mDuo13

So after the long-awaited fourth DVD of Kara no Kyoukai came out, it's been on my mind a lot. Luckily, the unusually-long wait for chapter four won't be repeated until after #5 comes out later this month; and instead, we'll be getting an unusually-long episode, the first one to be what in America would be termed "feature-length". And at just over 2 weeks away, I am getting hyped.

I mean, I hate to be fueling the hype train because I know firsthand how that can ruin a good experience. I'm sure it could apply to Kara no Kyoukai, too, for some people. But me... well, Kara no Kyoukai was made for me. They took the original creators of one of my favorite anime, added in my favorite composer, and then animated their first work with really high production qualities. What's not to like?

I also tend to like authors' first works, too. I feel like authors tend to have all these pent-up thoughts and ideas that come out in their first work, so that even if it's not the most polished narrative that writer puts out, it might well be the one that's closest to his heart. I see it often enough: Michael A. Stackpole's Talion Revenant and Stephen King's The Gunslinger, just to name a couple. (Yeah, I know, way to go with hella American examples while talking about anime. My point is this applies to anything.) There's just something special about someone's first work. It's like, from their childhood until then, the person has been saving up to write this one thing. After that, maybe they write more stuff and develop more skill, but those stories are things that are conceived and executed on a much shorter time scale. They don't have the same magic.

So that's how I feel about Kara no Kyoukai. It's the most Type-Moon work that Type-Moon, as a group, has ever created. Everything else feels like, "Type-Moon tries their hand at galge" or "Type-Moon makes an action-oriented visual novel with broad appeal" or "Type-Moon helps someone else make a fighter". You know what? Those are great, and I still like a certain one of them more than Kara no Kyoukai... but I feel like everything that stands out about Type-Moon and makes them unique is more present in Kara no Kyoukai than anything else.

It's the meaningful lack of dialogue. It's the essence of the character designs. It's the dark, philosophical explorations explored through the violence they induce. Most of all, it's just how messed up the main characters are. Tsukihime maintains a lot of this, and those are prime reasons why I like it: Tohno Shiki (more accurately, Nanaya Shiki), like Ryougi Shiki, sees the world differently than others, and both have the "desire to kill" far more than normal. However, Tohno is tempered by how he loves to live, while Ryougi's fills up her emptiness in how she lives to kill. Having not read Kara no Kyoukai (I'll do that sometime after the movies are done) I obviously can't speak about the final conclusion, but I see Ryougi Shiki's condition as the unadulterated version of Tohno's in the same way that Kara no Kyoukai is the same as Tsukihime, but unadulterated with the constraints of a galge.

When I watched Kara no Kyoukai chapter 4, I had the strangest feeling afterwards, like, the episode itself hadn't been the most exciting individually, but it had somehow made me appreciate the rest of Kara no Kyoukai all the more. I realized it's because it develops Shiki's character in such a way that I can better form these thoughts. (It doesn't hurt that episode 4 had the best OST so far, or that when I go back and re-watch episode 1, I now understand things like Touko's reference to the time when Shiki was hollow.) And with these things in mind, I'm sure I can better appreciate the 5th movie.

My bank account, on the other hand, does not appreciate the 5th movie and how much that special edition goes for. But you know what? I'm getting it anyway. Because it's special.