OP: “Gekkō” (月虹) by Bump of Chicken

The last of fall’s “big three” makes its debut, and as always with weak seasons, the stakes are pretty high with the standout series – if they don’t come through the house of cards can collapse pretty quickly.  In many ways I was looking forward to Karakuri Circus most of all – Golden Kamuy is really a second cour and not a new series, and the Ushio and Tora experience has primed my expectations for Karakuri Circus quite a bit.  So of course did the PVs, which were exceptional.

As with Planet With, the story of this series is much the author of the source material as the anime itself.  Fujita Kazuhiro is a legend in shounen circles, no doubt, but it’s certainly a pleasant oddity that his two most beloved works got anime adaptations long after their print runs ended. Fujita has fans highly-placed on the production side, and they’ve championed his work – he’s damn lucky for that of course, but so are we as an audience.  I don’t quite place Fujita-sensei on the same level as Mizukami Satoshi but he’s earned that legendary status – he has both a signature style and a gift for presenting it in wildly entertaining fashion.

MAPPA is not involved in Karakuri Circus in any way that I can see, but I’m not too worried.  Studio VOLN co-produced Ushio and Tora and they appear to have a close relationship with Maruyama Masao (the most important of Fujita’s friends in high places) as they’ve co-produced with both MAPPA and M2 in the past.  They’ve also brought back almost all of the key staff and two of the key voice actors from UshiTora, and brought in the brilliant (and very busy – he’s also composing for Kaze ga Tsuyoku and Double Decker this season) Hayashi Yuki to write the soundtrack.

As if all that weren’t enough to reassure, Fujita himself is co-writing the screenplay with UshiTora’s Inoue Toshiki.  Like that show Karakuri is going to be three cours (36 episodes), and this series is even longer in manga form.  Fujita was and is apparently OK with this, and I personally never felt Ushio was rushed though I know some manga fans lamented what was cut.  This premiere is briskly-paced, but it certainly didn’t seem rushed to me either.  One of the qualities I love in Fujita’s adapted anime is the breathless sense that there’s always something important happening, that if you blink you’ll miss it.

Fujita wrote this series immediately after Ushio and Tora, so it’ll be interesting to see how his style evolved as a writer.  The plot concerns a young boy named Saiga Masaru (Ueda Chihiro), who runs into a circus tout in a bear costume played by Koyama Rikiya (kigurumi type-casting?).   Masaru immediately asks the man (whose name is Kato Narumi) to take him to the circus – and the man’s initial reaction is that the boy must be a runaway.  But soon enough it becomes clear something is very wrong, as three strange men in back approach Masaru on the street and attempt to kidnap him.

One of the core elements of the Fujita oeuvre, it seems to me, is seeing people (and other sentient creatures) exhibiting very human emotions is extremely bizarre and fantastical situations.  There’s a lot that’s weird about this whole situation to be sure – not least of which is that Narumi apparently has a disease where he’ll die if he has a seizure and can’t make something laugh.  And of course, the kidnappers turn out to be puppets.  But the essence of the moment is what Narumi does, and why = he gets involved simply because he’s not the sort of guy that can see a wrong being committed and do nothing about it.

Things get progressively stranger from there – though the most normal part of the premise is that Masaru is an heir to a huge fortune, and the puppets belong to those trying to steal it.  Masaru’s grandpa had told him if he was ever in this situation to call on “Shirogane“, who’s always be at the closest circus (which explains his earlier request of Narumi).  Shirogane turns out to be a she, and she’s played by the great Hayashibara Megumi.  She’s a puppet master too, and after a disastrous train ride in which the kidnappers show just how far they’re willing to go to accomplish their goals, Masaru calls out for her in desperation (I guess it was lucky that train crashed where it did).

Honestly this is all so wild and out there that I’m not even really trying to digest the plot at this point – I’ll trust in Fujita to sell me on that part.  What works right away is the character side, where all three of the leads come across as interesting and sympathetic figures.  They’ll be the real core of this story if UshiTora is any guide, and having seiyuu like Hayashibara and Rikiya certainly helps.  I don’t know anything about Ueda-san – as far as I know this is her anime debut – but so far so good on that score.  The series looks great, too, both in terms of animation ad backgrounds – and of course Hayashi’s music is a highlight.  All the pieces are definitely in place for Karakuri Circus to be a top-shelf show, but this is a nine-month project – it doesn’t show all its cards in the first episode by any means.  That’s fine – the first episode was everything I expected it to be, and I expected it to be pretty damn good.

ED: “Marionette” by Lozareena