Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

In every Japanese high school, there are clubs, ran by diligent students who wish to share their passions with others. While there are of course some unique clubs out there, just about every school has at least one club dedicated to the paranormal, be they ghost hunters, researchers, or plain old horror buffs. But there’s one school, cobbled together from both new and old buildings alike, where their Paranormal Research Club is quite unique compared to the others. Not only is it situated in the farthest reaches of the oldest section of the building, but it’s leader is nowhere to be found. Try as you might ,you’ll probably never see her... That is, unless you catch her moving items out of the corner of your eye, or if you should happen to stumble on her remains. You see, this club’s mysterious Ghost President is, in fact, a ghost, and her club was formed on the idea of figuring out the truth about her past... Her young life, as well as her untimely death. Should you join this club, don’t be scared. She’s nice. At least, she’ll try not to hurt you.

Here’s a funny story for you... I went into this series blind, knowing no information outside of what I could remember about it from a previous viewing back before it had a dub, and for the longest time, I was convinced that it was a Shaft title, most likely directed by Akiyuki Shino, as it had his style all over it. There are quite a few anime out there that have an eclectic feel to their visuals, with a bizarre sort of cinematography that makes each shot transition feel random and disjointed enough to leave a jarring feeling behind, and while not all of them are by Shinbou, I generally feel the creepier ones tend to come from him, and this series had it’s creep flag raised high and proud, but where most of Shinbo’s work feels creepy in a skeevy, perverted sort of way... Even when it’s presented with some degree of subtlety, like it was in Madoka Magika... This one was creepy in a way that felt more appropriate to the horror genre. I thought, hey, I guess this means it’s one of his better projects, where he used his weird penchants to achieve a greater effect, right?

Well, no, but I wasn’t too far off. This anime was actually produced by Silver Links, and it was directed by it’s most prolific and prominent employee, Shin Onuma. Want to guess where Onuma worked before he jumped ship to the newly founded Silver Link? That’s right, he previously worked at Shaft, and worked very closely with Shinbou. There’s so much overlap between them before 2009 that I actually found conflicting information, each of which gave one or the other credit for directing the second Negima series. I looked through Onuma’s filmography, and I was pretty impressed by what I saw there... Out of the titles that I’d seen, a lot of them were in fact titles that used a Shinbou sort of visual style, but with a smarter and more thoughtful approach. That’s not to say he shies away from the male gaze, or never accentuates the assets of his female characters, but he at least feels like he has the ability to turn such proclivities off whenever they’re not called for, which is a quality I don’t think Shinbou had very often.

Since Dusk Maiden is a horror title, at least partially, Onuma does crank up the weirdness of his visual style to establish mood and create an unsettling atmosphere, or even to symbolically express the relationships between characters, and while it can get annoying once or twice, that’s more a reflection on the content itself rather than the way it’s being presented(more on this later). It doesn’t always work, but it at least consistently feels creative and ambitious, which I sadly can’t say for the character designs. The characters are drawn extremely to type, surpassing generic and moving all the way into cliche territory, even if it works in some cases, like in the design of the title character Yuuko, who looks like the archetypal Japanese beauty, with pale skin and long black hair, and a school uniform that Blood C had just made fun of a few years prior. It works in her case, as you’d expect a ghost to feel old-fashioned, but her love interest looks like every bland harem lead ever, the tsundere looks like your typical short hair, breast-envy tsundere, and don’t get me started on the genki girl.

I’ve done quite a few reviews where my access to a soundtrack has been limited or outright non-existent *Cough*Yurionice*cough* but with Dusk Maiden, I don’t have the problem at all, because the official DVD set comes with two soundtrack CDs in the case. There are now 45 tracks haunting my Itunes, but unfortunately, there isn’t much I can say about the soundtrack as a whole, because it’s kind of all over the place. That’s not to say any of it’s bad, but it’s about as varied and unrestrained as the show’s visual style, so there really aren’t any common features to discuss. It’s a bunch of different kinds of tunes, and they all sound good. Composers Kiego Hoashi and Ryuichi Takada clearly had a large order to fill, and I have to imagine that they exhausted themselves doing it. I guess three of the biggest trends across the collection would be that most of them either go for a traditional Japanese sound, a tense feeling of dread and urgency, or the kind of perky and upbeat melodies that you’d usually hear during casual scenes in any slice of life anime, but of a higher quality and less repetitive nature than your typical dating game background track.

