Denpa teki na Kanojo – 01

(A story by Kentarou Katayama, author of Kure-nai and set in the same universe. OVA adaptation by studio Brains Base. Website can be found here.)

Juu Juuzawa is approached by a girl who pledges her eternal allegiance to him and bows down to kiss his foot. freaked out, he runs away.

Eventually he gets tired of her stalker-like tendencies and asks who she is and why she is so fixated on him, to which she introduces herself as Ame Ochibana and says that he was a king in his past life and she was his loyal servant. Calling her weird, he tells her to stop pestering him. At night, he wakes up to find Ame in his room. Chasing her out, he takes a walk in the rain and stumbles across the murdered corpse of his classmate Kanako Fujishima. Ame appears at the scene with a bloodied baseball bat which she claims was left behind by the killer. He confronts her the next day and she invites him to her house where she presents a disturbing amount of information on the phantom serial murders happening in the area. Suspecting her to be the phantom serial killer, he follows her the next day but loses her when he is approached by her sister who thinks that he is toying with her sister. He thinks about Ame’s theories about the killer’s motive and deduces that the killer only appears when its raining. An anonymous call leads him to the park, where he meets the killer, who turns out to be a deranged man calling himself a covert government operative whose mission is to kill aliens disguised as humans. After a fight and Ame’s sudden appearance, the man is taken out.

Back at his place, Juu apologises to Ame for suspecting her, and demands that she tell him her wish, which she says is to be by his side. The following day, while talking to Miya Satsuki, his classmate, he falls to the floor: his drink was spiked. Miya reveals herself to be an accomplice of the serial killer, whom she calls her brother(Actually, he is her nieghbour). She was raped by him one day after he had killed a high school girl in the name of his ’cause’. Originally she had intended to turn him in, but discovered that she enjoyed seeing the pained faces of the victims and started accompanying her ‘brother’  to take pictures, even finishing off those who were not properly killed by him. After an exchange of words, Juu says that he is afraid of being alone and dying, to which Ame appears and knocks out Miya with some swift moves and a taser. Miya rises again and attacks Ame with a blade, but Juu gets in the way. Ame tases Miya once more and cries out to Juu. He has a dream about meeting Ame when they were young, and wakes up in the hospital with Ame by his side. Outside, he talks to Ame and then asks her where she would like to go.

Impression:
I intended to watch this a long time ago but forgot to check on it till today, making me about 6 months late in writing this up, but it was good enough that I wanted to blog about it. The story was good, showing how people who are insane tend to not realise it themselves. Ame is an interesting character who is not exactly ‘normal’ in the head, but her devotion (possibly even love?) to Juu is definitely true. Brains Base doesn’t disappoint, the animation was really well done with nice backgrounds and detailed murders and violence. They did a good job making Ame look like the killer, with the monologue shown as words and hidden girl watching Juu fight on the rooftop. The only thing I had against it was that i preferred Juu’s design in the novels more. It was rather interesting that this is set within the Kure-nai universe, even though no connections were actually shown and the stories themselves seem very different from each other (What I’ve heard was that Juu is Benika’s son, amongst other Kure-nai connections present). The screenshots I provided only shows some parts of the ova (which is 42 minutes long) and I suggest you watch if you’re even a little bit interested in this genre. There is supposedly another 2 more ova’s to be released, which will be packaged with later volumes of Kure-nai’s novel. I can’t wait to see more of this.

She may be strange, but she’s cute when she smiles~

By A.C.E.

So much for a short post…