2009-01-06

Red Garden - RePost

Red Garden (レッド ガーデン) is a 22 episode supernatural horror series by Gonzo.  It originally aired in Japan between 2006 and 2007.

     The show follows four high school girls in a stylized, cleaner, less crowded rendition of New York City.  The four girls; Kate, Rose, Rachel and Claire, are all students at an exclusive private school, complete with its own private island. They each lead different clique orientated lives, much like all high school students and are brought together by the event of a girl named Lisa’s death. All of the girls had some level of friendly relationship with Lisa and the night of her death they all found themselves entangled in a bizarre string of events that would change their lives forever. They died that night and were given replacement bodies.

    The people who gave them their bodies have done so to make them fight for their cause. This cause is the defeat of a cursed family, a curse that causes the men to become animalistic and feral. As the girls are led deeper into the mystery they find them selves having to come to terms with the idea that they are really dead and that they are beating human beings to death with baseball bats every other night. These girls, as most teenagers are apt to be, are highly emotional and with the addition of their bizarre supernatural night life are even more mentally distraught. This leads to frequent bought of crying and even sometimes breaking into a poorly harmonized eulogy.


    The series isn't bad. The mysteries remained that way till the vary end and the plot became quite convoluted at times. There is an amount of death and violence but it is not an integral part of the story. I.e. the clubbing of dog-men to death with Louisville Sluggers is not the main point of this series. It is about the mystery of the girls' circumstances and the supernatural war they are thrown into as it reaches its climax, as well as the girls coming to terms with their own versions of reality and lives. Good series, not the best, but worth it if you like interesting story telling and weird super natural tales and you can put up with lots and lots of whining and bad singing.

    It is nice to see a production come around that takes place in a country other than Japan (not that the Japanese settings are bad) yet at times the attention to detail is lost, like near the end of this series when people start driving on the left hand side of the road instead of the right. All in all, minus the rampant crime, lack of non-Caucasians and a cardboard like backdrop, the designers did New York some justice in their portrayal.


ps-Yes, there is one non-Caucasian character in the show that I can think of...but not really any others.

This series was licensed in North America by ADV and is now owned by FUNimation.

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