“Hidden Gems” are an interesting topic. On one side, it’s always exciting to find – or think you’ve found – something really great and entertaining that not a lot of people have noticed. On the other hand, the breadth of media consumers are often pretty good at picking up on works that are top notch in all regards, meaning that if there really was little to no buzz, rather than the “finder” just happening to miss the circles that got excited, the material is usually a diamond in the rough at best. Sure, it’s possible that meta problems like a lack of marketing or troubled release could hide something really grand, but more often there’s this impetus to call “hidden gem!” on something that’s either not as hidden as you think it is or only a gem compared to having zero expectations.
Because of that, I am doing my best to restrain myself from excitedly calling Kamisama Dolls a hidden gem. It’s certainly not the least-watched show I’ve reviewed; though metrics can be difficult to find, the best I can dredge up put it deep in the doldrums, with maybe 1% the reactions of a true titan like FMA, 10% of a popular show like A Certain Magical Index, half the take of the troubled and unfairly unwatched Beatless… and still ten times what Shikizakura drew in. And at the risk of preempting my usual wrap-up, it is a show that’s, as I indicated, at best a diamond in the rough. I certainly liked it, or I wouldn’t be opening like this, but I have to admit that even at its best it doesn’t quite have the polish or X-factor that many of the all-time standouts tend to have.
So, in that regard, allow me to present Kamisama Dolls not as “OMG a hidden gem” but… just as a nice show that you might not have heard of and that probably deserves better than my perception of what it gets, something that I’m happy to bring to light and share with all of you.
The show follows Kyouhei Kuga, a college student from a small village where, when he was younger, troubling things involving initially unspecified robot-like entities and mass murders went down. He’s in Tokyo now, though, and trying to forget all about it. He has a crush on Hibino Shiba, whose family came from the same village but who also has a reputation for shooting down just about every guy in the school. We start with Kyouhei’s turn to make an approach, which is deflected by Hibino’s annoying friend. Later, after karaoke involves a little much drinking, he actually does get a soft moment with Hibino, interrupted by their discovery of a murder victim who Kyouhei thinks might be someone from the village.
This turns out to be the case when, later, Kyouhei encounters a strange magic robot thing (the titular divine doll, or a Kakashi – this one called Kukiri) and shortly thereafter its “seki” (bonded controller) – his little sister Utao. She’s in the big city in order to capture an escaped convict of the village, Aki Kuga, with whom Kyouhei has a history if one that’s kept in the dark at first. Aki drops by as well, and the resulting Kakashi battle totally trashes Kyouhei’s apartment. Aki is captured (though he breaks free again shortly) and Hibino’s father lets, at the instruction of the village shrine authorities, Kyouhei and Utao move in.
From there we pick up a few threads including one about Hibino’s downright unstable Mulder-type friend, said friend;’s detective father, Aki being back in action, and more village forces (including ones from the Kuga clan’s rival Hyuga clan) arriving to capture him.
A good portion of the episodes here are dedicated to building character for our three primary leads – Kyouhei plays at being the timid nice guy, and seems to legitimately be that in love, but is also clearly holding on to a deep wellspring of rage and even hatred. Utao is more basic, being the typical bratty little sister with a deep (if sisterly) affection for her big brother, occasionally jealous at the attention he gives his love interest at worst. Much of her material is bonding with Hibino (who she has a deeply friendly relationship with) and Kyouhei (who plays well with the teasing/bickering sibling vibes, showing more character himself when he’s humorously tormenting Utao) or training as a Seki. Hibino, to her credit, has at least enough spine to her to not be a complete object with huge boobs. She’s nice and personable, but has something of a short temper and little tolerance for cruelty.
The first Hyuga member seen is Koushirou, who seems both cool in that he’s a reasonable authority figure that even Kyouhei, who doesn’t seem to care much for the village, respects, and cool in that his whole design is being a badass with sunglasses and a leather jacket. The efforts to capture Aki continue, with the paths crossing repeatedly, until the other Hyuga on the case makes a mess of things.
