House of the Five Leaves
The most initially striking thing about this 12 ep series is definitely it's idiosyncratic character designs, all angular, pointy, often emaciated looking, with large mouths and ghoulish eyes. I appreciate it. I'm not sure I can call them particularly beautiful, but there's a ghostly charm to them certainly. It's nice to see this in an anime industry with a million and one copy and paste cookie cutter designs.
The story itself also dares to be different to the usual samurai action fest, and takes the route of a slow burning character drama, relying on intrigue to keep us hooked. The show does pretty well with only 12 eps, I was kept guessing just long enough, and felt that the slow revelation of who Yaichi is was handled quite well. However, one of my biggest problems with the show was Yaichi himself. Admittedly, I wanted to find out about him, but he was still just so lacking of the charm the writer presumably thought he imbued him with, he just came across as a archetypal aloof anime twit to me. What's worse is that he hardly get's any more sympathetic after we learn his past, in fact he actually comes across as an even bigger self centred dick, but I'll go into more of this in a spoilery section below. So for me it's a bit of a shame that the whole show revolves around this character.
Masa, the show's protagonist is a bit more likeable. He's skilled but has a flawed personality, he's not too overly angsty and moany though, mostly he just seems to want to improve himself and help those around him. However, his admiration and infatuation with Yaichi (much of the show is essentially a romance between the two) seems to be completely misguided, I mean, what are these qualities he seems to admire in Yaichi, his archetypal anime aloofery? Masa's excessively meek personality does grate at times too, for example when Masa is duped by Yaichi and gang into unknowingly aiding the kidnap of a young child he has befriended. I was at least expecting a half hearted protest from Masa when he found out, but he can't even give us that! He just mopes along after Yaichi as he does far too often for my liking. The rest of the cast are fairly good too, even if they are quite typical. Though, for some reason Otake's character seems to get less exploration than the rest (nor are we really clued in as to what role she even plays in the gang, as she is mostly just seen sitting around drinking sake), and Yagi adds less to the plot than I was hoping he would, given the obvious potential of his character.
It's a good show, and one that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to a fan of historically set character driven shows, but for me it fell short of great.
6/10
My problems with Yaichi are not just that he's a charmless kidnapper who appears to have the help of the others simply due to fact that they are "indebted" to him. But also that he's evidently a murderous bastard who has no gratitude towards the gang (his "sworn brothers") that spared his life and even took him in as one of their own. we're not shown anything to make us feel especially unsympathetic towards his old gang, nor are shown how or why Sei transitioned from a young boy to a ruthless albino sociopath. Not only this, but the gang member who comes to kill him at the end of the series seems entirely more respectable than Yaichi (presumably this is why the Elder feeds and shelters him?), and I was disappointed that Yaichi got the better of him at the end. But okay fair enough, that's his past done and dusted, he's also found the kidnapped boy whose like him and who he was supposedly doing it all find, in an attempt to come to terms with his emotional scars, right? Oh wait, no, sorry, he still want's to carry on kidnapping... :roll:
