(12 episodes)
What’s it about ?
What is this I don’t even…
Characters
The titular Sasami, a recluse who never leaves home. She’s extensively cared for by her elder brother. When he’s off to work, she uses her computer network to spy on him possessively.
Said brother remains unnamed throughout the episode, and indeed goes to impressively bizarre lengths not to show his face to the camera at any point. Anyway, he’s a high school teacher, and probably well into his thirties.
Then there are the three sisters pursuing him to various degrees. Tsurugi is one of his colleagues, who does stuff like watching porn in the teachers’ office. The other two are students in the same high school : Kagami is the deadpan sarcastic one, Tama the loony one.
And then the plot goes completely insane : chocolate starts overtaking the world until the three sisters put a stop to it and save the world. (Oh, and and Kagami is apparently a cyborg.) It’s implied that this kind of stuff happens regularly.
It’s a SHAFT show, so there are absolutely no other characters around, with a cityscape entirely devoid of even a single extra.
Production Values
Typical Shinbo direction : artfully composed wide shots, random weird body language bits (such as the brother’s insistant avoidance of the camera), non-naturalistic backgrounds and colours. The animation for the action sequence is very impressive, which makes me wonder about the budget of this series.
What did I think of it ?
Hum. I had no worry that if anyone could make a brocon series watchable, it’d be SHAFT. Especially as the source material is said to be quirkily bizarre on its own right. And this is certainly an enthralling watch, even as alarms bell ring to warn that all of those characters are very creepy indeed.
But the big question is : where do you go from there ? A “bizarre menace of the week” structure could quickly become tediously repetitive, but I doubt this is really what the series is going for. On the other hand, there’s not that much room for character growth either : the characters’ quirks are overpowering and allow for little depth.
There’s definitely a lot of potential here, and on a technical level it’s definitely on SHAFT’s upper range, but I’m not convinced yet this is a show with legs beyond the shock-value façade.
