Fall Anime Impressions – Mouryou no Hako

Time for the third Madhouse anime series of the season – Mouryou no Hako. I somehow missed this show when I was looking at the fall shows but the positive buzz from other people guaranteed that I’d watch this.

Rating: 11/12 A+

Well, Madhouse hits another home run with this show.

The story so far seems to be about two girls – one the daughter of a working-poor doll head maker and the other is super-rich, perfect, and excels at everything. The daughter of the doll head maker starts to hero-worship the other and the perfect, rich one starts to tell her that one in the reincarnation of the other and vice-versa. The two develop a very close relationship and all seems to be happy between them until they decide to runaway together.

Then there’s the creepy part at the beginning where this guy meets a rather odd man holding a large ornate wooden box. The guy hears a voice coming from the box and when the door is opening by the odd man, he sees a young woman’s head amongst flowers and she appears to be alive. It was creepy and disturbingly wrong and yet I’m really curious how this plays into the rest of the show.

Once again Madhouse shows off their animation prowess with quality that was almost too beautiful to look at and the character designs, done by Clamp, fit the mood and story of the show perfectly. And finally, of the three Madhouse shows, this one had the best OP/ED of the bunch.

You can't really tell but he's hallucinating bloody handprints on the windows