Sankarea

 

Sankarea starts really promising. The Furuya family have an uneventful, happy life. They live in a house adjacent to the Shinto temple where the head of the family, Don, serves as the priest. Everything is well and fine until the family cat, Babu, is hit by a truck and dies. Chihiro, the teenager of the family and protagonist of this tale, can't accept losing his pet cat and so tries to bring it back to life by following an ancient, mysterious manual that contains a recipe for a ressurection potion.

One night, while working the recipe with his mortar and pestle he spots a girl outside the building screaming down a well about the several nasty things her dad does to her. This turns out to be Rea Sanka, the richest girl in the land. They somehow find common ground for a friendship and Rea starts helping Chihiro with the ressurection potion. 

Rea's dad, Danichiro, is not at all pleased with her precious daughter running around with the local rabble and a thing leads to the other that leads to a chase that leads to Rea being mortally wounded and falling from a cliff. All is well, however when, as it turns out, Chihiro's ressurection potion actually works and she comes back to life. 

And that's when everything goes downhill, or rather, it goes nowhere for the rest of the show. All we get from this point on is testifying how dull Chihiro is as a character, how dull Rea is when all she can can think about is pleasing Chihiro and I keep wondering why this plot doesn't move when there are so many hooks and it could go anywhere it wanted. The impression I got is that the story is actually following the wrong characters. Chihiro and Rea are just too uninteresting.

This show would be so much better if we could follow Chihiro's younger sister, Mero. In fact we do for episode 9 and it's possibly the very best episode on the show. Another way more interesting character would be Jogoro, Chihiro and Mero's grandfather. A crazy little man who appears to have dementia but the short glimpses of sanity seem to hint he's possibly the character here with the most interesting background to explore (which, by checking the manga, turns out to be the case).

There was no good reason to have the plot stagnant for half the episodes of this show when there's so much to draw from the manga. It starts off really well but I guess it asked way too much of my patience for me to really like it. Better picking up the manga for this one.