An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Seasonal Selection – Shikizakura Episode 1

Well, a new season is here and despite the fact that some previous Selections are continuing (namely Scarlet Nexus and 86), it’s time to pick one of them up. This time it’s Shikizakura, an anime-original (or mostly so) power suit action show. How’d the first episode go?

Well, the CGI is… I’m going to say reasonable. You can kind of tell where the animation rigging has its limitations, but the fast movement for combat looks pretty good. The character designs are nice, but sometimes they hold on a kind of dopey expression probably because it’s not easy to do subtle ones. The environments can look very nice, but when they’re not going all out the show does spend a lot of time with the strength of its medium: hard edges and geometric shapes. I’d say it’s a bit stronger overall than the similar-looking CGI in Revisions, though, especially in avoiding the really awkward Revisions arm acting, so that works out.

The basic story starts us out with a flashback to some supernatural combat where the main character, as a kid, encounters a shrine maiden before a region swarmed by demons is swallowed by white light.

Teen main character then wakes up to head to his school field trip. On the way, though, he meets a cute girl who has no idea how to use a smartphone, and decides to accept being late in order to help her not be lost. He shows her to where she was going and then hurries to the field trip, which was to a museum exhibit on a disaster of which our main character is revealed to have been the only survivor. Presumably, this was the event seen in the opening.

However, our main character isn’t exactly in the museum proper – rather, he shows up in a red-lit realm where no one else is and where he is confronted by manifestations of his own negative emotions… until those finally emerge as copy-paste chompy monsters from the opening. He’s saved by the arrival of the girl he helped and her chromatic power suit friends. However, when the floor gives out under the girl, he rushes to save her, and ends up doing so but falling to the basement himself.

In the basement, our main character is cornered by more chompy monsters (Oni, properly) and runs into the red power suit. It talks to him, offering him power if he’ll have it, and soon enough the suit arrives in the upstairs room to thrash the Oni in a fairly savage onslaught. Then, the suit (which appears to be in control) turns against the girl from earlier. Apparently, the suit itself is a sealed oni, and she bears some relation to the shrine maiden who did the sealing. While the suit tries to kill her, though, the main character fights back on the inside, struggling for control in order to save the girl and ultimately getting enough to punch himself out, and the resolve to be a hero besides.

When he comes to, he’s addressed by the other suit users (out of costume, as is he) who ash him to come with them. There’s a bit of a misunderstanding, though, as they aren’t exactly asking and don’t mean to join their order (at least, not at once). It’s more that he’s being kidnapped because he’s powerfully dangerous. Oops.

For an opening episode, this is firmly… good enough. It has some decent action and some decent story. It’s flawed enough and cliched enough that I can’t really say it’s likely to be great, but that I can also say it might be good. To an extent, it’s to the show’s credit and detriment both that it very quickly reminded me of such stronger shows as Madoka Magica, Shakugan no Shana, and Kill la Kill as well as weaker ones like Revisions.