Review of Shiki

To paraphrase Harry Enfield, I've got two words for Shiki: Shite. Shite. For starters, the first thing anybody notices within any piece of animation is how good or bad the animation itself is, and in most anime, I've found in most instances it's not very noteworthy, as it's usually made by large companies with equally large budgets, and they always manage to get it right, even if in most instances it's not utilised to the fullest degree it can, but that's not a complaint. What is a complaint is the undeniable fact that the art of Shiki is simply bad, no two ways about it, Theanimation was convincing, but that's to be expected by anything more advanced than lego stop motion made by one bloke. It clearly wasn't a Welcome to the NHK scenario either, the art direction was off, and it suits me to say that this was probably because the art of the original work from which this was adapted was just as bad. Correspondingly, the sound design was just as bad. The sound effects were good enough not to draw my attention, but the voice acting was quite uninspired, and the music in particular was especially weak. It's just the generic somewhat ominous sounding sort you'd expect in a horror, except here it feels exceptionally cheaply done, it feels like they didn't compose the music, but rather, they just looked up "scary music free download mp3 no virus" and clicked on the first result they found.

So, the story. Some rural Japanese village in which a large number of people are mysteriously dying and a doctor, along with a monk are trying to figure out what precisely it is. Turns out it was vampires and they've got to get rid of them, I'd under normal circumstances give a warning for 'spoilers', but not here, this is a matter of principle, it was so excessively poor there is nothing to spoil, if anything by revealing the story like this I've done you a service. I've only seen one medical drama myself, and that's House, a series with many similarities to the Sherlock Holmes series. Excluding that BBC series that was apparently bad, the books by ACD were all self-contained stories, as well as the episodes of House which, as a television series, would be adequately described as episodic. Of course, this was a deliberate decision, murder mysteries, and medical mysteries (which Shiki is both of, in a sense) are far more effective with short, self-contained stories, because you cannot drag out a single case for so long, but Shiki had a different idea. For at least the first 15 episodes, it's as slow and painful in pacing as death from infection in a World War I field hospital. Many of the first episodes matter naught, with tons of characters introduced through an intertitle (and some generic eerie sounding piece which just got annoying), most characters amounting to fuck all. Really, the show should be called "Doctor versus Vampires", because that's all it fucking is, even Megumi, the 15 year old girl who becomes a vampire very early on who tries to protect Yuuki should be a main character, she definitely has the most screentime of any singular vampire, yet the relationship between these two amounts to nothing. As the doctor finds out, the only way to kill these vampires is through a stake to the heart, and it's also revealed to the viewer that crosses and other Christian symbolism seems to deter them (a bit odd since they're Japanese), and, for some reason, the vampires cannot enter people's homes until they're invited. What were they thinking? How can you possibly make a creature like this seem terrifying, when it also can't go out during sunlight? These vampires are as much of a danger as making sure to look both ways before crossing the street, but wait, there's more.
Here's a question for you: what is worse than a series with writing so genuinely awful that it makes The Room seem Shakespearean? The answer is, a series with writing that awful, but attempts to dress itself up with awfully written philosophy and morality, that only serves to embarrass itself. Here's the summary: The vampires (or Risen) must drink the blood of someone once per day to survive, and the person who was bitten, after a few days of sickness, will become a Risen also. Now, I never went to law school, but it seems to me as though the Risen have no right to exist at all. They must kill others in order to survive, and the second one Risen feeds off the blood of a human, the ponzi scheme has been created, which will never be paid off, ending in the ultimate demise of both the humans and the Risen. Yet, for some reason, they try and depict it as though the humans are just as bad, and it really fucks me off, because they aren't. Risen need to kill others to survive, and ultimately cannot sustain their own lives, and will end the life of another species in the process. Humans do not need to kill any species in order to survive, and so, if I was a judge determined in settling who was in the right, I'd be done saying that the humans were after 5 minutes, and fine the Risen for having wasted the court's time. It seems like the most basic thing conceivably possible, if you want to have moral greyness, actually make the morality fucking grey, rather than this bungled abomination.

In conclusion, Shiki is perhaps the worst thing I've ever watched, in every parameter it is a disastrous failure. The art is ugly as sin. The voice acting feels like it was recorded in a single take, by people who didn't care, the music is beyond generic, and the writing is quite possibly the worst I've ever had to have the displeasure encountering, and it trying to pretend to be something bigger than it is does it no favours, I detested Kakegurui, but I will give that show praise for its honesty, it didn't try and pretend to be anything other than what it was, but I cannot say the same here. It truly is beyond me how something so unbelievably poor got greenlit, someone fucked up, and someone needs to be hanged for it.