review provided by TJ

Title: Sankarea: Complete Collection

Director:Mamoru Hatakeyama

Author: Mitsuru Hattori

U.S. Distributor: Funimation

Release Date: Oct 1, 2013

Format and Length: DVD/Blu-ray; 13 ep; 300 min

Genre: supernatural, romance

Industry Age Rating: TV- MA

Overall Personal Rating: B-

Similar Series:Dusk Maiden of Amnesia; Another

Synopsis:

Chihiro Furuya is a high school boy obsessed with zombie movies.  He has been every since he was a little kid.  His whole life pretty much revolves around zombies and the undead.  It has gotten to the point with him that he is not even interested in real girls.  Even though he admits that he knows zombies are not actually real, he also freely admits that “Zombie girls are the only ones that do it for me.” Naturally, when he finds an old notebook with the recipe to what appears to be a reanimation potion in his attic, he is ecstatic and cannot wait to try it out.  Which he proceeds to do on a cat that recently died.  So he goes to a deserted area to experiment.  But one night during his experiments, a girl stumbles upon him while he is at work.  This girl is Rea Sanka. For some reason or another, she decides to help out with what he is doing.  It is actually her who thinks of the correct plant to try and the cat is successfully brought back to life.  Sort of.  The body is still dead and decaying, but the personality that was housed in it is back.

However, one day as she is going to meet Chihiro, she ends up slipping and falling down a cliff and getting horribly injured.  But then she gets up and just walks away.  It turns out she had stolen and drank some of the potion.  The fall did kill her, but she got up as a zombie.  So now that Chihiro’s wildest fantasy had come true, he has to work to find out how to stop her body from decaying while helping her attempt to sort out her screwed up home life.

Commentary:

Overall there was nothing terribly wrong with Sankarea.  I liked the art and the story was, at the very least, different.  The opening and ending themes had good songs and the animations were fun to watch too.  I did really like the voice acting.  Every character’s voice seemed to fit them and for once the male protagonist did not sound like he had been smoking for twelve years as is common in many anime.

While the story was different and interesting, it was still weird and some parts of the plot were just a little bit disturbing.  The first and most obvious example of that is that Chihiro is, for all intents and purposes, fantasizing about necrophilia.  His dream girl is a dead girl.  And when he finally meets his dream dead girl, his problem now is to try to stop her body from decaying.  But that’s not the end of it.  Rea’s home life is probably just as disturbing as Chihiro’s fantasies are.  There is so much weird drama and it all adds up into one very odd and disturbing series.

It really is not all bad though.  If you can look past the fact that she is dead, some of the scenes in Sankarea are really sweet.  Looking at the superficial relationship between Chihiro and Rea, they look like to high school kids enjoying each others company.  There is humor, awkwardness, arguments, flirting, all the normal things two dating teenagers do with all the normal drama that comes with high school relationships. It was cute and sometimes quite funny.

Overall Grade:  B-

Much of the plot was weird and disturbing, but if those points could be over looked then it becomes a nice, cute romantic comedy.

“In the Radius:”

Other titles that are similar to Sankarea are Dusk Maiden of Amnesia or Another