Bakemonogatari E1: “Hitagi Crab, part 1”

This review was commissioned by @Doby Mick

Literally the only thing I know about this anime is that its name is impossible to remember or pronounce, it came out in 2009-10, and it was produced by Shaft. And I only learned most of that while looking for a source right this second. I have no idea what I'm getting into. Let's watch us some Boko Haram.

In true Shaft fashion the pilot begins with a guy walking down the street and getting an upskirt glimpse of a woman on the opposite sidewalk during a wind gust.

We've got us a 10/10 anime right here. Really innovative and engaging stuff. I'm already hooked.

A bunch of nonsense text flashes across the screen for a split second. I can't tell if it was nonsensical in Japanese, or if the translation is at least partly to blame. Then we cut to a high school. The girl's high school, apparently. Of course the woman we start the whole series with a panty shot of is underaged, why wouldn't she be? Anyway, she walks around her sunset high school, while introspective piano music plays and surreally overbuilt industrial buildings and empty classrooms with gigantic glass walls flutter artsily by in the background. I think we might already have a Shaft bingo!

Suddenly we stop following her and go back to the boy who got the view. Then the camera jerks skyward, blood splatters all over the frame (helpfully labeled "blood" with a bunch of little captions), and the title drops.

Scary music. Writer credits. A blur of gory imagery, much of it featuring a serious-looking lady and a maniacal looking blond man with a penchant for holding oversized crucifixes and/or still-beating human hearts. I'm sure this show will use Christian symbolism knowledgably and appropriately. Some more quick flashes of text shoot by in literally fractions of a second. Too fast to read, and too numerous to be worth the trouble of trying to catch each one with the pause button.

At the end of this strange intro sequence, the screen goes red and the final caption stays there long enough to be easily red. It seems to be narrating the ultimate fantasy of the probable target audience.

Some artsy shots of the guy from the intro walking around outside, now under a blue midday sky. White doves taking off in a flock. Then he...oh my god, we really are playing Shaft Bingo...is climbing a pointlessly tall spiral staircase that doesn't seem to lead to anything.

Some weird lights glow in the air above him, and then a woman - not the high schooler from before, I don't think - falls toward him, lights flickering around her all the way. He has an internal monologue, saying that the smart thing to do would have been to move away. The distance she fell meant that trying to catch her would just crush him as well as her. But, irrationally, he moved to catch her. And, fortunately for one if not both of them, she turned out to be supernaturally lightweight.

I do like the guy's voice actor. Really puts feeling into each word, and his voice is just super charismatic and listenable besides.

She opens her eyes and looks up at him. Then, what I assume is the actual series OP starts.

Song is okay. Imagery is...well, it's a bunch of animated and real life photographed scenery and characters framed against each other in an offputting way while nonsensical captions flash around and cartoon staplers staple lines of red dots across reality.

I guess this show about magical rescues and dubiously legal panty shots has a stapler motif. Because Shaft.

Okay. Main body of the pilot episode. "Hitagi Crab, part one." I have pretty much nothing to say so far, but hopefully that'll change shortly.

More random school imagery. Then the boy who did the spiral staircase rescue and the girl who the wind gave him a good look at (I think it's the same girl? Not completely sure, but I think it's her) are sitting in an empty classroom together, making plans for their "school festival." She's Tsubasa, the student council president. He's Araragi, the student council vice president. That means they probably fight demons or something.

Also, there are brief flashes of a naked catgirl posing in a desert in the middle of their conversation.

As they make their school festival plans while also worrying about having time to study for their college entrance exams, Araragi suddenly raises the subject of a girl named Senjyo. She has health issues that cause her to be frequently absent from school, and...he just wants to know what Tsubasa "thinks of" her. I guess he has a crush on this sick girl and wants Tsubasa to...give him her blessings to go for it? IDK.

She teasingly accuses Araragi of having some twisted fetish for sick girls, and he rolls his eyes and brushes her off. In his head, he's wondering if Senjyo is actually sick, or if there's something weirder going on with her. While flashing back to the Infinite Staircase Plunge.

Sounds like she might have Polkov's Syndrome. Abrupt falls from great heights and unusually low body weight does fit the symptoms, from what I've read about it.

Anyway, Tsubasa doesn't know much about Senjyo. She's shy, quiet, and often not at school, but manages good grades despite her condition. That's about it. She does remember Senjyo being much more energetic, athletic, and outgoing back in middle school (at Araragi's questioning, she explains that the two of them went to the same middle school), but even back then their social groups didn't happen to overlap much. She also recalls hearing rumors that Senjyo's family is very wealthy, but says that you'd never guess that from interacting with her due to how down-to-earth she came across.