There are a few stand-outs, such as the theme for the mysterious villain Shadow Yuuko, which is both terrifying and full of very subtle foreshadowing. Despair is an aptly titled tune that sounds like a violin playing heavily along to a somber music box, and it’s also one of the few tunes I actually remembered from it’s use in the series before checking out the soundtrack CDs. This is also the case for Altar, one of the songs I noted as objectively terrifying during my viewing, as it can only be described as the theme to an upcoming blood ritual, with it’s mixture of ominous ceremonial noises and childish accompanying choir. I didn’t really care much for the opening, at least on a visual scale, as it looks just as eclectic and offbeat as the show itself, but without nearly as much inspiration or direction, so it just feels like a bunch of random clips set to music. I do think the song, Choir Jail by Konomi Suzuki, is very nice, as it’s intense and emotional, and is able to lyrically capture some of the darker elements of Yuuko’s situation. I actually liked the ending theme better, as it was a much prettier song, with beautiful visuals that are actually allowed to linger, and you get to see Yuuko herself singing it, which is a nice tough.

The cast of characters was really small, being that they didn’t even introduce a fifth speaking role until episode 5, so Sentai Filmworks didn’t have a very tough job to do when it came time to cast the dub. I’m pretty sure they knew what they were doing, though, because they put four of their best talents in the main roles, with a small group of other well known names floating in from time to time as either small guest roles or nameless extras. They gave the title role to Emily Neves, one of the most in-demand voice actors in the industry, and in my opinion, the best new actor to debut in the 2010’s. She has a very wide range, as well as a chameleonic quality that easily puts her in a prime spot for numerous different roles, and it’d be an understatement to say that Yuuko was a complex enough character to give Neves a lot to work with. She’s able to put her talents on full display with this character, to the point that she could honestly just submit this series as her demo reel if she ever needed one.

Clint Bickham hasn’t done a whole lot of acting in his career, with his only consistently active years being in 2013 and 2014, but he’s shown in other titles that he can play boring or generic harem leads while still sounding genuine and expressing believable emotion, which he does a fine job of here. Brittney Karbowski was of course the perfect choice to play Momoe, the energetic, carefree and somewhat dimwitted comedy relief character, as she was basically able to cut loose and overact like a psycho in all of her melodramatic, loud, upbeat genki girl glory. As for Jessica Boone in the role of Kirie... Well... I have nothing but respect for her, but my enjoyment of her performance in this series bears a direct correlation to my fondness for her character, and to put it nicely, I wasn’t fond of her very often. She does play another character briefly, but I can’t really say who for spoilery reasons, but I like her better there. It’s a great dub that I’d highly recommend, even if it’s just for Emily Neves fans.

Sigh... Here we go again. It’s another damned school club anime. Ever since it was established that this particular sub-genre of Slice of Life was marketable, and that they could make a successful and popular one through little to no creativity or effort, they’ve been popping up everywhere, as excuses for story-tellers to cram a color-coded collection of waifus, or just a small harem, into one room so they could spend a season or two putting them through random stories. Dusk Maiden isn’t the first anime of it’s ilk to base it’s school club around an edgy sort of theme, hell, I don’t even think it’s the first one to use a paranormal theme, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t take the formula and do something bold and new with it. I don’t believe there’s any sort of idea or subject matter that’s doomed to failure from the start, and a good team can spin gold out of any sort of material you can imagine, so what exactly does this series bring to the table?

Well, actually, it has quite a few things going for it. I don’t think i’ve ever said this about any other anime before, but I absolutely love the setting here. Dusk Maiden takes place in a Japanese High School that’s cobbled together in a make-shift fashion with old, historic buildings, as well as new construction, to make something of a Frankenstein school. I’m the type of guy who likes to explore whenever he enters new buildings, I always get into the video game frame of mind and start looking for loot or whatever the real life equivalent of easter eggs would be, and one of my favorite things for a school life anime to do is to set a few episodes in the old, abandoned school house. Well, in Dusk Maiden, the old, abandoned schoolhouse is part of the school itself, and it sets an atmosphere that wouldn’t be out of place in the Winchester mansion, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. The school is maze-like, it’s full of secrets, and the way it’s shot is so dark and creepy that I get excited at the possibility of what might happen in there.

But that’s not even it’s best feature. Yuuka, herself, is by far one of the best characters I’ve ever seen in an anime, at least from a writing standpoint. There’s a lot I can’t say about her, for fear of giving away some pretty heavy spoilers, and the whole show is basically a character study on her(even though I don’t think it was trying to be), that almost every element of the story and plot are in some way connected to her. For the sake of comparison, she’s fleshed out and interconnected even more thoroughly than Haruhi Suzumiya was, and that’s quite a feat. She’s introduced to us as a bored, happy go lucky ghost girl, living her life lack-a-daisically in her clubroom, which was formed for the sake of recovering all of her lost memories, and there are far more layers in that sentence alone than you could possibly guess. There’s only one thing about her I wasn’t really fond of, and that unfortunately leads me to the show’s greatest failing. While there’s a lot to like about Dusk Maiden, it is ultimately a slave to it’s genre.

