3 Episode Taste Test: Ookami Kakushi (Hidden God)

What begins as a creep­ing sense of malevol­ence with Ookami Kak­ushi (lit. Wolfed Away) devel­ops into mute indif­fer­ence as the threat of a mys­ter­i­ous scythe-wielding lun­atic ebbs into frisky sexual encoun­ters. The series starts with the faint hope of a slow burn­ing mys­tery, that is res­ol­utely extin­guished how­ever by sedent­ary pacing and con­tinual non-events. Unsur­pris­ing then that the ori­ginal cre­ator behind Higur­ashi no naku koro ni has sim­ilar duties for this as well as the Peach-Pit duo tak­ing respons­ib­il­ity for char­ac­ter designs. The out­come is a taste­less melange of dif­fer­ent inspir­a­tions ran­ging from Night Wiz­ard to Pro­ject Zero to Myself; Your­self and many points in between that still main­tains its own dis­tinct approach but ulti­mately lacks the focus needed to succeed.

“the melodi­ous next epis­ode pre­views which, set to drum beats, are nar­rated by a soft, rasp­ing voice”

Hiroshi, his writerly father and his wheelchair-bound sis­ter have recently moved to the rural town of Jogama­chi. Divided by a river into the old and new areas, rumours abound of man-sized wolves roam­ing the sur­round­ing hills; it isn’t until a friendly acquaint­ance from school dis­ap­pears though that Hiroshi begins to real­ise there may be more to the town than he ini­tially assumed. With a local har­vest fest­ival upcom­ing — focused on the town’s abund­ant Has­saku fruit, a type of fra­grant orange — and strange occur­rences increas­ing, the local populace’s strange affec­tion for Hiroshi may be more a curse than a blessing.

While some­what heretical to com­pare, the series at first has an under­cur­rent of H.P. Love­craft to it, with its men­acing, small-town premise. The expect­a­tion that some­thing mur­der­ous and vicious is con­cealed and roams the aban­doned streets in the small hours of the night is tan­tal­ising; how­ever this is squandered by the lack of a strong nar­rat­ive thrust and a refusal to reveal any con­crete inform­a­tion on the ostens­ibly cent­ral theme of the show. The series begins with a scratchy, grainy look at events still to come, a masked fig­ure bran­dish­ing a crescent-shaped scythe being the most vivid; what fol­lows though oscil­lates between mildly enter­tain school hijinks and brain-meltingly tedi­ous excur­sions cham­pioned by the unnat­ur­ally peppy and instantly grat­ing female lead, Isuzu. With noth­ing but scraps to entice and ongo­ing events too insipid to ignore, the impetus for fur­ther view­ing evap­or­ates all too swiftly.

Son­ic­ally the series achieves much more than the story; the end­ing is an unspec­tac­u­lar lit­any yet the open­ing by Yuki Kajiura’s Fic­tion­Junc­tion sets the tone bril­liantly with a trade­mark high-tempo aria. The most unique con­tri­bu­tion how­ever is the melodi­ous next epis­ode pre­views which, set to drum beats, are nar­rated by a soft, rasp­ing voice cement­ing the fore­bod­ing ambi­ence of the series aims for. Back­grounds are handled by the pro­lific Stu­dio Easter which means they are infre­quently beau­ti­ful, unlike the primary anim­a­tion handled by AIC which, while ser­vice­able, doesn’t stand up to scru­tiny and lends itself to later epis­ode corner cutting.

The third epis­ode is the strongest of the trio and begins the intro­duc­tion of char­ac­ters fea­tured in the end­ing anim­a­tion as well as demon­strat­ing it is unafraid of poten­tially risky storylines, how­ever the pro­jec­ted twelve epis­ode run and cur­rent evid­ence strongly implies an imbal­anced nar­rat­ive more weighted towards frivolity than the more seduct­ive creep­ing hor­ror. The pack­age then as presen­ted by the open­ing epis­odes is mixed: isol­ated com­pon­ents offer much to be intrigued by whether that is the open­ing and clos­ing sequences that bookend each epis­ode or the the premise of a bifurc­ated town at war with itself when the moon rises. As whole though, Ookami Kak­ushi has too much bag­gage weigh­ing it down; the leder­hosen wear­ing female prot­ag­on­ist has more enthu­si­asm than is tol­er­able and male lead is dense enough to exert a dis­cern­ible grav­it­a­tional field, all of which neg­at­ively imbal­ance an oth­er­wise prom­ising series. ¶