I update my Fall 2008 blog with another new show. Finally after all the waiting I review the first episode of Shikabane Hime Aka. I guess most anime database sites prefer the more concise view of writing with the entire summary being one sentence. “The title Corpse Princess belongs to Mokina Hoshimura, an undead girl who seeks to hunt down 108 corpses in order to go to heaven.” The whole premise sounds a little generic to many, but I think it also has potential to be rather entertaining. Well enough with the rather short background story, blog begins now!
It opens up showing a full moon partly hidden behind the clouds. The screen cuts to showing us the sign of an orphanage. A cat meows in the background as the place is quiet except for the blowing of the wind. It
Looks very comfy...
shows a young boy in his bed having trouble sleeping for good reason. Apparently there are five other kids attached to his limbs and body asleep. I think that’s rather odd, and it would be very awful to have to sleep in that kind of position. A creepy cat that we heard meowing suddenly appears. Its yellow eyes glowing as it looks through the window. The boy wakes up to look at it, and the cat jumps through the window (like it can walk through objects) sits down and speaks. It says Ouri in a very
Creepy Cat
spooky voice. The boy gets up and opens the door slowly hobbling outside down an entryway to another building. By the way he is walking and acting I’m not sure if he is under a trance or not.
It doesn’t appear he’s in a trance as he takes notice to a light inside the building he’s walking toward. He opens the door asking if the person in there is his brother. It looks to be like a temple room with a Buddha statue and many candles lit in the room. The boy opens the door farther and notices there is a girl lying on a mat beaten up with cuts on her body. Her
You think you had a rough night?
clothes are torn and tattered. He rushes over to her aid. He touches her hand and notices that her body is cold. He checks for breathing and exclaims she’s dead. Suddenly other men barge in apparently monks who work at the temple. One of them has glasses and appears to be in bad condition as well. The four men stand over the girl while the other boy, who had hidden, is wondering what is going on with the girl. Then the cat from earlier asks him if he wants to know. She tells him she’s a shikabane.
The monk with glasses rolls the shikabane on her back and says because of his lack of experience the En was almost severed, although at this time I am unaware what the En is referring to. He does some healing monk thing and holds her close to him. The boy hiding notices movement in her hands, and the girl opens her eyes. She says “Keisei sorry.” The others appear to seem relieved she’s alive. The boy can’t believe it and states to himself that she was dead without a doubt.
Suddenly it shifts to police breaking into an apartment by using a circular saw to cut the chain holding the door. They rush in to a back room and see a guy sitting on a couch with pink lights shining on him. He has his head down, and the one of the officers says he is Hagino, and they had found seven dead bodies at his residence apparently all women who had lived with him. The man responds by asking them since they’re police that if their subordinates disobeyed they would get rid of them wouldn’t they. He slowly stands up in
Wonder what the spotlights are for?
an anything but coordinated manner. The detective (I assume) demands to know what crimes the women committed, and the man replies saying they did not listen to orders. He then jumps behind him to the open window and jumps off the ledge. It is implied that he fell to his death, but with guys like that we can never be sure.
The scene shifts to the day again back to the orphanage. The children are eating breakfast, with the Keisei man overlooking. Everyone is praying and while they have their eyes closed Keisei steals some food from a child’s plate. This gets the younger brother fired up, but Keisei begins to go off on a long winded
More pain to the back of the head
speech on nothing really till a woman comes in behind him and smacks him in the back of the head sending him flying into the wall. The woman demands the priest what he is teaching the children. The older boy from the beginning of the episode comes in, and apparently he is moving out. He and from what I assume is his younger brother get into an argument over his name and as he is walking back Keisei trips him causing him to drop his box. This leads to many swimsuit magazines to spill out all over the floor.
Bad time for your "collection" to come out.