Then, Tsubasa seems to get lost in thought, and her voice lowers to a nervous, half-ashamed whisper as she says that Senjyo has become more beautiful by the day. Such a lovely, ethereal, fragile creature.

Okay, so I guess Tsubasa was just totally projecting when she accused Araragi of having a fetish for sickly girls. Noted.

Araragi abruptly says that he just remembered he has somewhere to be, and promises Tsubasa he'll make up their lost study and festival-planning time later. I can't help but sympathize with Araragi's position, considering what just came out of her mouth.

He leaves the classroom and starts to walks down the (seemingly also empty) corridor, when a saccharine female voice from behind him asks what he and Tsubasa were chatting about. He turns around and sees Senjyo, who promptly sticks a knife into his open mouth and holds it there, so that it'll cut his tongue and cheeks if he moves so much as a centimeter.

Curiosity, she tells him, is like a cockroach infestation. It attracts annoying, filthy creatures to exactly the places where you don't want them scuttling about. He gasps and shivers, struggling not to move a muscle and cut his own mouth open. A very creepy music box-ish theme starts playing.

Then, still holding the knife inside his mouth, she pushes a stapler against the side of his face. Or...wait, holy fuck, no, she actually put it AROUND one of his cheeks, so that she can put a staple through it with the merest squeeze of her hand. Just in case the knife wasn't already enough of a threat.

Then, she starts musing aloud at how sheer, random misfortune led to her secret getting out. In fact, it was a banana peel someone left sitting on one of the steps of that infinite spiral staircase that she and Araragi were both climbing on their way to...um...I don't know, claim the Rose Bride or whatever.

Okay, I gueeeess this is comedy? Nothing about it looks or feels like comedy. The art style and music certainly don't suggest it. But, um. Yeah.

As the creepy music continues playing, Senjyo tells him that she supposes her secret is out now, at least to him. She weighs 5 kilograms. 11 pounds. Approximately one ninth of what a girl of her height and build should weigh. All this delivered in horror movie villain speech cadence. She goes on to say that she used to be normal, but then - in the summer break between middle and high school - she encountered a crab that stole nearly all of her body weight.

In her own words: "There's no need for you to understand."

That said, her story isn't actually quite as nonsensical as you might think. If you specifically had a northern spiny reef crab with you and spent enough time in a decompression chamber...I dunno, it's theoretically possible.

She tells him that she's told him this much because she knows that's the only way to get him to stop prying, after he learned what he did. To protect her terrible secret, she will do anything, including killing. That's why he's never going to breathe a word of this to a single other soul, never going to ask or talk to anyone about her, and absolutely never approach or interact with her again. She tells him to nod twice if he understands and agrees, and that any other response - including inaction - will be treated as an invitation for her to apply lethal force.

He nods twice. She puts on a very, very cold smile, says thank you, and removes the knife. Then she flashes him a sadistic wink, and plants a staple into the inside of his cheek before removing the stapler as well. He collapses on the ground, clutching his bleeding mouth and gurgling in agony. She tells him that she's impressed that he managed to not scream, and will take this as a sign that he can in fact be counted on to keep her secret.

So, for that reason, she'll let him off with a warning. This time.

Senjyo leaves. Slowly, Araragi staggers to his feet, still whimpering and trembling. Staring warily down the hall Senjyo left down, he reaches into his mouth and pulls the staple out of his own flesh in a spray of blood.

He...takes it pretty well. And pulls it out pretty quickly. Damn. The cinematography here makes this every bit as uncomfortably and gruesome as it sounds.

As he whispers to himself about what a fucking psychopath Senjyo turned out to be, Tsubasa comes out of the classroom and asks Araragi what he's still doing here. Clearly a little annoyed that he'd bail on their study/planning session and then just stand out in the hall. Either he's doing a really good job at not showing his pain and stress, or she's just oblivious.

After stammering around for a moment trying to decide what to even tell her, Araragi asks Tsubasa if she likes bananas. When she replies that she guesses they're okay, he goes on an (understandable, given the context that she unfortunately lacks) impassioned rant about how bananas should never be eaten on school grounds.

So the infinite spiral staircase is on school grounds. Yeah, this absolutely, 100% is Utena's high school 20 years in the future, when the neighboring city has expanded and engulfed it.

