Kagewani is a story about monsters. It wants to be something new and refreshing: neither the tale nor the monsters seem to be derived from any other source material, providing a wholly original matter. The tale is spun across two seasons, Kagewani and Kagewani: Shou, with a grand total of twenty six episodes.
Each of those episodes averages about seven minutes of running time, though. Bold choice, let’s see if that pays off for them.
Well, the first episode has about everything you’d expect from a monster story with no foundations to build on and only enough budget for seven minutes. A pack of unlikable idiots getting killed off one by one! No sense of continuity with regards to an environment! A beast with footfalls that shake the ground somehow sneaking up on people as soon as it’s out of frame! The infamous broken glasses trope! The camera the idiots had somehow being tossed right to our real main character! Animation so cheaply stylized it makes South Park look good!
Aside from the barely-rotoscoped background objects and oddly “realistic” human designs, it’s worth noting that Terry Gilliam’s animation moved in a more lifelike manner.
Seriously, it isn’t going to come across in the stills, but the animation in Kagewani can barely be called animation. Paper dolls slide across scenes, occasionally giving the illusion of being something other than static objects but never really moving in any way that’s even remotely natural. The raw art, while idiosyncratic in its own right compared to what you’d expect of anime, isn’t as immediately wrong as RWBY’s shoestring CGI or the aforementioned actual construction paper (or deliberate imitation thereof), but in terms of bringing that art to life, it’s got more in common with Ex-Arm than I would ever like to see.
I suppose, though, it’s more like a “motion comic”. The animations are more in place to give the impression of something moving than to actually show it. And unlike the creators of Ex-Arm, the people behind Kagewani actually knew how to compose a shot, even if they never really create the illusion of professional quality.
In any case, the gist of Kagewani seems to be vignettes of giant monster attacks that pretty much all get back to a researcher called Sousuke Banba. At least at first, Banba is just there to be, um, there. In addition to the idiots getting ganked by the dino beast in the forest, we get a standoff with a yeti monster on a freezing mountain and tentacle monsters at the beach, and oddly the former of those is the one with a flimsy excuse to strip a female character to her undergarments while the latter is more concerned with the fact that these things evidently convert humans, as revealed by Banba in his two lines of the episode.
After that, we get one where Banba does something, coming to the rescue when two idiot kids are being stalked by a carnivorous death turtle in the sewers. There we also meet another researcher, a corporate scumbag called Kimura, who seems to be studying the monsters with a profit motive through vector not announced. Banba doesn’t like him, so presumably he’s bad despite having his flamethrower goons off the turtle.
We get another couple filler episodes, with an invisible people eater at a convenience store and a giant underwater humanoid beastie.
Then we actually have something of a two-parter: one story that’s like the film Tremors on a school playground, and then a Banba-centric episode where he gets caught by some serious “What the hell?” monster nonsense on his way to investigate (the monster is a giant underground terror that can illusion itself to look like a driving tunnel, and its gullet is full of jumping spiders that huskify people in seconds, and also it makes the tip of its tongue look like a person and… it makes no sense on theme, but it’s apparently the main body of the Tremors monster)
After a couple more filler episodes, we get Banba’s backstory, where a frankly more esoteric monster called a Shadow Crocodile killed everyone in his home town, with the exception of Banba himself since his parents had locked him in a storage building as punishment. After having this flashback, Banba agrees to work with Kimura despite his slimy demeanor.
At the lab, we’re offered some backstory, that the first monster was the original Kagewani (the shadow-croc thing) and was made with ancient curse methods. When it was finally defeated, its scattered cells infected other living things, resulting in all the weird random monsters we’ve seen the world over. Now Kimura’s company wants to control and weaponize it. This, of course, takes less than seven minutes to go horribly wrong, releasing all the captured monsters.
This ends up causing Banba, locked out of the panic room, to absorb the Kagewani Clone the lab was making. He seemingly offs Kimura for planning evil bioweapon things and, now with the power of a shadow monster absorbed into him and gnawing at his sanity, goes off to hunt down the true core of this evil. End of season one.
Season 2 starts out randomly enough, with a monster attack seemingly inspired by Nightmare At 20,000 Feet but with a way higher body count. However, it then segues into plot as Banba (now a prisoner) is being transported, and is ultimately claimed by the goons of Kimura, who is alive albeit with some shiny new prosthetic bits.
It’s not all plot (in fact, the episode right after that reveal is a random one with a cult of a truly hideous monster) but there are more pieces to put together
Doing Kimura’s bidding because their interests seem to be aligned for now, Banba fights some monsters with his new powers, only to run afoul of an angry violent monster hunter lady. Kimura extracts him, and then goes about sparring with an even more sinister corporate dude who makes Kimura look like not such a bad guy.
While Banba is out of it having flashbacks to the Original Kagewani, this comes to a head. Mega-evil corporate suit tries to sell mutagenic Kagewani blood as a bioweapon (because no one asks “what do we do with the monsters after we turn every living thing into killer abominations?”), only for his harvesting rig to have a fatal error that lets Kimura force the guy to take a taste of his own medicine. He even rescues Banba in the process, who now has a plot hook because the show needs a climax.
