There’s definitely something there with BEM – bits and pieces of an interesting show.  But right now it’s just not clicking for me.  We’re in a one step forwards, two steps back kind of situation – every time I’m impressed with something it does something else a minute later which annoys me.  Maybe it’s not the fairest comparison but with Gegege no Kitarou I always feel as if there’s an imperative to it – that it exists for a reason and has a point it’s trying to make.  So far BEM just feels like a revival for revival’s sake.

This week’s story had some interesting elements to it to be sure.  It concerns the body of a young girl discovered in a cemetery in Outside, who turns out to be a finishing school student from Upper who disappeared ten years earlier.  It turns out that Bela took the girl’s face – Bero implies that all of the trio have “borrowed” the faces of dead people for their human costumes – which leads to problems when one of the girl’s former classmates recognizes Bela while she’s hanging out in the mall with her school friends.

I’m not that crazy about the idea of making Bela an incredibly generic anime high school girl who just happens to have faerie ears (which no one seems to comment on for some reason) with truly horrible and boring friends.  I suppose it makes sense in that she’s presented as the one who most romanticizes humans and covets their mundane existence, but the upshot is that she and her human life come off as incredibly banal.  Neko-musume got a refresh and looks like a beautiful human teenager (most of the time) but her character is still thoroughly vibrant and distinctive and so is her daily life.  Bela not so much.

I also didn’t care for the introduction of the “Bowler” character, who was thoroughly silly and added nothing to the atmosphere of the episode (and that’s an understatement).  In fact the whole premise of Mary’s murder and the motive behind it seemed sort of silly to me. Still, Bela’s situation is more interesting than she is, at least so far, and there is the potential for something in the depiction of these three youkai trying to cross the divide from their world to ours.  It just needs to be brought off with a little more originality and flair than it has so far.