Higurashi: When They Cry (Dub) Status:
COMPLETE Episode: 1-26
"One day, you suddenly hear an extra footstep, out of sync with your own...
At night, he even stands over your pillow... silently waiting, until you admit your sins..." HIGURASHI! A.k.a. that one anime I wouldn't shut up about for a while. Decided to rewatch it and do my best to articulate what works about it.
UNFORTUNATELY, Higurashi is the definition of a complex plot, it dives straight into
Memento-esque territory, but still manages to avoid being as convoluted as the likes of
Kingdom Hearts and
Blazblue.
How does it accomplish that? Well I honestly don't want to give many spoilers away with this one and suffice to say it's difficult to explain it's twists and turns without spilling the beans on a few key plotpoints, but I'll do my best:
As I've mentioned before, Higurashi is sort of
Madoka Magicka done better. Madoka subverted it's magical girl anime tone for a drama, while Higurashi INVERTS it's harem anime tone for a thriller. Whereas Madoka never narratively indulges in it's farce outside the opening theme song, Higurashi opens with a flashforward to our hero screaming and beating the bloody pulp out of a couple girls before we cut to present and find ourselves in a peaceful upbeat harem comedy with the same characters complete with cartoony sound effects.
While it takes Madoka 3 episodes to drag out the
"psyche!" moment we can feel coming, Higurashi merely teases us with the aftermath before rewinding and letting us watch it all play out. While you could credit Madoka for not giving the twist away right out of the gate, it's worth considering that Madoka is always shadowed by an air of melancholy to begin with, while Higurashi goes the full 9 yards by plunging you directly into a harem comedy and slowly sprinkling in genuine moments of dread.
The main premise is the generic anime hero Keiichi moves into the rural town of Hinamizawa, befriends the girls Rena, Mion, Satoko, and Rika and enjoys what seems to be a stereotypically annoying harem comedy life before things begin to go wrong. It all starts with a dark sarcastic joke he makes about Rena having buried a body in the junkyard when a photographer reveals that a body actually was found there.
Curiosity compels him to ask questions and he begins to uncover an old story about a murder over a dam project that would have threatened the town, but everyone conspicuously denies it. When the photographer is revealed to have died as a result of some annual "curse" by the resident deity, Oyashiro, Keiichi is questioned by police and this sparks suspicion among his friends who suddenly begin to stalk him and speak in veiled threats. It all culminates in what seems to be a massive conspiracy to silence him and when Rena and Mion approach him with a mysterious syringe and talking cryptically he kicks back and beats them to death with a baseball bat.
He manages to leave behind evidence and escapes to a phone booth where he calls the cops, but by this point his conspiracy theory seems to have been abandoned and he now believes it to be the demon, Oyashiro himself, stalking him, just before he apparently dies by clawing his own throat out.
The show then resets chronologically the story begins again. Higurashi actually does this several times as the core narrative plays out repeatedly over the course of the series for about 4-6 episodes before the anime seems to reset entirely and the next episode begins as if none of it had happened at all, except this time we see the story from a new perspective and as it plays out again we see different events unfold. Motivations are revealed, questions are answered, and new theories are presented.
At first it seems to simply be the same story again, but eventually we witness events well before and after the main story and eventually the core canon itself changes in both small and big ways. Events unfold slightly differently at first, but by the end you realize that the characters can't be alive in both continuities because they appear to die in completely different ways. Alliances are also different and while it's unsettling to see the violent shift from horror to comedy, the shift from friend to foe similarly manages to displace us in the world Higurashi builds.
Ultimately the key mysteries remain the same from beginning to end. While the motivations of many characters are eventually revealed and the answers to several smaller mysteries are solved, by the end, the big question still exists: What is Oyashiro's Curse?
Is it a literal curse?
Is it a political conspiracy?
Is it a demonic possession?
Is it a virus that drives you mad?
Is it a series of religious cult murders?
Is it a poisonous fog from a nearby volcano?
Is it an ALIEN PARASITE THAT CAN CLONE YOU!? WHO KNOWS!?
In fact, one of the oddest things about the series is how it ends which is an inappropriately cheerful and anticlimactic duel atop the school between Keiichi and Rena who's convinced that everyone is infected with an alien parasite.
Enter
Fridge Brilliance mode for a moment here:
~BEGIN SPOILERS~
The alien parasite theory actually goes to explain most of the biggest mysteries in the whole series. It explains why people go mad, it explains why people who leave Hinamizawa (and the vicinity of the swamp from which the infection supposedly originates) die or disappear, and it even goes all the way to back to explain one of the biggest early mysteries of the series: why people dig their own throats out, cause there're worms in their skin!
