There’s been a string of strange teenage suicides happening in New York, and four girls from completely different walks of life seem to be connected to them. First you have Claire, a street smart vagabond who’s currently bouncing between homes and jobs. You have Rachel, a popular and fashionable party girl. You have Rose, a soft-spoken wallflower who’s been stressfully holding her family together ever since her father left and her mother took ill... And you have Kate, a proper honor student who’s also a part of the school’s elite disciplinary committee. In addition to attending the same school, these four were also friends with Lise, a classmate of theirs who was recently found dead in a local forest. As the four girls are drawn closer together, bonded by the fact that they can’t remember what they were all doing the day Lise went missing, from the day before, the first of many mysteries unfolds before them... That not only have the four of them joined the undead, but in order to have any hope of getting their living bodies back, they must now either battle zombies, as a team, or melt away and truly die forever, all while an unimaginably evil plot plays out around them.

Visually speaking, Red Garden is kind of a hot mess, which is unfortunately nothing new for Studio Gonzo. Yes, it’s true, not everything this studio produces looks bad, but the projects they release tend to fall on either end of the spectrum... Either lavish and stunning, or ugly and garish. They tend to allocate funds in terms of equal extremes, with any random show on their resume either having massive budgets or shoestring budgets, with very few titles sitting in the middle of the spectrum. Red Garden, to my actual surprise, seems to be one of those very few. The budget doesn’t seem too bad in some areas... The backgrounds that are supposed to be reminiscent of New York City, and they are certainly dazzling and immensely detailed... And the occasional CG shot is better looking than a 2006 show from Gonzo has any right to look... But the animation itself still looks really cheap over-all, with character movement being extremely limited, as well as stiff and awkward more often than not.

And yet, there is a clear level of effort throughout all of it. Overall, Red Garden feels, to me, like the product of people who wanted to make their show look amazing, but didn’t know how to manage the resources they had in order to get the most out of it. As cheap as the animation looks, you can very easily tell that somebody was struggling to break through it, as attempts to cover up the lacking budget are consistently present in the way the visuals are framed and shot. I say attempts, because they very rarely work, although I do appreciate the extra little details that went into some of the smallest of animations. The one major exception to this, however, is the action, because while there may be some extremely silly elements TO the way characters fight, the fight scenes are still shot and choreographed really well despite the show’s limitations. You’ll notice quite quickly that it usually looks better during night time scenes than it does in the day, because while the production had a lot of fun playing with shadows, and using the darkness to compensate for it’s visual shortcomings, it couldn’t do anything against the light.

The biggest visual issue here, however, is probably the character designs. I mentioned earlier that this anime takes place in New York City, and they did a fantastic job designing the environment, but the characters were very obviously intended to look like non-Japanese people, and they look uncanny as hell. Most of the cast is meant to be white, with the exception of one black police officer, and the teenage girl characters look especially terrifying, more like Clasky Csupo than anime. They look like the slightly washed out versions of adults from Rugrats. Some of the haircuts are bizarre(although not quite to Shiki levels of insanity), and the facial designs are borderline nightmare fuel, especially the way the lips are drawn, and then animated when they’re talking. Another reason why this anime looks better in the night time scenes is because you can’t see anybody’s faces quite as clearly. Still, character designs aside, the artwork is way nicer to look at than most of the animation, so I think it’s fair to call this one a mixed bag.

But the designs aren’t the only way Gonzo tried to pay homage to America, it also kind of bleeds into the dialogue. Generally speaking, there are two methods for this; ADR and prelay. ADR is when you animate something first, and have voice actors dub over it. Prelay is when you record the dialogue first, and then animate around that. I go into deeper detail about the differences between these two methods in my Only Yesterday review, but all you need to know right now is that anime is usually ADR, and western animation is usually prelay, unless we’re dubbing an anime. What’s interesting about Red Garden is that the dialogue was recorded via prelay, and I have no idea why, since it doesn’t end up being all that important in the long run. There’s one aspect of the series that it kind of contributes to, but I’m going to be saving that little tidbit for later.