This Hyuga member is a little boy who looks like the gender flip of Utao – probably because it turns out they’re twins, the boy having been taken by the Hyuga and raised in secret. Said boy, Kirio, engages in a battle across the city with Utao, which results in Kukiri’s arm being broken and Kirio’s doll, Takemikazuchi, getting rather completely wrecked. This prompts a return to the village for Utao, and Kyouhei and Hibino go with.
We get Kukiri repaired, learn the truth about Kirio, and get the facts of the Kakashi down, learning that they’re primarily constructed of wood treated with a special (magic) mix of resins, the wood and resin alike seeming to come from the forest around the village, where deep communication between the trees enables psychic phenomena even in humans. We also get an extended flashback of the history of Kyouhei and Aki that’s been so contentious whenever their paths have crossed.
Six years before the present, both Kyouhei (then a Seki) and Aki (who was already reviled as an apparent sadist stripped of Seki authority, though the truth of that is left up to interpretation) became close to a teacher who came in from out of town. However, she ended up suffering greatly at the hands of a local big-shot bully, Atsushi Kuga, whose advances she turned down. To be fair she is clearly kind of messed up (she ends up sleeping with Aki, who is of course a minor at that point), but nothing to deserve being isolated, slandered, and ultimately when she’s fired, abducted and raped by Atsushi and his gang. Aki is lured to the scene and when an effort to rough him up goes sour and gets the teacher killed, Atsushi decides to cover up manslaughter with murder and have his doll, Kuramitsuha (Aki’s previously, and his in the present), kill Aki. When it tries, though, Aki forcibly regains control of Kuramitsuha, and makes a bloody mess of the scene including the uninvolved folks who appeared in response to troubling noises. Kyouhei was the one to find the mess and though he later learned Aki didn’t kill the teacher, he still quit being a Seki, out of what is eventually revealed to be fear that he could snap the same way as Aki did.
On other lines, it seems like the Hyuga head is a nasty piece of work (Kirio, taken in by Koushirou after the latter protects him from the old man, has the scars to prove it) and has ambitions related to a special Kakashi called Amaterasu, which is bound in a cave belonging to the Hyuga, presumably in secret.
The team returns to Tokyo. Hibino and Utao have a run-in with Aki (who is staying with the conspiracy nut), and the Hyuga forces come to town, which sees Koushirou arrange some degree of reconciliation between Kirio and Utao. Any thought that the drama is going to decrease is short-lived though, as a new Hyuga Seki shows up: Mahiru Hyuga, the “princess” of the clan and an imperious possible sadist infatuated and obsessed with Kyouhei. She gets fought off (because she makes a mess right away, of course) and ends up running into Aki and the conspiracy theorist as they deal with the mastermind behind Aki’s story-starting release from prison, a politician originally from the village who wants to open and modernize it.
More than that, we get a flashback that explains Mahiru’s obsession and more of the background of her, Kyouhei, and Aki. It seems, just after she became a Seki as a kid, the three of them found a monstrous doll able to move on its own. It tried to crush Aki’s mind for fuel and came after them with deadly laser blasts, but in the end and after some impressive struggles, Kyouhei pulled off a feat to turn its power against it and defeat the monster, earning Mahiru’s disturbed obsession and setting him and Aki down their paths, reacting differently to the power displayed that day. This is especially important because technically the show opened with this flashback, but out of context so it was impossible to know much of what was going on
Mahiru, in her yandere tendencies, skips straight to kidnapping Hibino when Aki calls her Kyouhei’s girlfriend. Kyouhei, Utao, and a friend from the village (a young lady from the clan that builds and repairs Kakashi, implied to have a crush on Aki) go to the rescue after Mahiru spills the beans in an attempt to woo (or the yandere equivalent) Kyouhei, and it’s a good thing too as while Mahiru is played too campy to really seem threatening, the hired goon she leaves watching Hibino is a good deal more dangerous.
The conspiracy theorist overhears about the kidnapping too and comes to the rescue, freeing Aki from the politician (who has decided to lock him up) and clobbering the goon to free Hibino from her compromising position before anything too awful can be done to her. As they flee, the politician attacks and the conspiracy theorist locks Hibino outside before ending up in a struggle with the politician for his gun. This gets the politician killed and the conspiracy theorist ends up on the run, grabbing the goon she beat up earlier as she goes for whatever insane reason she has today. This is her exit from the show, and I suppose it’s fitting enough.