It seems that the Keisei had planted the magazines in his stuff and even to the time to write the other young man’s name on them. Apparently the young man (whose name is Ouri) is moving out and living by himself now. (A possible harem setup) A little girl at the table obviously doesn’t want him to leave. Ouri leaves heading off to school planning on getting his things after school. Keisei and the woman who smacked him on the head have a talk about Ouri, ever since the night when Keisei was hurt (at the beginning of the episode) was the night when Ouri wanted to move out.
Try to leave after seeing this face.
We are shifted to a rather empty apartment room with the sound of a shower running in the background. It’s the wounded girl from the beginning. She is in the shower, but I’m not sure if there are still smaller wounds on her still healing or if they are some kind of weird marks. Her phone is ringing, but she can’t hear it and it shifts scenes. We are now at Ouri’s school, then in his classroom where he and some of his classmates are talking about Ouri moving out. Ouri tries to hint at getting them to help him move but they run off before he can even get his sentence out. He chases after them, but bumps into a girl named Inuhiko. She asks Ouri if he heard about the “harem
Guys seem to get the abuse this fall
killer”. (AH-HA! A possible Harem Horror Show!!) This gets the attention of one of Ouri’s friends saying how jealous he is, and how every guy wants to experience a harem setting at least once. His rant is quickly ended from a hard elbow to the stomach from Inuhiko.
They go into the discussion about the killer talking about the information that the viewer already knew from earlier in the show. We do learn though apparently he did survive the fall though (like I thought depsite sound of a body hitting the concrete) and is still lurking somewhere. The scene shifts to the shikabane girl talking to Keisei about the killer. Apparently the killer has become a shikabane and they are discussing how to deal with him. It is shown that he lived through the twenty story drop and got up turned into some crazy monster that looked like a shadow attacked the police outside the building and escaped. It appears that Keisei is enlisting the help of the girl (Makina). It appears one of the guys named Honda is not very happy about keeping the girl around with his statement, “That is the reason why we keep something like you around.” However, she seems unaffected saying she will find the shikabane and kill him.
We are outside the city near dusk and you see the shadow creature fly across the skies. The pedestrians below are taking notice below but it flies fairly quicly so they can’t get a good like at it. (It looks like a more hideous and bigger version of batman in the sky.) We are back at Ouri placing his belongings in a cart as he prepares to move. He leaves walking pulling the cart behind him. We are shown another building with Makina coming up an elevator in an apartment complex. Down the hall is a room with its door open with pink light flooding out into the hallway like before. Keisei and the others (priests? I guess) are outside when Keisei is informed that one of the girls in Hagino’s (the crazy demon guy) harem is in the building and apparently Hagino had summoned her.
It shifts back to Makina peeking into the pink lit room seeing Hagino sucking the blood from the neck of a woman. The room has stained glass on three sides and the corpses of three other women are laying on the floor suggesting that he was already finished drinking the other women’s blood. Makina asks Hagino what
Tastes better than juice!
he’s doing he replies that he died and was revived, and he has become an immortal vampire. The girl responds saying no, he’s just a shikabane. The women pick themselves off the floor and one of them grabs the girls leg, it is said that they are now shikabane now also.
He rushes at her and she tries to throw a punch but he catches her punch. She breaks free does a back flip and pull out two guns, and opens fire. The demon comes out of
A rather interesting thing to have inside you.
Hagino’s body and these things that look like bone wings pop out of its body. It ties the girl up with cord like things from its body, an explosion happens in the room and the demon is flying out with all five women (the four girls from earlier) attached to him, with some kind of rope thing from its body. Makina is struggling to get free still while the demon flies above the city. She still has her guns in her hands and manages to shoot the cords wrapped around her letting her escape, but she is falling toward the streets far below.
