Genres: adventure, drama, horror, mystery, thriller Themes: life after death, survival, troublesome teens Objectionable content: Significant Plot Summary: Strange suicides have been taking place in New York. One day, four girls from the same high school wake up in the morning feeling tired and dizzy and not being able to remember anything about the previous night. In school, they find out that one of their classmates has committed suicide. School is canceled for the rest of the day, but instead of going home, the girls are drawn to a park by butterflies only they can see. Suddenly a man and a woman approach the girls, telling them that they all died the previous night. Number of episodes: 22 Vintage: 2006-10-03 to 2007-03-13
Since this is October, I thought I would add a horror/thriller anime into my viewing schedule despite me trying to greatly keep my backlog at a reasonable number.
After thinking I decided to add Red Garden into my schedule, mainly due to the huge gap between Vol. 5 and Vol. 6 and the fact I didn’t marathon the series when I got Vol. 6.
If anyone wants to watch this as well we can set up a schedule and post our thoughts on the series.
Red Garden, one of the ADV titles taken back by Soljitz and given to Funimation - I don’t think an ADV single Volume 6 ever existed - but the dub is all ADV. I saw most of it on VOD and it was pretty good, although I’m not a big fan of musicals and they do sing in a couple of episodes. It stopped about the point we discovered that some of these people can fly, or leap great distances, which detracted a bit for me because it was easy to pick on. The animation is pretty good, they do a good job for instance the one girl’s brown car is pretty clearly an early 80s American car (I can’t remember now if it was a Ford Fairmount or a Dodge Aries K).
Yeah the last volume(s) was released by Funimation, although I already had a volume by ADV, I decided to just buy the two half season box sets by Funi, because it was eayser/cheaper for me.
Anyway this is an exellent show, a great horror series that grabbed me by surprise at first. And the ending is really good too. The emphasis on characters is what got me with this show. Plus I love a good show set in NYC.
By the way I do plan on reviewing this series one of these days. Perhaps I’ll re-watch it along with you this month, for the review. But only if a few others plan on watching it too.
The ones that gave it better reviews were lesser known reviewers or girls. The big name reviewers all consistently gave Gantz better reviews both at ANN and AoD.
The problem with Red Garden is it didn’t arouse much passion in most quarters, a good deal of the reviews of it were conservative in their praise of it. That was reflected in this forum, where there’s ADV and Anime Network supporters - I can’t even think of 1 person here who bought the series on singles as they were coming out. That says something.
I was just teaseing you dragoon . LOL. Figured you would respond eventually. But yeah I really did find that Red Garden got much better reviews then Gantz, but I still agree with you that the people that had a problem with Gantz did not really look past the gore, blood, and sex. The reviews for Red Garden were almost always postive, but more conservative. The reviews for Gantz seemed to either be “it’s amazing!” or “It’s the worst thing ever made!”. But there seems to be a lot of bad reviews for that anime though, when compared to Red Garden. I don’t really see what your getting at there.
My only real beaf with Gantz is the paceing, the flashbacks used to eat up time (really how many times are we ganna see that same flashback?) and the ending (which is outright terrible). I thought the soundtrack was amazing, and the character designs were very original, and that the backgrounds were very fresh and different looking. Although the CGI background did look a little cheap and odd at times. I am very glad I saw that show, and must thank you for recommending it to me . And the dub was exellent! Now that right there is a dub!
And I bought one of the singles for Red Garden, so do I count? LoL. But I was watching it on TAN at the time, so I wasn’t really ganna rush out to buy the DVD’s, I was going to buy them slowly, over time. I do think part of the reason people didn’t buy the show early on was due to the fact that it’s a real niche show, and those who saw it, watched it for free on TAN and were ganna get the boxset down the road or something. And yes I must agree the fans of Red Garden are not really ecstatic about it. They like it, but they don’t love it. I am the oddball out, as I sing the praises of the show as often as I can.
Thanks for posting that Tommy. I watched that review, and gata agree with him. Red Garden is realy good, for the reasons he explaisn quite clealry. He’s usually right ( ), and he has great tastes. Plus I think he’s a Kitoh fan, which makes him instantly cool. He gave good reviews to both Bokurano and Shadow Star Narutaru.
That’s what makes him good I think… he’s able to convert his unique style and eccentricities into a brand image. If he was just john doe like the other millions out there, he wouldn’t be so memorable.
Time to bump a very old thread…lol and respond to soemthing Tommy said
Nobody’s Boy Remi - he raited it 2 stars on his list there. Grumpy seems to dislike the show a lot. And says it’s nothing more then an uninteresting children’s story. Sevakis sings it’s praise every chance he gets, and worked on the show FOR FREE just to get the DVDs out the door, even though he wasn’t working for ImagineAsian anymore. That’s dedication. He says the show is heartbraking and one of the few shows to really impact him or something like that…And Grumpy said it was lame.
Thing is…I agree with both of these guys a lot. Sooo…who would I side on? lol. Doesn’t matter I’d never buy this anyway. But it does interest me…hehe
Anyway what did you think of Red Garden zidanetribal2000 ? It’s one of my favorite Sojitz era ADV titles.
Started this series back up tonight to get it off my backlog, though I’m starting from the begining again, since it’s been so long since I’ve seen the first 16 episodes.
I had completely forgotten, but I was reminded tonight that it’s somewhat similar to a musical in certian aspects.
It’s not really a musical lol. The girls randomly sing for some reason, and I don’t understand why, but this only happens a handfull of times. And the dub singing is supposed to be sub-par, so says the word of God and ADV’s ADR director. The Japanese singing was kinda crappy too. This plays into a very small plot point in the OVA, but I STILL don’t get it. Why even bother, because it’s such a small thing in the OVA, and if that was the point of the singing then wowies… What a weird thing to do.
I mean it’s cute that the girls can pass around a little song to sing, but…very odd and I just don’t get it.
I said “somewhat similar to a musical in certian aspects”, I didn’t say it was a musical.
And in the respect that the main characters break into random singing, and during that time, switch scenes between them all, it is similar.
Yeah that happens. But not too much (thank God). I guess you can say that, but I wouldn’t… It’s the one thing of the show I wasn’t blown away by. Everything else was near perfect. I rated the show a 9/10 on MAL. It’s a very good thriller/horror title, that fleshed out it’s characters well, and I loved the focus on the slice of life scenes.
And for once Gonzo ENDS a show. The ending explains everything, and was very dramatic and satisfying. Which is more then I can say about Gantz. The ending to Gantz could be compared to everyone at Gonzo giving me the finger, and truly I’d have more respect for them if they filmed themselves doing that, and used that as the ending instead.
The follow-up OVA on the other hand was terrible. It’s uneeded, boring, and totally ruins the point of the ending. Sometimes you don’t want to see what happens after a show ends, because there’s no point. This is a good reason for that. The OVA was quite dumb.
Well, I still haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t know what happens in the rest of the episodes after 16.
But, from what I remember of the first 16, it was rather interesting and very artsy, though a bit slow and drawn out.
. Although I did really like that show as well.
I liked Red Garden but Gantz to me had more impact.
. And the dub was exellent! Now that right there is a dub!
