Petshop of Horrors

There’s little in life that’s as rewarding as owning a pet... To have an animal in your care, who you can spend endless amounts of time playing with and caring for, and who in exchange will offer you support, affection, and an unconditional love that will last for the entirety of their ephemeral lives. Of course pet ownership isn’t cheap... A kitten can cost over one hundred dollars, a puppy can cost over one thousand, and that’s before factoring in veterinary costs, which will only get worse as they get old. Still, compared to finding the ideal lifelong companion, Is money really all that important? Well, for the clientele of one Count D, who operates a bizarre pet shop out in Chinatown, money is no object. Ultimately, money isn’t what they pay with. Count D doesn’t sell cats or dogs. Count D sells unique, rare animals... The kind that are not only endangered, but that most people will never see in their lifetimes. The kind that are able to assume human form, to fulfill the dreams of the customer, and maybe even reveal the darkness in their hearts. Be careful when you sign a contract with Count D... Even the slightest deviation, and your very life may be forfeit.

Released in 1999, Petshop of Horrors came out at an interesting time for anime, especially for its studio, which you can probably tell from first glance was Madhouse. The turn of the millennium saw a great many changes in pop culture, one of the less appreciated on our side of the world was the evolution of anime from cell painting to digital, and Petshop utilized a blend of both. The CGI is limited, you probably won’t notice it unless they’re showing the exterior of Count D’s shop, but it still clearly cost them a pretty penny to implement it, because Petshop very obviously had a shoestring budget to work with. This isn’t always a bad thing, as I’ve said in the past... I’ll always appreciate a well managed low budget more than a misused lavish budget... And with Petshop, it’s honestly kind of a mixed bag. When we’re out in the city, out in broad daylight or inside the building where Detective Leon Orcot works, the visuals are atrocious... They’re bright, but the shot compositions can be headache inducing, especially when there’s really nothing visually interesting to see in any of these environments, giving the illusion of the cast standing around talking in empty voids, bright glowing abysses that threaten to blind you if you stare too long.

These scenes also do nothing to hide their budget saving tactics, with each cut corner screaming at the top of its lungs to be noticed. So many obnoxiously long key frames that are only interrupted by flapping lips and very slight body movements that even a novice would notice on first watch. On the flip side, scenes taking place in the dark are the exact opposite. Petshop of Horrors can look downright gorgeous when the animators are allowed to play with shadows, lending D’s shop and pretty much any scene involving his fiendish pets a hauntingly gothic beauty. Layers upon layers of darkness tease your eyes, daring you to get lost in every corner of the screen, while simultaneously reminding you just how dangerous the unknown can be. This is even reflected in the design of the interior of D’s shop, where you rarely ever see an actual wall... Most of the time, D and his guests are framed by curtains and partitions, conveying a feeling of unease as the viewer is never truly sure what’s lurking in the room with the characters, as they have no idea what size or shape the space being occupied actually is.

The character designs are your classic Madhouse fare, with a heavier lean towards anatomical correctness than most anime even of its time, and barely any exaggeration in their eyes. Strong chins, angular faces and highly detailed features are common trademarks of Madhouse, and they’re a far cry from the simpler shoujo designs of the original manga. Count D is your standard, foppish, highly effeminate bishounen with an air of mystery about him, and I’m pretty sure he’s the only actual Asian character in the cast, so he is deliberately designed to stand out and look striking in each of his appearances. Detective Orcot, who I’m guessing is D’s eventual love interest in the manga(their bickering is at least flirtatious enough to imply it), looks a tad more generic, like they took him from some second rate rip-off fighting game where he couldn’t even be the main character. Nobody else really stands out except for the titular pets, none of whom adopted a cliched or straightforward appearance. Their designs are highly creative and unique, even though they’re based on existing myths... Trust me, you’ve never seen a mermaid or a gorgon that looked like these ones.