In any case, the fact that the sub track was prelay did make things a little awkward when the dubbers at ADV Films came along to ADR the show into English. Thankfully, the ADR director was Stephen Foster, who specialized in awkward dubs. I’ve talked about Stephen Foster in previous reviews, and to give you a brief rundown, he was a staple director of ADV films(and later Sentai Filmworks) and for a while, his work was the subject of controversy thanks to the truly awful dialogue rewrites that he came up with to localize the material and match the lip flaps. One of his common responses to all of the fan fury was to release about half of the material that was handed to him in extremely literal manner, interpreting the original dialogue verbatim while not even bothering to have his actors match their lip flaps properly. The weird thing is, for the most part, this actually worked out well for Red Garden. Out of what I’ve seen from him, this is actually one of Foster’s better efforts, and I don’t mean in an ironic sense like with Highschool of the Dead or Ghost Stories.

True, there is the awkward phrasing of a line delivery here and there, but for the most part, the dialogue in Red Garden is more consistently natural sounding than I’ve heard from a dubbed anime in a long time. I don’t usually hear characters talking over each other in any animated media... Or media in general, for the most part... And if you said it was an issue with the audio mixing, I guess I’d believe you, but it really sounds like conversations between characters are actually happening as a result. Nearly the entire cast give powerful, emotional performances whenever called upon, and the only one who ever goes too far into overacting territory one too many times is the guy playing the main villain of the story. One particularly interesting note is that this show was an early role for Brittney Karbowski, who I have gushed over in the past for her unbelievable level of voice control, but her performance through most of the series is so subtle and down-played that you might not recognize it’s her until she starts breaking down and/or screaming. But yeah, a pretty solid dub all around.

There’s a lot to talk about with Red Garden, and not a lot of it is pleasant, so I hope you don’t mind if I get the positives out of the way first. To start, as you may already know from my previous reviews, one of the fastest ways to make a fan out of me is to present me with a unique, potentially bizarre story concept, and then just explore the fuck out of it. Don’t just give me a cool idea, show me what it means from a bunch of different angles, and show me the effect this idea has on the world around it. Leave no implication unturned. For all of its faults, which I’ll get to in a moment, Red Garden passes this standard with flying colors. The idea has kind of been done once before... A bunch of recently deceased people are recruited to battle monsters that society doesn’t know about for a chance at resurrection... And if it sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is the basic plot description of Gantz. Well, Gantz may have done it first, but Red Garden at least gets off to a much, much better start with it.

One of my most immediate complaints about Gantz was that when Kei and everybody else was given their guns and told to kill aliens, they didn’t do shit. They stood around screaming about how fucked up the situation was, wondering aloud what they were supposed to do while still holding the fucking guns. I know most people put into that situation wouldn’t be able to function properly, but the way their hesitation was presented in Gantz was infuriating. On the other hand, how does Red Garden handle it? Well, obviously the four girls aren’t instantly turned into badasses, but when their fight or flight reaction kicks in, they actually fight or flee. They suck at it, and they have to learn how to pull themselves together over time, but at least you find yourself rooting for them, and praying for their survival, instead of yelling at them to fucking do something. Their reactions feel natural, and relatable, rather than annoying.

Taking things one step farther, though, Gantz may have presented some cool ideas about it’s central concept, but Red Garden still has one more advantage over it when it comes to writing and exploring the concept. That advantage is the cast of characters, as every single one of the four main girls, along with a handful of their supporting castmates, are far more likeable, interesting and fleshed out than any single character in Gantz. I said before that all four of the main girls come from different walks of life, and none of these feel like stereotypes. They each have fully realized identities, as well as distinct lives going on outside of the main plot, and the beautiful thing about it is, you see how the lives they’re leading change as a result of their new circumstances. I’m not just talking about drifting into new friend groups, or losing time to attend to previous responsibilities and interests, I mean the different ways each character experiences the trauma inherent with everything that’s happened to them.