Tsubasa asks him what the fuck he's even on about, and he panics and stammers before running away, insisting that he needs to get off to that other engagement of his already. Tsubasa just ineffectually yells at him to stop running in the halls, as if that's the closest she can come to making sense of what just happened.

Araragi flees down the hall, descends the stairs, and then - with a truly alarming scare cord - runs back into Senjyo. She slowly turns back toward him, says she almost can't help but admire his defiant spirit, and asks if he has any last words. While producing an absolute arsenal of pens, pencils, razors, knives, and drawing compasses from hammerspace.

The music escalates appropriately over what it played in their last encounter upstairs. God, this anime has a hell of a soundtrack. Which...okay, fair, that's also on the Shaft bingo card.

Araragi insists that he doesn't want to fight, or even to just be butchered. He deliberately followed her downstairs because he thinks he can help her.

Bwuh? Why would he even want to help her at this point?

She gives him a serial killer smile, and tells him that kindness is an act of war as far as she's concerned. She starts advancing on him with her masses of weapons, but he just opens his mouth and shows her the inside of his cheek. The wound is completely gone.

Stunned, she drops her hundreds of blades and needles. When asked how he healed so fast, Araragi explains that he used to be a vampire. He got better, but he still has a partial healing factor. The guy who cured his undeath might also be able to get Senjyo's weight back from that crab.

Next thing we see, he's carrying her to Oshino's place on his bike.

Okay, I'm starting to get this. All the anime cliches condensed together and played heavyhandedly straight...but also deliberately garbled to produce a surreal WTF comedy effect. I think I can dig this.

The context-free panty shot at the beginning makes a little more sense now, though I think they could have done a much better job there. Aside from its placement and lack of relevance, it didn't actually do anything to corrupt or warp the cliche. It just made it feel like the intro to some sleazy softcore porn series. So, I guess just a bad execution for that one; it's unfortunate that it had to start off the pilot.

As she rides behind him on the bike, Senjyo tells Araragi that Oshino sounds like the name you'd expect a moe character to have. Araragi tells her that that's a really weird thing to say, and also expresses surprise that she thinks in terms of "what anime archetype does this person fit into." She just counters that she, herself, is, well...

Araragi quietly mutters that if that's what she's going for, she may have overshot her target. Not by a lot, just a little bit. A tiny smidge.

This exchange kinda made me groan. Pointing out a cliché while you do it is the laziest, most toothless kind of parody. In this case there's the joke about how badly she overshoots the mark by, passing tsundere long behind and landing herself in psychopath territory, but...it's not quite enough. I guess it doesn't help that it's hard to parody anime tropes through exaggeration, since a lot of the unironic examples are already beyond parody. It’s a bad genre for Poe's Law.

Charming, homey music plays as he ambivalently bike-drives her to an abandoned looking building, where this Oshino character with his undeath-curing powers resides. They dismount, and Senjyo starts complaining about things. Why does he even care to help this personality disorder textbook illustration, again? To change the subject, he asks her why she doesn't have her bookbag with her. She replies that she leaves her books in her locker, and stashes her other supplies (and then some) all over her person, so that she can keep both hands free to defend herself if needed.

I suspect the part that she's not saying is that a bookbag would be heavy enough to set her off-balance, and the distributed stashed items keep her from being blown away by the wind. I don't know, maybe that would make too much sense for this show.

Speaking of her hidden school supplies, needles, knives, etc, Araragi tells her that she's going to need to put them all down or give them to him before he brings her inside. He owes Oshino a great debt of gratitude, after all, so he's not going to bring an armed lunatic into his house. She's very reluctant, but finally agrees to shed everything. With the warning that her family's wealth gives her access to a lot of manpower, and that she's already paid a bunch of gangsters to murder his entire family if she doesn't check back in in time. She names both of his little sisters and the schools they go too to make her point.

Also, she informs him that he should be grateful she stapled the inside of his mouth instead of somewhere more visible (when he counters that she only did that to protect herself from consequences, she abruptly changes the subject), says that she will feel no gratitude or warmth toward him for going out of his way to help her even if Oshino cures her completely, and warns him very slowly and carefully that he had better not try to rape her.

Araragi says that she might be just a little bit paranoid. She gets upset and tells him that that's a very impolite thing to say to a girl's face.

Also, she complains about how dilapidated the building is as he leads her up the stairs.

She also asks a little bit about Araragi's post-vampiric condition. He explains that he's just a normal human again now, all that's left from his vampirehood is accelerated healing. I suspect he's holding back a few other powers that he still has. I don't blame him for doing so.

They reach the roof of the half-decayed building, where Oshino awaits. He's the blond guy playing with human body parts from the OP.