Outside, Mahiru catches up with Hibino and indulges her yandere side a bit more. I’ll cut to the chase on character analysis but I actually like how Mahiru is handled as a character. She’s clearly unwell, and she has a real ability to go too far without even realizing it, but there’s a lot of pathos to her presentation, how she clearly doesn’t understand why more fighting power doesn’t get her everything she ever wanted and can’t stop herself from flying off the cuff. After Hibino, in her doll’s grasp, tries to explain some of what Kyouhei went through, Mahiru ends up flinging her off the high-rise, and there’s a great shot where you can see Mahiru’s face filled with surprise, fear, and even despair because, ya know, she doesn’t actually want to murder a romantic rival.
Thankfully for keeping Mahiru’s kill count down, this is when Team Kukiri arrives, with Kyouhei able to get Hibino with a diving catch and everyone else aboard to get him. They awkwardly land on the roof, but Mahiru is still kind of on the war path and ends up provoking a doll fight with Utao. Emotionally it’s rather serious for the two of them, but it is more of a spar than a duel to the death at least.
The fight ends when a hit from Kukiri’s blade disables the control mechanism of Mahiru’s doll, causing it to go inert and crash since it can’t receive psychic instructions from her with that damage. However, it doesn’t stay down because Mahiru’s feelings that have seeped into it over her years as its Seki are too strong, causing the doll to go berserk and act on its own. Mahiru tries to get her force of will across and almost succeeds, but it ultimately grabs Hibino and flies off. In the process, Kyouhei protects Mahiru when she gets flung away, and then we can probably pinpoint the exact frame where her heart breaks as he runs off to save Hibino without regarding Mahiru at all.
Utao and the Hyuga duo (who arrived on-scene earlier) try to take it doll-to-doll to rescue Hibino while Kyouhei races to do things manually. He gets close when the doll is impaled on the top of a building, but trying to pry apart its chain arm with his bare hands, while brave, is less than effective. Kukiri gets stabbed hard and crashes, and Kyouhei takes a blow to the head that shocks and horrifies everyone watching.
Kukiri, however, rises, singing a new tune – literally: the Kakashi, when active, tend to “sing” a song based on who their Seki is, and the returning Kukiri isn’t singing Utao’s version of its song, but Kyouhei’s. Kyouhei is knocked out by his injury though (which is at least treated as serious) so it’s not exactly as though he’s controlling Kukiri either, though. It sets on Mahiru’s doll, severs the arm holding Hibino and the unconscious Kyouhei, and ultimately destroys its foe – utterly.
Everyone, or at least most of everyone, heads to the hospital as we begin to wind down to roll credits on the show. Mahiru vanishes, devastated presumably by the loss of both things that mattered to her in the world. Kirio, who made a bitter mistake in the battle, is off sulking. Kyouhei does some soul searching in his coma, and manages to come out of his nightmare at an embarrassing time with an embarrassing exclamation. It’s not too bad for him, though, as Hibino talks him down from pulling the “my enemies keep coming after you so I must go” BS, including with a big damn kiss to cement the two of them as an item.
All isn’t entirely well, though, as Kukiri falls inert and can’t be awakened by Utao, setting up that they’ll once again need to return to the village to deal with it – though whether Utao or Kyouhei will be Kukiri’s Seki for future acts not put to screen is left up in the air.
Later, for the last real scene, Aki drops by to reminisce with Kyouhei – in which they actually have a pretty fun dynamic – and establish his plot going forward. He’s learned that the regenerated monster doll, aka Amaterasu, is in possession of the Hyuga family head. Since that guy is a well established nasty piece of work and the doll a well established weapon of massive destruction, Aki intends to stick it to them both in order to settle things with the village, and it’s implied that Kyouhei may have found the resolve to not let him fight alone.
While the end credits give us more hints of things to come, that’s essentially the show. As arc endings go, I suppose it’s a fair one to cut on. It’s not as nicely wrapped up in a bow as Coppelion, but it’s still an at least somewhat satisfying finale even as the adventure continues.