To be fair, the first four episodes get off to a great start. The pilot is written in an extremely clever way, setting up pretty much everything it has to, and introducing every single character at their best. The following three episodes are backstory as to how Yuuka and Teiichi met, as well as how Momoe and Kirie entered into the picture, and the dynamics between them. These episodes didn’t feature anyone outside of the main four, so it was able to spend a lot of time on them, building up their relationship as a club and as friends, and dropping a ton of really smart clues about Yuuko’s past and the identity of the mysterious enemy stalking them from the shadows. Of course, the good times can’t last forever, because this is a harem anime, and it just had to move into love triangle territory eventually. Granted, the culture fest story ar does introduce a pretty relatable villain, but she doesn’t stick around, leaving our little harem to it’s own devices.

Being that this is a harem, we get all of the worst harem cliches. The main male character is a boring, unremarkable wet sock, but all three of his co-stars are in love with him, and somehow, the one with no explanation gets off the easiest. Yuuko’s love for him basically boils down to the fact that he’s the first person in the school to see and openly acknowledge her, which is kind of a low bar when you think about it, although it does make sense when you take the decades she’s spent alone into account. There’s another reason that’s eventually revealed, but it’s kind of pointless, outside of the fact that it IS a reveal. Momoe is in love with him because, as she puts it, he’s really capable and knows how to take action, which kind of floats between vague bullshit and a complete misunderstanding, as she probably got that impression from all of the ghostly mysteries that Yuuko allowed him to solve.

Kirie doesn’t even have an explanation, as she just starts getting jealous of his relationship with Yuuko in episode 5, and from there, she spends the rest of the series either acting like a love-struck tsundere or dumping exposition and explaining things that most viewers would have been able to figure out on their own. This is in spite of the fact that she was a much more interesting character up until that point, and her relationship to her ancestor Yuuko had far more promise to it. Momoe at least stays consistent throughout this process, as she never stops being the comic relief dumbass of the group, but her love for Teiichi is so uninspired that at one point she actually proclaims, out loud, her joy over being useful to him. As you might expect, all of this is peppered with the usual harem fare, like barbie-doll nudity, a swimsuit episode, and girls cooking for Teiichi with a heavy emphasis on the importance of feeding him with their chopsticks(Say ahh! Christ, I’ll never understand the romantic appeal of feeding someone like they’re a fucking baby), but there is kind of a silver lining at the end of it all.

Once the will-they-won’t-they hurdles are cleared, the actual romance between Yuuko and Teiichi is a really lovely one, and it’s not hard to get invested in it. Granted, there’s very little substance to the romance, and some of the more obvious issues with a human loving a ghost are largely avoided, and a poignant, beautiful ending is immediately ret-conned by the post credits sequence, and the two rejected romance options never let go of their obsession after he’s officially off the table, but it’s still very effective for what it is. The harem elements absolutely cripple Dusk Maiden’s potential, and the romance may be weaker than it seems on the surface, but thankfully, these elements are never placed front and center, and Yuuko’s story is still strong enough to make the series worth watching. If you squint hard enough, you could even see some messages hidden in the text, like that most people only see what they want to believe, you can’t be a complete person if you cast aside negative emotions, and labyrinthian school buildings are fucking awesome.

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is available from Sentai Filmworks. The original manga is not available stateside, but the DVD does come with two OVA episodes... One that’s pure comedy and pg-13 nudity, and one that’s an extended version of the final episode, but I have no idea what’s supposed to be extended about it. The CD soundtrack, as I mentioned, is also included.

I know a lot of this review came out more negatively than I wanted it to, but that’s because all of this anime’s best qualities are either subjective on my part or mired in deep spoilers, which made it’s worst qualities so much easier to talk about. I did, however, have a mostly positive experience with it, as behind all of the groan-worthy harem nonsense, there’s an engaging story surrounding a really complex and interesting character. The comedy is also largely effective, although it never quite reaches the precedent set by the pilot episode. There are parts of it that remind me of Robert Westall’s The Promise and the animated movie Paranorman, which can never be a bad thing, and it’s strongly constructed mystery is far more memorable than it’s cringe-worthy harem elements. I wish the ending had stuck to it;s guns rather than resorting to a cheap cop-out, especially since it never got a sequel to justify it, but I still really enjoyed the story up until that point, for the most part. I give Dusk Maiden of Amnesia a 7/10.