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Studio: Tatsunoko VCR
Director: Keiichi Sato
Screenplay: Shin Yoshida
Voice Cast: Asuka Shibuya as
Hinaru; Kasumi Suzuki as Yurine; Keiji Fujiwara as Nue; Toshihiro Wada as Otoha;
Hiroto Torihata as Kure Narumi; Hitomi Nabatame as Homura; Kiyoyuki Yanada as
Suiko ; Mai Nakahara as Chizuru / Mery ; Rokurō Naya as the Chief; Saeko Chiba
as Sagizaka Yoshiko; Takahiro Sakurai as Houshun'in Ekou; Tetsuo Goto as Minoru
Sagisaka
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
Created to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Tatsunoko studios, the best way to describe Karas is an ambitious and very interesting premise but one, including the notable delay in between releases of all six episodes, which needed time to breath, rushing with all the ambition of a debut of a man, Keiichi Sato, who started out as a character and mecha designer who finally got to direct a production. It is a simple premise at its heart combining Tatsunoko's history of superhero characters in their animation like Gatchaman or Yatterman, with horror and Japanese folklore, and then-modern CGI animation which is meant for style for the sake of style even if the premise is elaborate in lore. Considering this has sword welding armoured figures fighting in the sky of Shinjuku at Christmas at the beginning of the first episode, the style is there, as is the director Keiichi Sato spelling his own name out in episode one with ants.
Karas is absolutely of its era, very much of the 2000s in style with the CGI and looking as expensive as possible, alongside the emphasis on a more muted art style. Voice casting for the English dub, which brought in Matthew Lillard and Jay Hernandez for key roles, definitely evokes how by the mid 2000s there was a push for making anime more mainstream, and as a straight-to-video project licensed by Manga Entertainment, this is also of the time. Whilst there were a few prominent ones at the time like this, that format was losing traction for these types of projects and TV series were easier to access on DVD finally at that point, Manga Entertainment eventually becoming less prominent as a British and US distributor, and more British one who releases mostly television series and some key films in the decade onwards. Karas however to its credit has a fascinating premise - in Shinjuku a mysterious figure known as Karas, a denoted figure meant to protect the city on behalf of the demons and the yōkai of the city from evil doers, stops demons from killing the humans and consuming their blood. The current one is Otoha, a man in a coma for the first three episodes who spends his time as a doctor for the yōkai in their world. A demon hunter about to stop time, he is under the watch of Yurine, the woman behind our lead who a) is an unexpected catgirl, and b) exists as a concept, more than one Yurine in existence as part of this lore using both Japanese mythology and various Asian disciplines of spirituality as its influence, Yurine existing for all the Karas and all looking the same, including for Eko, the former Karas of Tokyo who, having become disillusioned to its corruption, seeks to annihilate all humans there with what is effectively a plan to turn everyone into his own personal tap of human blood to be able to power his ultimate form.
The style, even under all the CGI, which is used for Karas and his opponents, mechanically altered supernatural demons, is inspired, running both with this idiosyncratic style but also melding it with ancient Japanese folklore. The first monster emphasises this, whilst pulling no punches even if the later episodes are much gorier, with a water demon draining human blood from victims in a specific public bathroom near the subway, introducing us too to Narumi, a new police officer assigned to the one man behind their paranormal department, with his own concerns with his daughter in a mental asylum for seeing her whole classroom massacre by a demon. You however also see that Karas' first episode is arguably stylish to the point you cannot understand half of it, and also rushing through a premise which had legs for longer episodes than the thirty each gets. Effectively taking horror monsters, and having them as life draining robot ones, tackled by a doctor for good yōkai, a huma, who returns to his world to slay evil ones from a former Karas, we have a premise that is rewarding, but this show really needed to have been longer even if it was forty minute episodes. The first three episodes known as The Prophecy for Western release from Manga Entertainment feels like it is bolting through so much without explaining enough, including a demon in human disguise named Nue, after Eko and his monsters too. There are aspects you have to expect are there for the creativity of the production, like all Karas being able to turn into fighter planes for combat, but it is telling, alongside there being too many characters, that The Revelation as the last three episodes are called, all released two years after in 2007, has to start episode four with a huge amount of exposition to explain itself. Characters who barely get detail on them, like a female female Karas and her Yurine watching on as a preppy girl, get more to do, and it explains key lore points alongside Otaha's back story as a mob enforcer.
