PLot summary

Tokyo’s chosen protector, the Karas known as Otoha, has lost his master, Yurine, to the former Karas turned embittered tyrant, Eko. Otoha had awoken from his coma in the city hospital in order to stop Eko from destroying Otoha’s corporal form. Too late he realized he was not Eko’s target; Yurine was.

Without their Yurine, the Karas of the cities are powerless to transform into their guardian forms. Now Otoha wanders the streets, trying to discover a purpose without his Yurine. In a twist of cruel fate, what little was left to Otoha before his coma was riven from him by his former gang member brothers.

Eko, meanwhile, finally has all the pieces he needs to turn Tokyo into a charnel house, devoid of humans but a haven for demons. Karas is unable to stop Eko as he sacrifices his minions in order to realize his ambitions. Tokyo now becomes a blood drenched battle ground between the now powerless Otoha and the nigh indestructible Eko. But Tokyo chooses its Karas; who will this city now pick as its protector?

review

Readers familiar with this site know how I feel about the previous Karas. To those unfamiliar: Karas: The Prophecy had too much flash and not enough substance. Too little information was given about the Karas and the role they play in protecting various cities. Tidbits were thrown out to the general public, but most people were forced to re-watch the first volume multiple times in order to gain some modicum of understanding. Wikipedia also became a popular source of external information for the series instead of the series itself.

Karas: The Revelation, while being a massive improvement over the first volume, was still lacking major plot points and depth. Otoha had the potential to be a highly sympathetic character, and I began to be drawn to him, but the development fell short. This was aggravating. There were far too many holes in his story, his personality, his background, his role as Karas; the list is long in that regard. Whole episodes should have been devoted to Otoha if the studio wanted to flesh him out. And it felt like the studio actually did want to flesh him out but ran out of time. Instead, we’re given this hollowed out shell of a man who looks fantastic on the surface but is empty on closer inspection.

The same goes for Eko. This guy wants to destroy Tokyo for the countless years of pain he endured as he watched it degrade under his protection. This is a huge plot point but there wasn’t much background on how Eko has attracted demons to his cause or how his Yurine grew so weak or who he was before he was a Karas. Even briefly touching on any of these points would have made Eko more sympathetic which would have added to the story’s overall depth.

As it was, the story felt incomplete and shallow. The Yurine’s control the Karas, but how and why? The city creates the Yurine but how are the Karas chosen? Why is Otoha called “Doctor Karas”? What is a Karas’ duration as protector? All these interesting questions, which viewers ask themselves, add a spark to the series which never developed into a flame. Everything fell short except the visuals and the voice acting.

Karas has some of the absolute best character designs to date. Homura, a Karas visiting Tokyo, takes the cake as the best design in the series. Her armor and Karas persona have a sensuous yet warrior-like feel; the balance between the two is perfect. Even the absolutely laughable Karas-jet planes had great design work. All the Mikura (machine demons) were horrific in appearance and had the desired affect of creeping me the hell out. Both Otoha and Eko were given the super-bishishounen treatment and looked fantastic on the screen. The Yurine are adorable with their glowing hair and cat-girlish mannerisms. Visually, it seems as if nothing was overlooked, with the exception of the editing.

In some scenes, the editing made it confusing as to what was actually happening; is the fight over or did it move somewhere else? Is this a flashback or is a character’s response real time? Did this character die or not? Poor editing made a movie which was already dreadfully confusing, needlessly more so.

Karas: The Revelation was Tatsunoko Production’s 40th Anniversary work. The animation is indeed a celebration of superb craftsmanship, super-detailing, realistic movements, and inspired character designs. “Impressive” is actually too mundane a word to describe the animation. Details abound and the rich palette for the series almost drips from the screen. The story for Karas, however, was the Achille’s Heel for what could have been Tatsunoko Production’s finest work to date.

The English voice cast, though much touted, paled in comparison to the Japanese voice cast. The Japanese voice cast emoted well and blended in beautifully with the visuals. The music suited the animation and was epic to match the high reaching feeling of the anime.

Karas had the potential to be a masterpiece beyond its jaw-dropping visuals. Story, plot, and character development, however, were sacrificed in favor of beautiful animation and inventive character designs. It’s easy to make something look good; it’s much more difficult to develop an anime that will stick with someone long after they forget what the series or movie looked like. Karas was a beautiful anime, but I’ve already forgotten what it was about, if I ever knew to begin with.

out of a possible four gummies.

In honor of Karas: The Revelation’s release today, The Anime Blog is giving away a Limited Edition Karas Pocket Watch! This pocket watch face features the same logo used in the movie and comes in a swanky black box. Hold on to it to help you keep track of time or give it to the die-hard Karas fan in your life!

To Enter:

• All entrants MUST live in the continental U.S. (sorry, shipping is ‘xpensive)
• All entrants MUST be a registered user to win. (Register Here)
• Post a comment in the comment board below stating that you’re entering for this giveaway.
• One post and only one entry per registered user. Flooding the board with multiple posts will result in deletion of all said user’s posts.

Deadline:

• Deadline is numerical: 60 unique comments (minimum). The winner will be randomly drawn when 60 comments have been posted.

Winner:

• The winner’s screen name will be posted on the site and the winner will also be notified by e-mail!

Good luck and don’t forget to tell your friends! The more comments we get, the faster you can win!

“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 Karas…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