Another -- Review ★★★★★

Another is probably my favorite anime of 2012. Not only because of Mei's cute eyepatch, but also because it covers all the bases for horror, thriller, and mystery, and does so in stunning fashion. I'll warn you up front, though. This series starts off slow. I'm personally way into slow shows, so I adore Another's deliberate pacing, but I know some people could be bored to tears by it. But if you stick with it, this series will hook you once the plot takes off and the early exposition is done being gradually meted out.

So what exactly is going on here? Well, it takes about three hours for the show to explain itself, so how can I summarize it in one paragraph? Sickly high-school dude Sakakibara moves into this town, and he and his new classmates end up crotch deep in murder mysteries. -- Wait, is this Higurashi again? -- Well, that's not too far off, at least in premise. Now that I think about it, there are a ton of similarities between the two, not that it really matters. Also, I don't want to give away too much, because even the basic setup of this series doesn't get revealed until around the fourth episode. As I said, it's meticulously paced. The things you really need to know are exactly what I stated before: horror, thriller, mystery.

HORROR: This is a pretty spooky show just in its presentation, and the way it withholds information from the viewer is crazy effective at keeping you on your toes the whole way through. Oh yeah, and there's buckets of gore. Like Higurashi, this one's not for the faint of heart. THRILLER: This show is so intense. Note that I say "intense" and not just "tense". This can be an extremely engaging story if you let it be, and that's why I praise this series for its pacing and restraint. We children of the 21st century have such short attention spans that I find it incredibly refreshing when a series pretty much says "Yo, you don't get to decide whether to rush through this plot. We're going at my pace!" And of course the art direction is right on the ball, creating a supremely captivating and often disturbing mise-en-scene. While this isn't your full on Ju-on/Ringu kind of ghost story, it gets most of the way toward that level of creepy suspense, especially in the early stages of the story before you know too much about what's happening. MYSTERY: You pretty much never know what's happening. Every couple of episodes you get new clues to cling to that inevitably turn out to be red herrings. Is that cheap? Yeah, insofar as all mystery stories are cheap. Is it worth it? Yeah, for the most part. Like any good mystery, Another proves to be an investigative journey that keeps you hooked all the way to the end. The final reveal is also kind of cheap, because the writers were essentially cheating to keep certain things hidden from the viewer, but there isn't really anything logically inconsistent about the plot twists, so I'm willing to suspend my disbelief here.

So what about the packaging? Well, there's definitely a grand vision behind Another's presentation. The visual symbolism is laid on pretty thick, especially with regard to the show's pervasive ball-jointed doll motif. It immediately calls to mind Ghost in the Shell 2 (not a great film), as both anime draw from a mixture of Japanese doll tradition and the surrealist art of Hans Bellmer. Plus dolls are just creepy anyway. Also, this show is super into elevators, and you'll notice they like to stop at the 5th floor. This is important since Asian buildings skip the 4th floor, for basically the same reason we skip the 13th. And as Mitch Hedberg famously said, "Come on now, you know what floor you're really on!" Overall, the artwork is great, except for the occasional 3D-animated scene that sticks out like rain on your wedding day. The music is pretty solid and fits the atmosphere well too, even though the OP is a little too Andrew Lloyd Webber for my taste. But again, they nailed the suspense, which is great because suspense is sort of a dying concept in the anime industry, what with the whole moe revolution (though, this show demonstrates that moe and suspense actually can go together wonderfully).

But really, the important thing is that Another's story is just really effin' good, and there are some great characters as well. If you're in the mood for something dark, you can't go wrong with this one. Maybe it's a tad too gothic-melodrama at times, but that makes sense in a series that is this dripping-with-atmosphere. You just have to be willing to let this series drag you through its twists and turns at its own pace.

--The Anime Hipster