Created to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of Tatsunoko studios, the
best way to describe Karas is an
ambitious and very interesting premise but one, including the notable delay in
between releases of all six episodes, which needed time to breath, rushing with
all the ambition of a debut of a man, Keiichi
Sato, who started out as a character and mecha designer who finally got to
direct a production. It is a simple premise at its heart combining Tatsunoko's history of superhero
characters in their animation like Gatchaman
or Yatterman, with horror and
Japanese folklore, and then-modern CGI animation which is meant for style for
the sake of style even if the premise is elaborate in lore. Considering this
has sword welding armoured figures fighting in the sky of Shinjuku at Christmas
at the beginning of the first episode, the style is there, as is the director Keiichi Sato spelling his own name out
in episode one with ants.

Karas is absolutely of its era, very much of the 2000s in style
with the CGI and looking as expensive as possible, alongside the emphasis on a
more muted art style. Voice casting for the English dub, which brought in Matthew Lillard and Jay Hernandez for key roles, definitely evokes how by the mid 2000s
there was a push for making anime more mainstream, and as a straight-to-video
project licensed by Manga Entertainment,
this is also of the time. Whilst there were a few prominent ones at the time
like this, that format was losing traction for these types of projects and TV
series were easier to access on DVD finally at that point, Manga Entertainment eventually becoming less prominent as a British
and US distributor, and more British one who releases mostly television series
and some key films in the decade onwards. Karas
however to its credit has a fascinating premise - in Shinjuku a mysterious
figure known as Karas, a denoted figure meant to protect the city on behalf of
the demons and the yōkai of the city from evil doers, stops demons from killing
the humans and consuming their blood. The current one is Otoha, a man in a coma
for the first three episodes who spends his time as a doctor for the yōkai in
their world. A demon hunter about to stop time, he is under the watch of Yurine,
the woman behind our lead who a) is an unexpected catgirl, and b) exists as a
concept, more than one Yurine in existence as part of this lore using both
Japanese mythology and various Asian disciplines of spirituality as its
influence, Yurine existing for all the Karas and all looking the same,
including for Eko, the former Karas of Tokyo who, having become disillusioned
to its corruption, seeks to annihilate all humans there with what is
effectively a plan to turn everyone into his own personal tap of human blood to
be able to power his ultimate form.

The style, even under all the
CGI, which is used for Karas and his opponents, mechanically altered supernatural
demons, is inspired, running both with this idiosyncratic style but also melding
it with ancient Japanese folklore.  The first
monster emphasises this, whilst pulling no punches even if the later episodes
are much gorier, with a water demon draining human blood from victims in a
specific public bathroom near the subway, introducing us too to Narumi, a new
police officer assigned to the one man behind their paranormal department, with
his own concerns with his daughter in a mental asylum for seeing her whole
classroom massacre by a demon. You however also see that Karas' first episode is arguably stylish to the point you cannot
understand half of it, and also rushing through a premise which had legs for
longer episodes than the thirty each gets. Effectively taking horror monsters,
and having them as life draining robot ones, tackled by a doctor for good yōkai,
a huma, who returns to his world to slay evil ones from a former Karas, we have
a premise that is rewarding, but this show really needed to have been longer
even if it was forty minute episodes. The first three episodes known as The Prophecy for Western release from Manga Entertainment feels like it is
bolting through so much without explaining enough, including a demon in human
disguise named Nue, after Eko and his monsters too. There are aspects you have
to expect are there for the creativity of the production, like all Karas being
able to turn into fighter planes for combat, but it is telling, alongside there
being too many characters, that The
Revelation as the last three episodes are called, all released two years
after in 2007, has to start episode four with a huge amount of exposition to
explain itself. Characters who barely get detail on them, like a female female
Karas and her Yurine watching on as a preppy girl, get more to do, and it
explains key lore points alongside Otaha's back story as a mob enforcer.

As quickly as his tortured
history is disposed of, even if it means quickly getting past his crime father
and an unexpected bromance that dies a quick death, The Revelation however has to quickly deal with ending the show, so
even this is rushed despite explaining the premise. The rush undercuts Karas so much as by those three
episodes, we are already into an apocalypse scenario where, with the notable
shift in more gore and limb severing, we are in a far more violent doomsday
tendril situation. As a result of the rush, even this, which is a scary and
gruesome scenario, actually gets into something I have I have always hated in
anime - just killing random bystanders off in vast amounts in elaborately gory
scenarios as we see here. It is odd but, even with the trashiest of horror anime
I have seen that are bad, they seem more justifiable even with an archetype
once you known them a little, even one dimensional stereotypes, to be able to
exist as a singular figure with their own existences for how long the tale is.
Focusing on having their death as one person than merely part of a mass, no
matter how gruesome especially with the eighties straight to video era, takes
it into an exclamation mark to the scene that works. Here because you do not
have enough time to digest the stakes, sadly Karas despite its moody nature even ups with randomly drawn
bystanders getting horrifying ends which feels like shock value. This even
makes the ending of the notorious Urotsukidôji:
The Legend of the Overfiend (1989), its own world ending scenario, powerful
ina horrifying way because we had more build up and warning of the threat at
stake in that film in spite of its own problematic nature.

A lot of Karas'  fault is that, with
this premise, Karas is an
imaginative and vivid production which had so much work and production
preparation clearly placed into it, but was really rushed to a scenario that,
even in another slightly longer OVA work, would have needed slightly longer to
reach what is this extreme an end. It is also a conventional superhero plot at
its heart, despite the gore, that made a bad decision to not get the exposition
out of the way or having time to slow down and let its lore sink in even if the
production wanted to avoiding too much talking. What stands out in its tone, its
horror-occult premise, is pushed to the backburner, which becomes its biggest
sin. Particularly with how the designs are so elaborate and idiosyncratic even
with clichés - there is requisite spider woman on the evil side, but her
monster form and how she drains the blood for humans by hundreds of tiny
spiders is entirely idiosyncratic here - it feels gauche to rush through a premise
which has at its heart the additional subtext of modernisation conflicting with
Japan's past. Details I can expect most will miss, such as how to activate the
Karas form, Yurine chants a Shinto mantra, but there is an elaborate metaphor
here that anime has tackled a lot and is worth doing so over and over,
modernisation and Japan's past in conflict, the old traditions and the modernisation
clashing as the demons of yore are forgotten and humanity in the city sinks
into crime and corruption. Details like the mayor of Tokyo betraying humanity
due to his hatred for all the crime, in another adaptation, would have become
more loaded if allowed to breathe.

You can see the production value
onscreen, not just in the computer effects, but costume design touches, like
the Yurine all having goggles with idiosyncratic and cute markings for eyes on
them, or that people cared for this work's lore, that in this world cities are
still alive with the unnatural, the crows to the stray cats part of the spirits
living in them that denote a human to become a Karas and keep all under
control. As a result, this does have the disappointment of what could have
been. For me this was always a title from this era getting into anime I wished
to get around to, but never did. I am glad to see there was so much passion to
the production as an original premise, which I have to admire now I have seen Karas and realised more was on its mind
than presumed, but it is with the cost that, unfortunately, it missed the mark.
This premise with the cost of its style clearly put on the production in time
and effort did not get to the stage it needed to in being fully fleshed out,
and it also needed to have been worked on more carefully before it came out. Thankfully,
the epilogue of this production is that someone like Keiichi Sato, with this debut as a director, would go on to make
helm more productions into the modern day, such as the first series of Tiger & Bunny (2011), so this
ambition would lead onwards into other productions.