It's time for another Anime post. Anime is one of the greatest communication mediums on the planet. It's got is fair share of garbage and mediocre portions. But when it is good, it can be magnificent and today I set myself a challenge because writing like any other person is kind of boring and almost against the ethos of the medium I'm writing about.

Anime With Twists

I'm not going to spoil you the story/twist (except for few minor nudges). But I'm going to talk and drag you into watching these magnificent anime. There are many types of twists. Hollywood is mostly perpetuating one type where audience is made to assume something about a character or an incident and it turns out that it wasn't the case. It is said that the twist was well done when it has been setup from the beginning. Fight Club (1999) is a perfect example of this. There is also this other kind of twist where the perspective change. Skeleton Crew (2009) had a nice twist in the beginning for those who didn't watch the badly done trailer. The twist is that the tense and horrifying opening was part of a film and the horror movie is about a film director turning into a snuff film maker. A more mainstream example would be The Sixth Sense (1999)

Then there is also the revelation twist which is sometimes just a post credit scene in some franchise builder movies (mostly just MCU). But if you want to see some effective usage of this twist technique, look into detective stories. Major spoiler incoming........

Another - Revealing The Twist First and Moving On With The Story

Another (アナザー Anazā) is a Japanese mystery horror novel by Yukito Ayatsuji, published on October 29, 2009 by Kadokawa Shoten. The story focuses on a boy named Kōichi Sakakibara who, upon transferring into Yomiyama Middle School and meeting the curious Mei Misaki, finds himself in a mystery revolving around students and people related to his class falling victim to gruesome, senseless deaths.

• Wikipedia

The husband of the author wrote another masterpiece named Shiki. Both are truly amazing works.

The anime starts with an amazing opening narration with a great hook. It pulls the perspective twist several times. You think the anime is going for a certain thing and it turns out that there was more realistic but odd explanation. In fact the story has Agatha Christie/ Arthur Conan Doyle style of grounded realism. Even the supernatural phenomena are described as something not that different from earthquakes and other natural disasters. They are NOT up against some evil. They are up against a very odd and unusual phenomena of nature and the the ending is truly well done.

Another is an anime that pulls off its twist in a way that the biggest twist is that you didn't even notice that the anime revealed the biggest revaluation super early in the narrative right under your nose and you missed it. Another is a great trick to pull off on a friend.

Shiki

The anime has an amazing art style. The music is hypnotic and the twist is a gradual one. It's an anime that starts by killing off the protagonist of the first episode and kicking off a mystery. You are going to be cheering for the uphill battle of your heroes and the villains are truly menacing. Then you are going to redefine your interactions with the characters as the plot moves on. The anime isn't shy about making endearing characters and letting them die. The deaths are a mystery. There is even a bizarre sense of realism despite the art work. You won't see characters turning into different personalities. It is simply a story about characters revealing more about themselves.

The villains are villains and the heroes are still heroes. But the slow thematic and tonal twist will make you think "Does That Even Matter?" If I had to stop using words, I can boil down the anime to what you would feel listening to this:

"Death is terrible for anyone. Young or old, good or evil, it's all the same. Death is impartial. There is no especially terrible death. That's why death is so fearsome. Your deeds, your age, your personality, your wealth, your beauty... They are all meaningless in the face of death."

"If I was the protagonist in this story, I'm sure someone would come save me. It would be like a miracle. But I have no one to save me. There is no god who would grant me a miracle. I'm a murderer, after all. But I've done nothing bad. All I did was feed myself. If I hadn't, I would have starved to death. Would it have been better that way? Am I evil because I didn't let myself starve to death? Give me an answer, Muroi-san! I didn't willingly become such a creature. But if I have a life, shouldn't I treasure it? Is that a sin? Muroi-san! This is what it means to be abandoned by God."

You'll see loneliness. You'll see beauty. You'll see survival. You'll see lots of survival and after a long time in any audio-visual medium you'll stop cheering for neither the heroes nor the villains and you'll even want to see them make peace. Shiki never really talks about peace. But it does reveal the hollowness in everything else (even if it is what you've been cheering for 75% of the run time)

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

I can't even say what genre this belong to without making it a spoiler. Best way to experience it is to go in blind and watch it immediately. It's a true and unique masterpiece which has The Heart of a Narnia Movie, Beauty of a Zen Documentary and F-ed up stuff that'd make you take think the Saw franchise was a movie for families.

You haven't even seen the mutilations and mind games and some well done intimidating atmosphere. The story will hit you like a truck and then confuse you, clarify and then move on to reveal things that would redefine your whole experience of the series. The sequel titled Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Kai had its own perspective twist where everything happened in the previous season was revealed to belong to a different genre.

They are all part of the same whole and nothing felt out of place even at a single time. Everything blended supremely well and if re-contextualization of everything you previously saw is the definition of a twist, Higurashi is the single most "Twist" fiction on the planet as far as I know.

The two opening songs are some of the best ever in entertainment. The lyrics add so much depth and they feel like a genuine part of the experience. I invite you to read a translation as I couldn't find a version with quality sound and translation to share with you.

That's Enough For Now

I hope you had something different and boundary pushing beyond your average stories with a "Twist". These kind of content is the reason you should be watching anime. These experiences are hard to impossible to come across anywhere else (except for Visual Novels). So take your time and watch the above material. They are short but very powerful and most importantly unique. They will redefine the way you think of stories with twists. In a way that's a magnificent meta-twist!

Happy Steeming!