I don’t care who you are, how tough you are, or what you’ve endured throughout your lives... If you were told one day that you were dead, and that you were living in a fake homunculus body while your old one stagnated in a coffin somewhere, and you were going to have to beat zombies to death every night if you wanted to keep on kind of living, that shit would disturb you. That shit would traumatize you. If it were proven to you, I mean. Almost all of the character development in this series revolves around the different ways this knowledge would change a person, and I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that It. Is. Fucking. Delicious. The writing is never afraid to go to some very dark places while exploring the psyche of these characters, whose bodies and lives are no longer their own, and while they do eventually grow together as a team, they each take a distinctly different path to get there.

It’s also worth noting that the world around them isn’t stupid, either. You’ve probably experienced some form of media where there’s some secret war going on that you can’t pay attention to because you can’t stop thinking about how fucking weird it is that nobody’s noticed all of this bullshit going on, right? There has to be some kind of lasting evidence, if not from security systems, but from the collateral damage alone, somebody’s gotta be noticing this shit. This happens in Red Garden. I don’t want to give away any specific spoilers on this, but there are two police officers following the case of the missing teens and mysterious suicides, and they do actually make progress throughout the story, instead of eventually devolving into incompetent morons for the sake of the plot. Unfortunately, though, there are two glaring issues with the writing of this anime, and one of them is, in fact, the plot.

This isn’t just a show about zombie teens being forced to fight zombies with their bare hands. It goes deeper. Much deeper. Over time, we’re given bits and pieces of the overall plot that’s going on behind the scenes, mostly in the form of information dumps, which are just barely disguised as natural conversation. I’ll give credit where it’s due that I don’t specifically recall anybody ever resorting to the classic bullshit line “As you know,” and there aren’t any longwinded voiceover explanations for anything, but in spite of this, none of it makes any fucking sense, and it just gets worse as the story goes on. You’ve probably already asked why the people who gave the girls their curse are resorting to using zombies to fight zombies, rather than just gunning them the fuck down themselves, and I don’t think this question is ever answered, but trust me, that’s only the tip of the iceberg here. The best way I can describe the plot is that there’s a long term feud going on between two pharmaceutical companies, who are battling over ancient cursed books.

Oh, and the other major problem? They sing. Yup. This show is a fucking musical. Kind of. There are a few early scenes where characters burst into song for no apparent reason, it comes right the fuck out of nowhere with no explanation whatsoever before just stopping at some point. I shouldn’t have to mention that this was a bad idea, but it was a bad idea. First off, the musical numbers don’t look visually pleasing. You would think, if a fictional story is going to randomly burst into song, that there’d be some kind of shift in tone and visuals, right? Maybe some exaggerated movements from the singer? Maybe some dancing in the background? No, it’s just depicted like regular dialogue. It honestly just looks like those AMV Hell clips where someone pairs a song to an anime, and manipulates the characters lip flaps to match the lyrics. And because the characters look like they’re still speaking naturally, all the notes are really short, so the songs just ultimately come off as slightly less understandable dialogue. So yeah, while there is stuff in this anime I really like, the overall product does not come together well at all.

Red Garden was originally available from ADV Films, but when ADV went under in the late 2000s, they lost the license to Funimation, who eventually let it go out of print. Attached to most DVD copies is an OVA that is absolutely fucking terrible and where I might treat all of Red Garden’s negative quirks as charming curiosities, I can not recommend wasting 45 minutes on that OVA for the life of me. A manga alternative has not been released stateside.

Look, I appreciate the fact that this anime was willing to take risks and try new things, but at a certain point, you’ve gotta know when to stop throwing stuff at the wall. I don’t want to believe it’s impossible for a zombie musical to be good, but the only other example I can think of is The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, and that’s popularly considered one of the worst movies ever made, full stop. As for Red Garden, there was definite potential here, with a cast of deep and fleshed out characters struggling to live their lives in the shadow of an ongoing traumatic nightmare they may never escape from, but this series was juggling so many insane ideas at once that something just had to give. I feel like I’d be giving it a much higher score if it were somehow chopped down to 12 episodes instead of 22, with most of the bullshit conspiracy plot taken out so the majority of the series could just focus on the main cast, and I would tentatively recommend this series for a spooky seasonal binge, but it still pains me that it didn’t turn out as good as it could have.

I give Red Garden a 5/10.