So, the good: Kamisama Dolls is a very solid action-adventure sort of story with enough mystery in it to keep it going. It spends plenty of time on its characters and that reaps rewards in the form of most of the characters having a good deal of depth as well as the overall tone being pleasant and watchable rather than oppressive. The dolls have very nice designs; they’re intricate, unique, and have a lot of theme to them.
The worldbuilding might be a bit light, but at the same time it’s made clear that you can’t really mass-produce mystical sacred wooden puppets and that they don’t really have the power to mess with the modern world either: a doll is likened in combat ability to a tank, which is very impressive when it’s flying around and possessed by one person, but nothing a military couldn’t deal with. When it comes to these urban fantasy stories, you tend to have to give some wiggle room on the how and why of these things staying secret and neither dominating nor getting exploited by the modern world.
The characters, I think I’ll address individually. I already talked about Mahiru and the pathos she brings as a yandere played in a more tragic manner than anything else, but let’s take a look at our other major players.
Kyouhei feels like a good answer to the traditional powerless or wimpy male lead that you often see play against super-powered ladies in Urban Fantasy shows. That is, he’s kind of trying to be that archetype, but he has a lot of potential that he’s deliberately hiding in order to do so, both good potential when it comes to his skill as a Seki and bad potential when it comes to his temper and capacity for violence. This serves to make him a much more compelling lead than the typical outsider schmuck pulled into a new world; he’s part of the abnormal world and trying to escape even as it pulls him back in.
Utao is the clingy little sister archetype, who wants big brother all to herself. I usually hate this archetype to a lesser or greater degree, because it has a tendency to produce flat characters and really creepy scenarios when the little sister’s affection goes too far (and it often starts way, way too far). I like Utao. She plays those notes in a balanced way where you get she’s a good if clingy little girl, and because a lot of time in the show in general is given to downtime scenes you get to see her and Kyouhei interacting as siblings, and not just in a saccharine fashion – you get to see them tease and annoy each other too, so their bond feels a lot more real. Her love for her brother may include jealousy and she may consider other girls “rivals” but it also doesn’t come off as a perverse or incestuous lust. And, more importantly, there’s more to her. We see her struggles and her pride as a Seki, and we also get to see her face becoming a big sister to her previously unknown twin, and how she rises to that occasion.
Kirio and Koushirou aren’t actually on screen all that much, but they have a good dynamic. Koushirou is from the “enemy” family, but he’s also clearly a reasonable guy who wants to apprehend an escaped mass-murderer because it’s the right thing to do and who also doesn’t want to see a little kid suffer any more at the hands of an insane brutal grandpa. Kirio as well has some interesting notes. He was raised by the old Hyuga head, and we see he has the massive scars to prove just now bad a childhood that was, so there are a lot of ways in which he seems to be seeing the world for the first time. He also clearly doesn’t know at first how he wants to relate to Utao, his other half and supposed enemy, but in the end they get to reach a point while, kids or no, they can kind of work things out.
And then there’s Aki. Aki is clearly screwed up. He reminds me a good deal of Accelerator sometimes, and Season 1 Accelerator at that. The white hair and wiry physique probably help that, but his admixture of viciousness and indifference is also somewhat familiar there. Though he doesn’t do the plot-lifting you’d expect of a character initially presented as the show’s villain apparent, Aki does get a good deal of work and development when the flashbacks let us in to where he came from and how he was treated. He might not have been well beforehand, or he might have been unfairly maligned; either way, his crimes are more passionate and retributive than we’re initially led to believe. Again much like Accelerator, a different view on his misdeeds helps him be seen in a new light. He’s certainly not a good guy, but the lines he gives about him and Kyouhei being the same that sound insane at the start of the show ring very true by the end. They’re very similar people who took very different paths because of what differences they did have, in themselves or their circumstances.