We see this happen to Rena, but here's what I think is the biggest giveaway here: No one ever reacts to it or acknowledges that it's happening to her. It's PLAUSIBLE that people simply aren't noticing it, but seems much more probable that this theory is all in her head. She builds up a conspiracy theory about a religious and politically fueled bio-terrorist attack that seems possible, but then she just casually throws out claims that the alien parasites can create doppelgangars which we never see and easily fall to Occam's Razor.
I think it's interesting that we get this sort of
Inception-style ending where it seems like almost everything is wrapped up, BUUUUT maybe it isn't?
To be fair this theory doesn't specifically explain several other smaller mysteries in the series either, such as how the NPA guy managed to visit Hinamizawa and leave without anything happening to him and it doesn't go to explain Rika's apparent dual personality and her inside knowledge.
In fact, Rika's unexplained insight into future events and alternate canons are also some of the biggest mysteries of the series which become center focus in the sequel series,
Kai where it's revealed she (like a certain other anime) is trapped in
Groundhog Day, er... month... or something... In fact, having seen several of those episodes and rewatching these I'm struck by a glaring lampshade that Higurashi hangs in episode 11:
Originally Posted by Keiichi's Mom
The most important part of a good story is the introduction. Without a solid introduction, the story doesn’t have the foundation it needs to move forward.
Originally Posted by Keiichi
So if nothing really happens in the beginning... then nothing ever happens.
What the ****? My biggest issue with Kai is just how ******* slow, uneventful, and unrepentantly boring it is! How do you manage to point out your own **** up before you make it?
I'm also bothered by how the sequel series also centers around Rika and introduces an actual spirit character which not only destroys the variety that came with switching perspectives every few episodes even when Satoko is blatantly underdeveloped, but it also shatters the possibility that the events of the series AREN'T SUPERNATURAL! That was a point in your ****ing FAVOR, show, why ruin that!?
~END SPOILERS~
Other issues I have in the main series are mostly nitpicky. There are a
couple tiny plotholes in the series, which, honestly is impressive considering how complex it is, but they're still somewhat problematic. One that comes to mind is when Miyo Takano warns that the curse manifests in one person dying and another disappearing, but qualifies that the number missing must equal the dead.
THIS DOESN'T WORK because the history of the curse tells us that it's only ever affected 1 to 2 people per year UNTIL the Cotton-Drifting Festival where SHE DIES along with the photographer, Tomitake. It's not until after she's dead that this theory that the missing should match the dead is even plausible because there has never been any more than one confirmed death prior to hers.
Less a plothole and more an oddity is Mion's gun, which she carries holstered all the time in her default outfit. She wears a gun to SCHOOL and despite finding herself in fight-for-your-life situations REGULARLY she
never draws it. Makes Chekov sad.
Another put-off is Keiichi's inconsistent behavior. For the first half of the series I sincerely applaud the writers for giving, what is essentially a horror movie victim, some common ****ing sense! He makes logical connections, he arms and takes measures to defend himself when he feels threatened, and he lies when it seems appropriate to him. THIS IS GOOD and it makes sense when he freaks out on people, HOWEVER... on at least two occasions when he's faced with certain pain or death he reacts coolly and literally attempts to BARGAIN with his enemy. And I'm not saying "pleading", I'm saying he has a smirk on his face like, "Ah whatevs, you can kill me, but if you do you gotta do this, this, and this".
Dude... you're strapped to a table and bitch is about to hammer NAILS INTO YOUR ****ING FINGERS, I don't think you're in any position to make DEMANDS!
The animation's pretty inconsistent too. It's generally pretty low-quality with occasional spikes during yandere moments (which, rejoice, there are plenty of) and the English voice acting borders on painful at times. Granted, it's serviceable, but it's obviously inferior to the Japanese dub and liable to drive up the wall anybody not used to high-pitched anime girl voices.
All in all, Higurashi is a fine anime. I wish it left fewer loose ends in it's quest to tell a mystery thriller, but it was certainly an enjoyable thriller to try and solve. The tonal shifts were dramatic and balanced excellently to skeeve you out, one-upping Madoka in my book. Even our hero, Keiichi is eventually revealed to be hiding some very
not-heroic secrets, but at the same time offering other characters with hidden motives that are prepared to go from full-blown moe to total horrorshow.
Despite a distinctly lower production value and significantly humbler origins, Higurashi absolutely THRASHES
Future Diary. **** that anime. **** that piss-poor, righteously ********, horridly written GARBAGE. **** IT.
Higurashi's immeasurably better...
except possibly in the health sense, since honestly this anime gave me a headache. Again. Literally.
I don't know what it is, whether it's all the talking, the interweaving plots, the ambient cicadas, the stiff animation, the desaturated color palette, the overwrought bloom, the grim and occasionally morbid nature of the story, OR SOME COMBINATION THEREOF, but I felt legitimately ill twice now while trying to watch this. That's easily my biggest issue with the series if anything. It shouldn't make me sick.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]
[Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]
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