Review of Shiki

You ever read a little novel called 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King? (Yes, THE Stephen King). Well if you have then all you'd need to know about Shiki is that it is basically the anime version of 'Salem's Lot, and knowing that, you'd come to the conclusion that it is *pretty freaking good* (unless of course you disliked 'Salem's Lot...) For those of you who haven't read it, well, then allow me to draw up the parallels: Story (9/10) -We are introduced to a village/small town -We are introduced to various residents of said village/small town -New arrivals move in to the village/small town -Shortly after there are mysterious deaths anddisappearances
-A few of the characters we are introduced to, including some kids, a doctor, and a monk/priest, start piecing together that these deaths might be the cause of the new arrivals who might actually be vampires (with their own familiar/werewolf servant)
-People continue to die as our main characters fumble around in their own separate attempts to take care of things
-And I might have to stop here or else risk spoiling the ending for both this anime and a really good book. Just know that both endings are pretty similar as well.

As for the differences though, I'd say it's in the ways that Shiki differs to 'Salem's Lot that made it really good, and that being the vampires themselves; while in King's novel the people turned into vampires become mindless, soulless drones you don't feel bad about killing, the vampires in Shiki retain their personalities and feelings. This makes it so that, before you know it, half-way through the anime you find yourself flip-flopping over whose side you're on. You sympathize with the vampires, or shiki, and feel bad about what's happened to them (especially knowing who they used to be), but at the same time know that they have done things that are unforgivable and cannot be allowed to live.

This element doesn't really come into play until well into the anime though. I have a hard time judging seeing as how I'd marathoned all 22 episodes (plus two extra episodes) with my friend in a single day, but the truth is that the beginning starts out pretty slow. I feel like it would have taken me awhile to slog through the first ten episodes or so had I been watching it alone, not because they were uninteresting - far from it, I found myself able to continue each episode solely out of curiosity for the mystery surrounding the shiki - but because of how many characters we had to be introduced to and how we had to see each of them unravel the mystery. Furthermore because the concept of vampires is familiar to us, after awhile it becomes more a matter of just waiting agonizingly for the human characters to catch up and finally get a step ahead, and confront the shiki head on.

Also, going into the anime I was expecting to be chilled to the bone, particularly since my friend told me she'd held off watching it before because she didn't want to do so alone. Aside from body horror though this anime didn't scare me in the slightest - I'm not even entirely sure if it was supposed to. Regardless, it's pretty relaxed in the first half, and even after things start to get more bloody it isn't anything an average person couldn't handle, unless blood and bodily harm makes you squeamish.
As far as the ending goes, I think it'll be relative to you whether it's good or bad. For my own part, as we neared the conclusion I could see it ending one of two ways, and the anime went for something in the middle. So I was satisfied, and at the same time... a bit not. If you're like me, then in all likelihood the characters you want to survive will end up dead, and the characters you want dead manage to survive, which sucks quite a bit. And this brings me to -

Characters (9/10)
Yeah I know Art comes next but the characters are more important to me, in anything I read or watch. And as far as Shiki's characters go, I'd say they deliver. I can potentially see people complain about the large cast, but the anime seems to be aware of the struggle the viewers might go through and makes it easier to keep track of them (which I will get into in the Art section...) But what I liked about Shiki's cast was its diversity. Falling back onto my 'Salem's Lot comparison, it was easy to see which characters were supposed to be the 'good', 'main' characters in that book. We get a peek into the lives of a great deal of the other residents of the town as well, and they're all, to put it bluntly, pretty rotten people. And these two camps of characters that are good and bad *stay* in their respective camps. So it's hard to really get affected by what happens to them - you don't really care if the whole town disappears, nor do you much care which of the main characters survives, since they're just your standard good guys and nothing else.

With Shiki, you'll also have characters you'll like and characters you won't like, but those characters won't necessarily fall into the same categories all the way through. There were characters I disliked in the beginning that I end up rooting for, and characters I used to like I end up rooting against. As a result, whether I would cheer or moan in sadness, my feelings for those characters were that much stronger whenever something happened to them. You see them struggle and saunter on, have their ideals challenged and their lives ripped apart, and each of them deals with those things in different ways, sometimes opposite ways.
And I rather liked that.

Art and animation (8/10)
If there was anything that might have put me off about this anime at first sight, it probably would be the art. Character designs are tall and insect-like, a little reminiscent of Code Geass or Vampire Knight. Other than that it looked pretty decent, surprisingly brightly colored considering the subject matter, although it knew to get dark when it was supposed to.
The most stand-outtish aspect of the art, though, would be the HAIR STYLES. I'm pretty sure the anime's a little infamous for the characters' ridiculous hair styles. Seeing as how lots of anime have characters with weird-looking hair it wasn't TOO distracting - but it did provide a lot of probably unintentional comic relief whenever I or my friend commented on a character's hair and where it ranked on the ridiculous-scale. They definitely helped a lot in making them more memorable though, so even my friend, who unlike me is very bad with names, could keep track of them all.
The animation is solid in my opinion - characters move fluidly and action scenes are cool to watch. The only weird thing about it was the crying animation - at times the way tears flowed in a scene would be almost as ridiculous as the hair of the person crying them, making them hard to take seriously.

Overall Enjoyment (8/10)
Because it was her own idea to marathon this anime, my friend would ask me in between episodes what I thought so far (seeing as how I told her I would only agree to a marathon if she had something AMAZING to show me). My answers were a consistent "it's good", "it's interesting", "yeah it's alright so far". I did also tell her about how much it reminded me of 'Salem's Lot and assuring her that was a good thing. Shiki had been under my radar ever since I first became an anime fan, and I probably would have gone the rest of my life without sparing it a thought if it hadn't been for my friend. But I don't think the anime ever reached real levels of amazing, or even exciting until the last few episodes. I will say though, that after finishing it and waking up the next day, I was a bit disappointed I wouldn't get to see more of it. Cause this is an anime that's actually worth enjoying for more than a day, and I'm glad that I saw it.