They end up encountering the angry monster hunter lady when going after the original master Kagewani. She’s still angry, and surprisingly good at using her esoteric ninja-like arts to actually kill shadow crocs, of which there are now many, but the final boss croc is a bit more than she can handle. They end up teaming up once she remembers she’s a badass and not a helpless waif in need of protection, and even seem to get the upper hand on the Original Kagewani
That is, until Kimura turns traitor, shoots ninja girl to “not quite dead” with a laser from his robot hand, reveals how fully cyborged he is, and uses technobabble to suck up the battered original Kagewani because… some nonsense about evolution that makes Gilgamesh look sane.
He sucks power out of Banba, gets ganked from behind by the mutated mega-evil corporate goon (who had not been seen since his apparent death and has no reason to be here of all places), finishes said goon off, and then gets Banba to Kagewani him to death before the damage to his cyborg body can let the monsters he’s absorbed go out of control. Thus, with a mild cliffhanger for a part 3 that will probably never happen, Kagewani ends.
This is… a hard one. The visual aspect of Kagewani is so overwhelmingly incompetent and cheap that it nearly smothers everything else. All things considered, while not truly exceptional, the direction and art team knew how to make the most of what little they had, but they had such a fundamentally deficient base to work with that it really only counts for so much.
The first season, in a sense, rocked the 7-8 minute format since it was mostly concerned with just showing random monster attacks. The writing wasn’t good, but it was kind of what you want out of the material: introduce characters quickly, face them with a monster, and show how they either get killed off or get away. The plot that builds up overall is fine, I guess, but it’s kind of just there to give you a sense of a climax existing.
The second season wanted to be a much more legitimate story. And, to be honest, the story isn’t bad. But this time around it’s fighting the format. They try to introduce everyone and every thing, but we don’t really have time, for instance, to understand the monster-hunting ninja girl. The shift to the plot that focuses on the Kagewani, plural, is also full of holes with regards to everything we were told about the continuity.
In season 1, they introduced the titular monster, which rampaged ages ago until it was heroically killed. But its cells spread and infected living things, creating all sorts of ye liveliest awfulness. We’re largely concerned with these things, and the horror works because you get episodes like the sea monster or the Tremors one and its sequel that establish how strange and astounding these product creatures can be. The Kagewani itself has a great esoteric power of being a shadow that kills you if it chomps your shadow, but we have a deep sea humanoid that’s implied to not be the only one of its kind and an illusionist burrowing critter the size of a mountain. The breadth of options makes it work.
In the second season, we do see more of the unique monsters, but we focus on how mook monsters are produced from normal life forms, and of course on the Kagewani (now things with a more recent origin, where there’s more than one, and that are esoterically significant) as the primary monster of import.
In essence, there’s a genre shift. The first season is central to horror and more of an anthology show, the second is action with a horror bent, what with our main character now having super monster powers. That is, to be fair, kind of the shift you get when going from the first Alien movie over to Aliens, which of course worked famously well. The problem is, again, seven minute format isn’t great for telling that second story.
I can’t help but think of what Kagewani would be like if it were a more normal 12-episode show. The first few episodes could show us maybe two vignettes each, with more of Banba and the random chick he’s with who gets presumably axed in the Tremors monster’s big illusion-filled gullet, so that we know more about them as people. Then Kimura comes in and somewhere around the halfway point we have the disaster at his lab and shift to the season 2 story with a more seamless dovetail from having transitioned to plot earlier. From there, we can introduce the monster hunter lady and the lore of the Kagewani before getting a solid showdown at the end.
The fact that very little would have to change in terms of the show’s outline proves there’s a decent skeleton here to work with… but it just doesn’t work as-is, and as-is is what I have to judge when I do one of these reviews.
In a sense, Kagewani reminds me a bit of Kemurikusa, which I reviewed earlier this year, in that it clearly had more ambition and intelligence than its budget would allow it to actually show off. However, Kemurikusa had somewhat deficient CGI, good designs to work within that constraint, and truly great and creative ideas that were supported by a solid foundation of a basic plot. The bad bits were bad, but the good bits spiked all the way to absolutely brilliant. Kagewani only really spikes to bog standard. The “normal show version” I posit isn’t something I could say with confidence would be a great show, just a watchable one.
There are a lot of layers on which I want to give Kagewani a passing grade but… at the end of the day, it was a pain to watch. It’s only about 8-10 normal-length episodes worth of material but it felt like an eternity more between the horrid animation and the sketch of a story. I’ll offer it a flat D in these trying times, respecting that there is material in Kagewani that’s worthwhile to watch. A single season 1 episode (or a cherry-picked one from season 2 that’s more random monster centered) could be kind of fun in its own right for the minimalist storytelling, but it doesn’t function well as a show.