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As quickly as his tortured history is disposed of, even if it means quickly getting past his crime father and an unexpected bromance that dies a quick death, The Revelation however has to quickly deal with ending the show, so even this is rushed despite explaining the premise. The rush undercuts Karas so much as by those three episodes, we are already into an apocalypse scenario where, with the notable shift in more gore and limb severing, we are in a far more violent doomsday tendril situation. As a result of the rush, even this, which is a scary and gruesome scenario, actually gets into something I have I have always hated in anime - just killing random bystanders off in vast amounts in elaborately gory scenarios as we see here. It is odd but, even with the trashiest of horror anime I have seen that are bad, they seem more justifiable even with an archetype once you known them a little, even one dimensional stereotypes, to be able to exist as a singular figure with their own existences for how long the tale is. Focusing on having their death as one person than merely part of a mass, no matter how gruesome especially with the eighties straight to video era, takes it into an exclamation mark to the scene that works. Here because you do not have enough time to digest the stakes, sadly Karas despite its moody nature even ups with randomly drawn bystanders getting horrifying ends which feels like shock value. This even makes the ending of the notorious Urotsukidôji: The Legend of the Overfiend (1989), its own world ending scenario, powerful ina horrifying way because we had more build up and warning of the threat at stake in that film in spite of its own problematic nature.
A lot of Karas' fault is that, with this premise, Karas is an imaginative and vivid production which had so much work and production preparation clearly placed into it, but was really rushed to a scenario that, even in another slightly longer OVA work, would have needed slightly longer to reach what is this extreme an end. It is also a conventional superhero plot at its heart, despite the gore, that made a bad decision to not get the exposition out of the way or having time to slow down and let its lore sink in even if the production wanted to avoiding too much talking. What stands out in its tone, its horror-occult premise, is pushed to the backburner, which becomes its biggest sin. Particularly with how the designs are so elaborate and idiosyncratic even with clichés - there is requisite spider woman on the evil side, but her monster form and how she drains the blood for humans by hundreds of tiny spiders is entirely idiosyncratic here - it feels gauche to rush through a premise which has at its heart the additional subtext of modernisation conflicting with Japan's past. Details I can expect most will miss, such as how to activate the Karas form, Yurine chants a Shinto mantra, but there is an elaborate metaphor here that anime has tackled a lot and is worth doing so over and over, modernisation and Japan's past in conflict, the old traditions and the modernisation clashing as the demons of yore are forgotten and humanity in the city sinks into crime and corruption. Details like the mayor of Tokyo betraying humanity due to his hatred for all the crime, in another adaptation, would have become more loaded if allowed to breathe.
You can see the production value onscreen, not just in the computer effects, but costume design touches, like the Yurine all having goggles with idiosyncratic and cute markings for eyes on them, or that people cared for this work's lore, that in this world cities are still alive with the unnatural, the crows to the stray cats part of the spirits living in them that denote a human to become a Karas and keep all under control. As a result, this does have the disappointment of what could have been. For me this was always a title from this era getting into anime I wished to get around to, but never did. I am glad to see there was so much passion to the production as an original premise, which I have to admire now I have seen Karas and realised more was on its mind than presumed, but it is with the cost that, unfortunately, it missed the mark. This premise with the cost of its style clearly put on the production in time and effort did not get to the stage it needed to in being fully fleshed out, and it also needed to have been worked on more carefully before it came out. Thankfully, the epilogue of this production is that someone like Keiichi Sato, with this debut as a director, would go on to make helm more productions into the modern day, such as the first series of Tiger & Bunny (2011), so this ambition would lead onwards into other productions.
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