The soundtrack for this OVA is one of the strangest I’ve ever heard, and not just because every track’s title starts with the letter D. With the exception of D’s character theme, which is a relatively simple string track using traditional oriental music to further establish his role as a foreigner, every single piece of Petshops music finds its own distinctive way to enter the uncanny valley, from notes not lining up, to just one layer of a multilayer track feeling slightly choppy, so a distorted sound accompanied by aquatic background noises. I’ve never been great at describing music, so I’m not going to continue to flail about uselessly over it here, but it is definitely worth a listen, especially since these songs esh with the visuals they accompany so well they’re honestly kind of hard to remember until you listen to them out of context.

The English dub also has some interesting qualities to it, not the least of which is the surprisingly small number of people actually credited to it. True, it’s only a four episode series, but there were more than enough characters left out of the credits to imply some actors were pulling double or even triple duty for this project. John Demita, who has enjoyed a long and fruitful career in both anime and video games, chews the scenery as Count D, and while his fake asian accent may be a bit problematic in hindsight, it works pretty well for a character who is in many ways not what he seems. If his costar Detective Orcot sounds familiar to you, it may be his highly memorable turn as Kyle Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust that you’re remembering... It was for me... Or it could have been Alex Fernandez’s decades of American television roles, most recently in Westworld. I haven’t followed his career personally, but he’s good at portraying characters who strike an even balance of serious and goofy. Most impressive of all is Wendee Lee, who plays at least a few of D’s pets, and she employs a level of voice control to communicate non-verbally through them that I’m usually only used to seeing from Brittany Karbowski. Some of the smaller roles are a tad stiff, but over-all, a pretty damn solid dub for the time.

From the perspective of a westerner, it’s easy to fall into the belief that anime is the pinnacle of Japanese media. Yeah, there are Americans who prefer to read manga, or who get really invested in niches like Japanese live action dramas and Jpop, but there are also a large number of people who primarily stick to anime, and prefer to view it on its own, as an island, with no outside context. I’m not going to lie, I’m one of them. I’m an anime fan. I’m an anime reviewer. I do occasionally dip my toe into other forms of Japanese media, I mean I’m pretty sure I’ve consumed every piece of Negima media that wasn’t aired over the radio, but for the vast majority of anime I watch, I’m never going to go out of my way to seek out related material. The problem with this, I will admit, is that in most cases, this is the opposite of how media operates in Japan. You’d be surprised how many anime there are in existence that were created for the specific purpose of advertising the source manga, from slow burn LGBT romance stories that end early and force you to pick up a book to see if the couple ever gets together, to the slew of 1990’s OVAs that released straight to DVD on a minimal budget and only gave you a snippet of a long running print series.

For Petshop of Horror, we are taking a look at the latter. Short length OVAs were huge in their decade, and while the most famous one was arguably the original Jojo's Bizarre Adventure anime... Which only covered the Stardust Crusaders arc from Iggy’s introduction to the battle with Dio, and only received an additional FIRST HALF several years later upon popular fan demand... Most of them would never see any kind of update or reboot after their initial adaptation. Petshop of Horror isn’t the most egregious example of this in my opinion... The world needs a full scale Battle Angel Alita anime before anything else... But it is still an interesting one to discuss, especially in regard to the form this anime took and how it differs from the manga. I’ll be honest, I’ve never read the entire manga, but even just from the first two stories alone, I’m familiar enough with it that I wouldn’t even really feel right calling this OVA an adaptation of the manga it’s based on... It feels more like a sample platter. Maybe a ‘best of ‘ compilation. Because the anime does not tell the story of the manga in order, and it doesn’t execute those stories the same way either.

In the first volume of the manga, a young woman adopts a songbird from Count D. This bird, like most of his animals, takes the form of a man. She actually follows the contract she signed at first, and the two spend a great deal of time bonding, until she realizes how lonely his song sounds. She adopts a mate for him, and when she finally breaks contract, it’s when she enters their enclosure one day before their courtship ritual is set to be complete... Whereupon the story finally shows its true colors, shifting from gothic melodrama to graphic horror in one genuinely shocking reveal that the manga earned. This story wasn’t included in the OVA, but the second story was... And it aired out of order, of course, as the third episode of the anime. The way the anime works, with each story compressed to a twenty minute length, it wouldn’t be fair to say the scares are ineffective, but if their manga counterparts are anything like the first story of the manga, then it is fair to say a lot of development and suspense was left by the wayside.

