Review for Sankarea: Undying Love Collection

Introduction

We should have had this last year. Sankarea is unfashionably late, which might also be a problem now that it seems that zombies are falling out of vogue again. But this time the fault lies not with the local distributor, but with the source. Funimation should have released this last year, indeed they did release Sankarea last year, but they were supplied with the broadcast masters from Japan, and released those by mistake, not the uncensored home video version. It took the better part of a year for that mistake to be rectified, the original disc recalled, and the show re-mastered and re-released, hence its tardiness in coming to UK shores, following the usual Funimation to Madman to MVM localisation (although this time there is no PAL transfer, it is NTSC).


I’ve said before that I’m no fan of zombies, so my anticipation for this show was already lower than that of its target demographic. When I learned of the show’s premise, that of a boy who falls in love with an un-dead girl, the gauntlet was laid down. Two similar shows make a genre, and the other live boy-dead girl romance that I’ve seen, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia has set such a high benchmark that Sankarea has a long way to go to please this anime fan. Go on, entertain me.


Chihiro Furuya is a weird kid from a relatively normal family. He lives at a shrine where his father is a priest, with his kid sister Mero and his grandfather and the family cat, Babu, and often pestered by his outgoing cousin Ranko. Chihiro has a zombie fetish. It isn’t just his intense fandom for the zombie genre; he has what he believes is an impossible wish for a zombie girlfriend. Impossible? When the cat is hit by a car and killed, Chihiro can’t deal with the loss, and he decides to reanimate the pet, using a mystical text from the temple. But the ink is smudged on the crucial page, and he’ll have to use trial and error to figure out the special ingredient. So he’s going to the abandoned bowling alley every night with Babu’s corpse...


Rea Sanka is a relatively normal kid from a weird family. Her family’s name is on the local girls’ school, and she’s considered the princess, but her mother is cold and unloving, her family has an ever changing domestic staff, and her father is overly affectionate and controlling... and creepy. She has no life of her own, no friends, which is why she escapes from the house each night, and goes up the hill to scream her frustrations into the well outside the abandoned bowling alley. Inevitably she and Chihiro meet and get to know each other. She even suggests that the missing ingredient in his elixir might be the poisonous hydrangea blooms. It’s the last night of Chihiro’s attempts to bring back Babu, and Rea steals a vial of his final elixir. But her father catches her when she sneaks back home, and confines her to the house. Feeling trapped and frustrated, Rea drinks the elixir, hoping that he poison within will end her suffering. Instead she wakes up the next day... different.


Sankarea’s thirteen episodes are presented across 2 DVDs from MVM thus, and the episode titles get the full Shatner. They call the thirteenth episode the OVA, but according to the ANN Encyclopaedia, it’s the un-broadcast thirteenth episode that was bundled with the final DVD/BD release in Japan. There are two OVA episodes of Sankarea, but they haven’t yet been released in the West.


Disc 1
1. Once I... Became a... Zombie...
2. It Was... Successful
3. Sanka... Rea
4. A Normal... Girl
5. If She’s a Zombie... That Means...
6. It’s Because I... Ran Into You
7. Childhood... Friends...

Disc 2
8. Counterfeit... Freedom...
9. A Mother’s... Hand...
10. Strong... Feelings...
11. Nothing... Really... Special
12. At That Moment... I...
13. I, Too, Am... A Zombie...

Picture

Sankarea gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer, essentially the Funimation discs with a few changes in content by Madman before coming to the UK. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with strong consistent colours, and no obvious signs of compression. Even better, these discs are encoded progressively, so with compatible equipment, you’ll be able to get smooth, fluid 24fps animation. Sankarea gets some really impressive production values, interesting, slightly off-key and spooky character designs, solid and engaging world designs, and a thoughtfully expressive colour palette, used well to bring out the mood and tone of the story. This is one show that would really benefit from an HD presentation, as the detail and quality of the animation certainly warrants it. Alas that isn’t an option at this time in the UK, although Australia and the US have got it on Blu-ray.

Sound

As per usual for Funimation sourced discs, you get the choice of DD 5.1 Surround English, and DD 2.0 Stereo Japanese with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. I was immediately put into a good mood for the show when I heard the opening theme, another peppy nano.Ripe ditty. You can bet that I’m going to profess my preference for the original language audio, and sure enough I was very happy with the voice actor performances, and the general quality of the audio, the stereo offering a nice degree of space. The subtitles are accurately timed and generally free of error...


Generally. It’s the opening of episode 11 where the subtitles fall off a cliff. The pre-credits sequence for the episode, 90 odd seconds of a scene, loses most of the dialogue subtitles and replaces them with the song lyrics for the opening theme. It gave me an excuse to sample the English dub at this point, and it’s another quality effort from Funimation, with good performances from actors suited to their characters. It’s a shame about this error in an otherwise decent release, and the thing about this being an NTSC disc, is that the error probably repeats in the Australian and US releases as well. The US release is a Blu-ray DVD combo, and my guess is most of its purchasers in the last few weeks have been enjoying the HD version of the show too much, to check out the DVD discs just yet.

Extras

Sankarea is presented across 2 discs, which in this case have passed through the Madman authoring factory by only having the usual Funimation trailers removed, the discs regionalised. Otherwise, the NTSC discs are pretty much what you would get if you bought the US release (minus Blu-rays of course). The discs present their content with static menus, and there are jacket pictures to look at when they are at rest in compatible players.


