Friday 19 March 2010

Ookami Kakushi - Episode 11

With Sakaki having clearly gone completely bananas and deciding to flood Jouga village using the nearby dam, it's up "those pesky kids" to stop him. But can they reach him in time?

Needless to say, almost the entirety of this episode is first the race to reach Sakaki before he does some serious damage to Jouga and its residents, before the even more inevitable face-off between Sakaki and Nemuru, Hiro, Isuzu and company - A point in which our bananas villain suddenly becomes less of a cold-blooded killer and more of a luke warm, slightly fuzzy one, especially when it comes to despatching any of the major characters.


It's difficult to know what to say about this finale of the series proper (with the final episode looking like it was penned after an afternoon of recreational drug use judging by the preview), as it's simply so obvious in the way that it panned out that you could probably have guessed exactly what was going to happen last week. While it finished everything off nicely enough, there was nothing to really get excited about here, and the whole thing ended up turning into some kind of mushy morality tale on how we should accept people who are different to us - Not really something we need anime to teach us in parable form, I'd like to think.

This ending does however sum up Ookami Kakushi quite succinctly, as a series that never really pushed the boundaries of its characters, story or plot, preferring to plod along as a run-of-the-mill mystery that ran out of steam entirely once some of its secrets were revealed. It's certainly a far cry from the more shocking and complex world of Higurashi, to the point where it would be an offensive comparison to even call this effort Higurashi Lite. Come this final "proper" episode, it felt more like Scooby Doo with knobs on than anything truly noteworthy.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think in the last paragraph, you sum up perfectly what this anime is like.

Peter S said...

Everything about this series seems only partly thought out. Sakaki's ridiculous evil plan was just icing on the cake. I did like how Hiroshi got off his butt and tried to DO something, as little as it was.

Unknown said...

While I do agree that the show hasn't been very impressive, I wanted to point out that there was a "Next episode" preview at the end, so I would assume the show isn't over....

keikakudoori said...

Might as well be the final episode. I think the real story has ended here.

I could've been ok with many things but Hiroshi's last comments were the last straw. The morality part in OKK, as you pointed out, was unwanted to say the least attempting to wrap up the story and give it a 'meaning' with a cheap morality lesson. It was a terrible move on their part.

In the end, OKK couldn't surpass any of other R07's works in any positive way. Sadly, I didn't even see it trying. It's rather unfortunately really what OKK turned out to be, seeing how much more the author is actually capable of.

Unknown said...

plz dont insult the doo :D