For every episode of the anime, there is a formula at play. A character visits Count D, and there’s something immediately wrong with them that you probably can’t put your finger on. They adopt a pet, who takes human shape before them, while D insists they are the animal he claims them to be. He gives them a contract, establishing a set of rules they need to follow(it’s not exactly a Gremlins rip-off, but that is the general idea), and upon taking their new pet home, they immediately break said rules, in a way that reveals some dark truth about them, and often delivers a karmic punishment upon them. There’s also a detective who’s always pestering D about his unusual amount of dead customers, which, fair. It’s a simple, effective formula, which can lead to some genuinely shocking reveals, some terrifying transformations, and even an instance or two of actual heartbreak. As compressed as the stories probably are, and while they do feel it once in a while thanks to some suspiciously convenient turns of fate, nothing ever feels lost in translation. I have to imagine that when the producers were looking for manga stories to use, they deliberately looked for ones that they thought would best fit the anime format.

The unfortunate downside to this is that the overall story is left completely in the dark. Who is Count D? What’s his background? Where is Detective Orcot’s obsessive investigation into Count D going to lead? Why doesn’t Detective Orcot believe in the supernatural, or that Count D is selling supernatural creatures, when Count D always has this little mutant bunny bat hovering around him? That thing is not normal, it is right in front of your discount Terry Bogard face, you are a bad detective! The obvious answer to all of this is “Read the manga you illiterate jackass,” to which I would respond “I’m not illiterate, I just hate pirating media, and this manga is out of print and really expensive. Even buying the first volume for this review was kind of a hassle.” So in effect, while this OVA does deliver some memorably creepy stories and some iconic disturbing scares, the overall product does feel kind of unsatisfying. Of course, there is the other option, where a horror series with an episodic formula goes on too long and starts to feel repetitive up until the moment it starts desperately jumping the shark to keep things fresh.

For those who don’t remember, Hell Girl was an episodic anthology anime with a similar formula that people had that very complaint about, and while I’ll happily defend the entire first season, the second season even managed to wear out its welcome for me, and that’s not even getting into the third season and the live action drama. Would the same thing have happened to Petshop of Horrors? I don’t know, but if there ever WAS a full series adaptation... Maybe either thirteen or twenty-six episodes, depending on initial fan demand and commercial success... I’d be down for that. Still, that’s from my perspective as a western born anime fan. The plan was never to create a fully realized anime, it was to produce four episodes on the cheap that could be sold in stores for probably around six to ten thousand yen each, both funding and advertising the source material. But hey, if Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure can get a full scale remake, and Battle Angel Alita can get an awesome Hollywood movie, I refuse to believe anything is impossible.

Petshop of Horrors is incredibly easy to find, and is still in print to this day, currently owned by Sentai Filmworks. The manga was originally available stateside from Tokyopop, but they are now long out of print, and while it’s not too difficult to find second hand copies online, be prepared to pay an elevated cost per volume. I've heard a live action movie was in the works at one point, but apparently it got stuck in development hell and never happened.

There are several reasons to call the Petshop of Horrors OVA a missed opportunity, and while I wish there were more of it to watch, that’s not to say it isn’t worth picking up in its current form. Moody and ambient, gothic and otherworldly, and with a sense of dark beauty all its own, it’s a great pick if you’re looking for something short to binge on some lonely October night with the lights off and a bowl of popcorn in front of you. The individual episodes, while self-contained outside of Count D’s interactions with Detective Orcot, are at no point devoid of depth or substance. Some of the reveals follow a pretty questionable line of logic, especially if you’re somebody who likes to overthink the media they consume(AKA me), but they are effective parables, and they do teach good lessons, and they’re executed and paced about as well as they can be in a twenty minute time slot. You may not find the experience ultimately satisfying, but I do believe this is a nineties horror classic everybody should see at least once.

I give Petshop of Horrors a 7/10.