Disc 1’s sole extra is the audio commentary on Episode 3, with Tia Ballard (Rea), and Aaron Dismuke (Chihiro). It’s the usual from Funimation, and I’d switched it off after five minutes of inanity, and not because of the series spoiler contained within.

Disc 2 offers the textless credits and the US trailer. You also get an audio commentary on episode 11 with ADR Director Joel McDonald, zombie expert Terri Doty, and voice of Dan’Ichiro, David Wald. It’s a better, more zombie focused commentary, and little more engaging than the first one.

Conclusion

It happens a little too often for comfort these days when I watch anime. Interesting... good... entertaining... fun... great... brilliant... you call that an ending?! Shows grow on me as I watch them, I find that I’m investing myself in them more and more as they unfold, and then they mess it all up with the final episode, leaving a sour taste in my mouth, a feeling of time wasted, emotional investment squandered. I have to step back for a couple of days, think about something else instead, before coming back to the show, and asking if the journey was worth it, regardless of the non-ending. Sankarea is one of those shows, which with its last gasp concludes on a deliberately open-ended note, introducing a new character in its final scene, an obvious plea for a second season by its creators. If that fails, we’ll have to adjourn to the manga, and hope that the anime didn’t stray too much in the adaptation.


I haven’t had as much breathing room as I would have liked before coming to this review, but I have to say that despite the ending, I really liked Sankarea, as it delivers something all too rare in the anime that I watch these days... something I haven’t seen before. As I mentioned, it isn’t the first dead girl/live boy romance I have seen, but Dusk Maiden of Amnesia had the fortune to start with the girl already a ghost. That series started off on a very comedic and light note, before gradually becoming darker and serious. It eased the viewer into the more distressing aspects of the story. Not so with Sankarea, this starts off in a dark and comic mode and pretty much stays unsettling and discomfiting throughout.


It starts off with its female protagonist very much alive, and takes us through the events and processes that lead to her zombification. Right there, you know that it can’t exactly play those scenes for laughs, and it becomes even more serious when you learn exactly how Rea is turned into a zombie. That she has to die is evident enough, but when it turns out that the creation of a zombie comes through the ingestion of an elixir, which contains a poison to live humans, you have to wonder just what sort of circumstances would persuade Rea to choose such an option. When you meet her creepy, overly-controlling father, and her cold, heartless stepmother, as well as the weird army of maids in their mansion, you’ll get some idea. Especially with the father dictating Rea’s every move, personally intervening and sabotaging what few friendships she might have, with a weird notion of what constitutes a family album, and obviously grooming Rea for... well it is tantamount to child abuse. No wonder she wants to escape. I have to admit that the first few episodes of this show were more unsettling than they were entertaining


Fortunately it’s offset in the early episodes by the introduction of Chihiro, his friends and family, and his zombie fetish, as well as his unlikely meeting and growing friendship with the living Rea. That process begins when Chihiro’s pet cat (with a speech impediment) Babu dies, and Chihiro becomes determined to bring him back. He’s conducting his reanimation experiments in secret when he meets Rea, and she finds herself drawn to this morbid boy with a fetish for the dead, simply because he’s still the most normal person that she’s spent any amount of time with.


Things change after Rea’s death, and reanimation, as she moves in with Chihiro and his family at the temple. What follows is pretty much a slice of life (slice of death?) show, as Chihiro gets used to living with the zombie of his dreams, although he’s less concerned with matters of the cold flesh, than trying to keep Rea from decomposing. And even in this show there’s the complication of the other girl, in this case Chihiro’s cousin Ranko, who’s had a crush on him ever since they were toddlers, and is now out of sorts with Chihiro having found his dream dead girl. As per usual for anime, eventually an odd, friendly rivalry forms between Rea and Ranko. And as we get to know more about Chihiro’s family, the more we see that it’s not exactly the conventional family unit. Chihiro’s little sister Mero follows the quiet, subdued stereotype, and dresses like a ghost to sleep. His grandfather is addled, and eats hydrangea leaves as a snack, and it looks as if Chihiro may not be the first to dabble in the reanimation of the dead.


Towards the end of the series we get back to the plot, as Rea’s dad becomes determined to reclaim his daughter, dead or alive, and winds up kidnapping Chihiro to do so. This is interrupted by a really charming episode that concentrates on Mero, who’s been pretty much a side character to this point, only really noticeable in the next episode previews, but the show’s conclusion heads towards dealing with Rea and her creepy father, trying to resolve that painfully awkward relationship, before hopefully moving Chihiro and Rea’s relationship in a positive direction.


Then there’s that final episode, fun for the most part, told from the zombie cat Babu’s point of view, a day in the life and un-death of Rea and Chihiro, but then comes that non-ending which is making me grumpy again just typing about it. The pacing isn’t that great, with the show uneven in tone, the fan service is up to the usual anime standards, and it leaves far too many questions unanswered about both Rea’s family and Chihiro’s family, and the romance is barely getting started as this series comes to an end. I wouldn’t be averse to more Sankarea down the line, but what we have here certainly entertains during its runtime. And I can safely say that I have no other anime romances with a zombie girl and zombie otaku boy in. Sankarea definitely gets a plus point for the novelty factor. That subtitle flub on episode 11 is disappointing, and given that everyone shared materials for this release, it’s likely the US DVDs are the same way. But, I can confirm that this is the uncut, uncensored, gory and ecchi Sankarea... and that zombies look good in cosplay!

EDIT: To confirm that I asked about the US DVD, and the episode 11 subtitle error is indeed present, but everything is as it should be on the Blu-ray.