You may note though, I’ve left off Hibino. That’s because, of all the characters in this show, Hibino is the one I’d really want more out of. She’s far from the worst love interest I’ve seen; she’s not reprehensible like S2 Louise or painfully bland like Wako; she has a clear voice, where she’s very kind but also able to stand up for herself and not tolerate being put through bull that romcom downtime naturally wants to put the leading lady through. I give her credit that her reactions speak to her own character, rather than just being stock. Her chemistry with Kyouhei is alright, and her big sis chemistry with Utao is actually really good. But there is a degree to which her role in this story alternates between positive emotional support and damsel in distress, without a lot of real agency to do stuff. I kind of wish she was allowed to investigate on her own or be really clever about things, rather than that getting pawned off on her nutjob conspiracy theorist friend or batted back to the village crew.
Maybe if she had more to do, she could be introduced by something other than her tits. In a small awkward note, whenever a character doesn’t know Hibino’s name (or doesn’t care – see: Aki) she’s “the girl with the huge boobs” or something else to that effect. And, granted, Hibino does have the requisite vast tracts of land, but in Summertime Render when that kind of appellation is used to identify Hizuru, it’s only a couple times and only because Totsumura – for whom it’s in character to ID her that way – is involved. Here, it feels like the writers couldn’t think of any other quick identifying characteristic for Hibino.
And I might as well use that awkward segue to get to the art. The characters are pretty well designed. Hibino is lovely and not just on force of her rack, I already talked about Koushirou’s coolness factor, Kyouhei looks the part of his everyman guise, Utao has some absolutely hilarious and endearing expressions while normally being more than cute enough… they look good. There are some oddities, like the fact that characters in this show are almost permanently on some level of blush, but it’s a nice show to look at.
The action is pretty good as well. The fights are written like you wants fights to be, with the right movements and back-and-forth of momentum. The dolls fly and move around in a way you can follow and that looks like it both has grace and weight to it, and when they do cool stuff it’s visually impressive. The animation in this show is, to be sure, not award winning. Most stills would blend in very naturally with a selection of stills from other shows set on modern earth in the late 2000’s to early 2010’s, without a lot of unique look or feel to set it apart… but then it’s trying to be an urban fantasy story that convinces you these things are happening in a more or less normal world, so I think that’s deliberate. It’s not going to reach true spectacle, but it’s going to fulfill its role.
On the worse end, I have little to say. I had my quibbles with Hibino, as I mentioned before. The story is flagrantly the first half of a larger work, but the conclusion is fair enough for a season of anime. Especially considering when this thing came from, I can’t fault it too much for not wrapping up better; anime adaptations of manga have often been treated as trailers for the original, rather than as culminations of the work or full adaptations, so there’s a degree to which you have to take the lack of a proper ending. And the climactic battle was climactic enough, the couple got together… it was fair.
The pacing is… questionable. Even though I enjoyed how much time we got to spend with the main character club just being people, I can easily see someone getting bored of it and wanting to get back to the dolls fighting. This is especially true given how many subplots this show likes to juggle. There are some stories that are naturally sprawling and massive, involving dozens of characters who may not even come into more than tangential contact for most of the work. Noein was like this; there were a lot of factors and forces in play and it was almost uniquely the viewer’s place to see how their different stories had domino effects on each other, all leading up to the conclusion for everyone. Kamisama Dolls talks the talk, but I’m not sure it thinks big enough to really walk the walk. For all her screen time, the conspiracy theorist added little. She connects to her dad, the detective, and he gets a fair amount of screen time that goes even more nowhere. Maybe it’s a factor of how the story is unfinished, but it feels like a lot of these intersecting lives and friend-of-a-friend sidestories could be either cut or reduced to extras in order to do more with the core.
Speaking of the core, Aki is rather underused. For being the technical kickoff to the story, he doesn’t do a whole lot in Tokyo, he talks tough, evades capture, crashes on the conspiracy theorist’s couch… I guess he’s not ultimately a villain but he’s the closest thing we have for a while so it would have been nice to see him get out and do more things on his own initiative.
All in all, though, what problems I do have with Kamisama Dolls aren’t enough to give it lower than an A. This is a good show, one that it’s a shame wasn’t seen by more people even if it can be a little rough around the edges. Naturally, I looked up the manga and naturally it hasn’t been licensed and localized – no surprise given how forgotten the show is. I’d strongly recommend the show, though, even knowing that’s the status of the source material, because it’s a fun ride with some nicely rounded characters, and sometimes that’s more than enough.