I half expected Senjyo to blow up at the mention of "another" girl, and start trying to murder a flabbergasted Araragi for "cheating on her."​

Also, his theme music sounds like something from a western. For some reason.

There's some more banter as Araragi tries to get Senjyo to start introducing herself. He says something that annoys her, and she jabs him in the eyeballs with her fingers, while Oshino just kind of watches with a bemused expression. When Araragi asks her how the hell that was a proportionate response, she makes a joke about equivalent exchange.

I'm not sure if this reference serves any sort of meta joke purpose, or if it's just a character making a pop culture reference. FMA is popular enough that I could see someone actually doing this in real life (minus the eye-gouging, I hope).

She also, at the tail end of her bio-alchemy recitation, admits that she's really more malicious than anything else and just using paranoia as an excuse. So, that's progress!

Senjyo deflects his indignation at being jabbed in the eyes by asking what's up with the half-naked child in an aviator helmet curled up morosely in the corner. Araragi tells her to please pay the child no mind, because she is a mere nameless phantom with neither shadow nor substance.

That's "just the kind of kid she is," Araragi helpfully clarifies at the end.

Oshino finally speaks up and tells Araragi that he actually just gave the little girl a name to reward her for how much she helped him over the holidays, so she's not a total blank slate anymore. She's called Shinobu now, and also has been allowed to share Oshino's family name. Still, neither of the guys are willing to tell Senjyo any more than that, and the little girl herself is nonresponsive.

Araragi has a short internal monologue about what the kid really is.

But, that's not any of Senjyo's business, she's just being nosy.

So, the conversation comes back to Senjyo and her reason for being brought here. Oshino tells her up front that he cannot help her, for it is she who must help herself. She irritably tells him that she's heard that from five alleged gurus so far, and they all turned out to be frauds. So, he gets to the point. Erm. Maybe? I think?

He starts rambling about how the entity she encountered is called the Weight Crab of Kyushu. Or...the Stone Crab. Or the Mind Crab. And...also, he says that it is very significant that the Japanese words kani (crab) and kami (god) are very similar, so one could say that she's been placed under the curse of the Heavy Stone God. However, to some people this entity appears not as a crab at all, but as a rabbit. Or as a beautiful woman.

However, if Senjyo insists that it was in fact a crab that took her weight, then Oshino will have no choice to conclude that it was, in fact, a crab.

She says that she really doesn't care what it's called. Oshino tells her that what it's called is exactly the point, and indeed the only way to help her solve her problem. You see, gods are all around us, but also very distant, making her one of the most fortunate of the weight crab's unfortunate victims. What actually happened to her during the encounter was, essentially, a change in her own perspective.

...

This is probably parodying a more general trend in urban fantasy anime, but holy shit does this work as a satire of Garden of Sinners specifically.

...

He tells her that she needs to stop playing the victim, but then a moment later concludes that she isn't actually doing that. She's not JUST a spoiled little rich girl, like most of the crab's victims. So yes, he will help her.

End part one of the two-part pilot.

The outro song is a lot catchier than the intro, and it's accompanied by more interesting visuals too. Well, aside from when it lingers on a blank white screen labeled "ending theme."

When it's not doing this it's cute. And the song is good regardless. And that's that.


I like what this show is trying to do. Maybe back in 2009, it actually succeeded at doing it. Watching this in 2021 though...well, like I said. Young adult anime is impossible to parody at this point.

There's a lot about it that I enjoyed regardless. Intentional juxtaposition of moody, emotional aesthetics with absolute silly nonsense always tickles my funnybone. I might make fun of the studio for its overblown art style, but it is still nice to look at, and more fantastical shows like this one let them really go whole hog with it as opposed to stuff like March Comes In Like A Lion where they need to reign it in a little.

I'm really curious if this is a sendup of Type Moon in particular. The anime adaptation of Boko Haram debuted a couple years after the first Garden of Sinners movie, but I don't know if Type Moon was yet popular enough to get this kind of satirical attention when the manga...oh wait, no, just looked it up, and Boko Haram's origins are in a 2006 light novel that came RIGHT after Nasu's explosion of popularity in the same medium a couple years before. So yeah, that's definitely at least one of the things it's making fun of, if not the one thing. That does make some elements of Boko Haram a lot more pointed and effective of a parody.

Still, is it good enough - at least in today's context - for me to actually *like* it? I'm not sure. There are plenty more episodes in queue though, so I'll have a more concrete answer soon enough. If nothing else, the art and music are pretty.