Another Final Thoughts--I See Dead People

Otherwise known as Final Destination: The Anime.

  
While Another wasn't as bad as I feared it would be, it was still pretty ridiculous. I found myself laughing at this anime far more than taking it seriously. The random actions of the characters combined with their increasingly silly deaths didn't help. It also goes a bit overboard in its attempts to be creepy and shocking, which result in a lot of the laugh-out-loud moments. Sometimes I felt like I was playing Clue, only instead of trying to figure out who the "extra person" was, I was trying to guess who would die next (It was the nurse in the hospital by a falling elevator!). Also, a lot of the problems caused in this show seemed to come from a lack of common sense in the students and in some cases the teachers. For example, if it was so important for the kids in the class to ignore Misaki, why couldn't they just tell the new guy? As far as they knew, the "calamity" hadn't started yet, and it was a pretty important piece of information. This same kind of logic applies to events that they didn't directly cause as well. House on fire? Calmly knock on doors and ask if everyone's okay instead of sounding the alarm and getting the hell out. The teacher is attempting to stab himself with a knife? Stay in your seat and stare at him while he gushes blood like a fire house instead of attempting to get help until after the fact. By the end of the show, I was convinced that everyone in the class was an idiot.

  
However, if the entire show had been like that I probably would've dropped it a while ago. I have to admit, Another does have its good moments. After the first few episodes it drops randomly flashing to creepy dolls and stops playing background music that makes the theme song of the Haunted Mansion sound subtle by comparison and actually gets suspenseful. Easily the best scene in the entire show is when Sakakibara starts to wonder if he is actually dead and has a nightmare about it, complete with him rotting away. Runner-up is another dream sequence, where he sees all of the people who had died so far in the show, wounds still intact, and blaming him for what's happened to them. Too bad the rest of the show wasn't on the same level as those scenes. I kept getting the feeling that a lot of this must've worked better in the original novel, and some people have mentioned that changes were made (not just media transition changes either; a least one major plot point in the final episode was apparently done completely differently in the novel). This makes me think that the show was trying to sell itself on shock value, and those parts were more laughable than anything else. The parts where the anime does flex its muscle and show that it can be a good mystery horror show do balance out the sillier parts a bit, but overall it ended up just being an okay show to me; not bad, but not extremely well done either. I do recommend it to horror fans though, for the parts mentioned above. For those of you who don't like graphic violence though, stay far away.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.