“I have no idea what’s going on” was my mantra the entire time I was watching the first volume of the six-part anime OVA series Karas: The Prophecy. This movie felt like a combination teaser trailer that never quite ended and a dream that you dreamed you were having and then “woke up” and realized you dreamed you woke up and were still dreaming. Karas was as confusing as the latter statement and as tantalizing as the former.

The animation for this movie was excellent and the designs were all top notch, but you can tell that they failed to include anyone on the staff that knew what a plot line was. Karas started out in the middle of the story with absolutely no background info on anything and kept on starting in the middle. By that I mean you felt as if the story were trying to develop all over again every so many scenes and never quite made it.

I kept trying to get a sense of the actual story from all the false starts and the only thing I could conclusively come to is:

• Demons are over running the human world in mechanical bodies the antagonist, Echo, created for them. Echo is a villain with absolutely no background or purpose besides maybe taking over the world. We the viewer aren’t privy to what Echo really wants to do; he maybe wants to destroy or remake the world, we have to guess.
• The forces opposing Echo are the Karas (I think, yet another guess) but Echo himself is a Karas (maybe, this is all conjecture). The Karas are disembodied human souls who are in the service of cat girls called Yurine who dispatch them within set territories in the city.
• While all this Karas mumbo jumbo is going down, two cops in the human world are trying to crack the bizarre cases left behind after the robo-demons attack. For some reason, we get some in depth back story about the two cops, but I didn’t even really give a shit about who the hell these flat foots are.

What I really wanted to know through out the entire painful movie experience and will never know is:

• Who the hell was Karas?
• What was Karas?
• Where did he get the ability to turn into a fighter jet?
• Why did he turn into a fighter jet?
• What was Echo’s plot?
• Who are the Yurine and why are the Karas the Yurine’s bitches?
• Etc., etc.

The unanswered questions are countless…I knew within the first ten minutes of the movie that I would be yelling at the TV screen for answers. It wasn’t a language issue either; Karas didn’t make any sense in Japanese or English.

I’m still confused as to the “ending” of Kara-it had all the subtly and finesse of a car driving into a brick wall at 90 mph, bursting into flames, rolling into a puddle of gasoline then exploding, then imploding, but without as much depth.

The soundtrack was well scored and matched OK with the movie, but it felt at many times that the music was too good for the story or that it was making up what the story lacked. At those times, the score was laughable; just imagine John Williams scoring the old animated Transformer movie with the Superman soundtrack and you’ll get an idea of what I mean by the music being better than the movie.

Karas was painful to watch, mainly because you wanted it to make sense. The concept sounded pretty good and the animation was great. The designs were well done and the voice actors were well cast, so why did it suck the way it did? How could it have sucked the way it did?

I keep going back to the theory that the studio was on a time constraint and they wanted to make it symbolic and minimal. I’m not an incredibly deep person when it comes to anime, but I know the difference between symbolism and laziness and the difference between art house and pretentiousness; Karas was lazy and pretentious.

I realize that “Prophecy” is the first of six parts but usually with a series like this there is some extensive background established from the get go to maintain interest instead of jumping ahead and never looking back. I don’t have enough interest to want to continue watching Karas when number two is released since I don’t like playing the guessing game with a movie for an hour and a half.

Read the part two review (Karas: The Revelation) here.

outta four gummies