We are then shifted back to Ouri who is struggling as he is pulling his cart up a hill. Suddenly there is a loud crash noise and Ouri sees Makina who had fallen and hit the ground. Ouri accidentally lets his guard up and the weight of the cart rolls back down the hill after Ouri let go. Ouri quickly remembers that it was the girl who was beaten up back at the temple. All of the sudden the talking cat appears and confirms his
There ARE monsters in your closet
statement. For some reason Ouri shows no sign of surprise to a talking cat. He checks Makina’s pulse and confirms she’s dead. He holds her close to him like Keisei did earlier in attempts to revive her. We are suddenly shown a scene with two sliding doors cracked open. There is fire on the other side and suddenly hands with claws burst through the door. Makina is on the other side trying to back away into against a wall from the demons. She is in pure terror. We can assume she’s in hell.
She says Keisei’s name and is covered in darkness. She wakes up in Ouri’s arms, it is now night back in the human world. She asks who Ouri is, and he says well your heart wasn’t beating and still isn’t. She asks why he knows that and yet he still isn’t afraid. He says well you’re alive. She seems to relax and smile, but quickly smacks him and runs away down the hill jumping on a moped that Keisei drove up on. They ride off from the scene. Ouri chases after her but the moped is gone by the time he gets there. Back on the moped Keisei asks Makina how her body is, she says she just regenerated, and she’s by his side. He says that the other priests are keeping an eye on the shikabane. Kiesei tells her not to touch the other women around
Fights on roofs mean the final showdown
him, because a Shikabane can’t infect other humans. He believes the women may have just been hypnotized. They reach the building and Makina takes off up the building to the roof, where shikabane is waiting still with the women around him.
The shikabane can’t believe that Makina fell from that height and lived. We are told that from time corpses like him appear. They die but they possess a will and take action. Known as a murdering Shikabane. She then says she is a shikabane with the sole purpose of destroying murdering shikabane called a hime
Locked and Loaded
shikabane. She throws off her coat and pulls out her guns again. The women rush toward her, but she dodges them and jumps over them cause she jumps like thirty feet in the air and opens fire on the shikabane. We are shown Ouri who is slowly riding his bike up a hill, looking very exhausting. Debris from the building where two Shikabane are fighting falls to the ground by Ouri causing him to crash. We are shown a shot of the priest who doesn’t like Makina standing there by a window looking down at Ouri.
We are shifted back to the fighting after the demon kicks Makina off of him she is surrounded by the women and bit and strangled however, Keisei comes to her aid. and knocks the women off of her. (I guess he is capable of some combat as well.) Both shikabane rush at each other Makina with her guns blazing sticks
I don't think they like her
them right in the demons abdomen, causing blood to shoot out. She drives him straight into a huge lighting fixture shocking him and shooting him at the same time. Finally she points the guns point blank at his head, smirking at how just now he feared her. She blows some rounds into his head, and it changes scenes.
We are at Ouri apartment who finally got his cart there. He is going to put boxes in his living room when he notices a banner, and his three friends passed out on the floor, surrounded in a mess of food and drinks.
Someone missed the party
We then see Makina getting into the shower once again her body covered in cuts. She says the stunning phrase “The smell of a Shikabane.” and the show ends. The ED starts out with acoustic guitar and sounds very fitting for the night time theme of this show. It soon picks up though to a faster paced song. I enjoy it, it doesn’t sound too bad.
My Thoughts
This show was intersting somewhat. Although I’m really kind of bewildered and slightly unsatisfied. While it seemed cool at parts, and fast paced at times, it also seemed rushed and left a lot of the plot to the imagination. It seemed like the viewer was just kind of thrown in there. It certainly doesn’t waste time getting the show moving. I still don’t know what part Ouri really is going to play later on in the show. I do like the “feeling” that this show gives off. It does a good job of portraying a proper setting. The action is good, and the the way it shows them is great. I liked the camera angles it took during the fighting scenes. I hope that it fills us in though the series and sets the plot a tad straighter in the later episodes. The ED was good, and I’ll be looking forward to the OP since this show also left it out for the first episode. I will be checking out episode 2 though to see what direction this series takes.
Seito Academy 