Ga-Rei: Zero

There are times when watching an Anime can drop you into the middle of an established storyline with no idea of what is going on.  Ga-Rei: Zero not only dumps the viewer into the somewhat confusing world of Ga-Rei, but created an entirely new cast of characters, complete with small backstory riffs, and kills them off in one episode.  For the uninitiated, this was an extremely jarring way to start the story off, but it did succeed in getting my attention.

I only just finished watching this series due to my favored fansubber dropping the show and my delaying picking up a new one for an extended period of time.  The show is surprisingly good.  It suffers from a phenomenon known as book-ending, but it has decent production values and tells an interesting story with a surprising amount of emotional connection.

Ga-Rei: Zero tells the prologue of the main Ga-Rei Manga in which the main character, Tsuchimiya Kagura is brought up into the world of exorcism and gains her signature Ga-Rei Byakuei spirit.  But really the story is about Isayama Yomi, a fellow exorcist who takes in Kagura after her mother is killed at the hands of an evil spirit.  Yomi and Kagura grow to be sisters in everything but blood and they develop a caring relationship, sheltering each other from the harsh realities of their respective family lines.  Things are looking good until events lead to obliteration of the status quo (blatant attempt to avoid spewing spoilers).

The series, animated by AIC Spirits, has solid production values, particularly in the animation of combat sequences which are crisp and well executed.  There are two fights of supreme note in which some absolutely bizarre combat takes place on some unusual vehicles, but you really have to see the fights to understand why they are so noteworthy.  Musical and vocal talent is superb, but the OP and ED suffer from being stereotypical for this kind of anime and get very bland by the end of the show.

The bookending that I mentioned earlier refers to the show’s sandwiching of a large, seven episode flashback that splits the climax of the storyline and replays the second episode in the tenth.  The entire climax is therefore held in the first two and the last two episodes, creating a scenario not unlike dictionaries on a shelf, held in place by bookends, where the bookends are more interesting than the books they contain.  The backstory told in the flashback is absolutely critical to the ending of the series, but its placement divorces the viewer from the dramatic tension of the climax.  The writers did do a very good job of making sure that the tenth episode, which resumes the story of the second, has enough shifts of perspective to not feel entirely redundant.

As a side note, this bookending was enhanced by the fact that I watched the entire series in two days and two sittings.  The pressure of that kind of story would have dispersed over the three months it would have taken to tell in the television format, but it suffers in the DVD and fansub formats.  It is also a great deal easier to fit the pieces together when the flashback doesn’t take two months, ruining some of the cliffhangers and reducing the effectiveness of Yomi as a sympathetic character.

Readers of the Manga will undoubtedly recognize the substantial meaning behind the final conflict in the last episode, and the subsequent lead-in scene to the first frames of the Manga, but for those of us sitting outside the continuity, Yomi’s actions and final thoughts feel like a copout to the pressures of form endings.  The redemption story has been told a thousand times and really, Yomi seems to go the opposite direction in the course of the series.

On the other hand, I have nothing but respect for the studio for setting up the single best MacGuffin I have seen since Hitchcock in its slaughter of an entire cast of perceived main characters in less than 23 minutes of a single episode.  Well played.

Ga-Rei: Zero is worth a watch, but maybe with a little time taken between episodes so the storyline doesn’t trip over itself.  Certainly, fans of the Manga should (and probably have) see this intriguing little entry into their universe.

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