedule, I’ll cover True Tears, ARIA and continue with Clannad. Seems to be the general concensus around here as well.
@ Sylon Beta: Oh sweet, it’s a short series, good to hear that. Less of a chance things will fall apart as we go along.
@ Servbot: Huh? Kanaka? I don’t see the connection lol. (Kana? iono)
And yes, I installed the comment editing plugin. I had to fix spoiler tags and figured that while I was tinkering around with things, might as well install this plugin. I know how annoying it is to mess up a comment with a typo or something, so being able to edit them for a time seemed like it would help cut down on the double posts.
Shirukii: And whats incredible is that Jigoku Shoujo is slated for 3rd season…..People apparently don’t get tired of seeing others get sent to hell.
Another comment on Shigofumi: Anyone else love the dark colors of this serie? It’s very atmospheric.
Holy crap! When I saw the last pic, it looked as if Kanaka the staff was shoving the barrel of a pistol down Shouta’s throat. Come on, you must have seen that too ;)