Red Garden Eps. 1 - 22

Red Garden has been my saving grace these past few months. I've had numerous sexy video game excitements from the Wii, Zelda and Final Fantasy XII, but poverty meant (and means) no legitimate manga and the recent dire anime pickings meant a distinct lack of passion for the things I write about here. Red Garden, luckily, has kept me in the loop, albeit in a fairly limited capacity.

The main point of contention I can find, in regards to this situation and the show itself, is in deciding whether Red Garden was genuinely a great series or merely a decent one with no competition.

Aesthetically, I've loved everything about Red Garden. The character design has been constantly excellent, with lots of stylish Shōjo wardrobe changes and fashion hat-tippings; the hair gradient colouring has been this season's (liek, omg) Ergo Proxy eye shadow for enchanting design quirk; even with the odd bum episode, the animation quality has been consistently decent. I often got the impression that this was a show with the Western market in mind, or at least acknowledging its influence, and I can imagine its R1 release being success with such strong visuals behind it.

The voice acting has been downright terrifying at times, and I don't necessarily mean the heinous singing. When you get goose bumps from a voice-actor's screams there must be something special about their abilities, and Red Garden's voice-acting (bar the singing) has been standout as some of the best I've heard in an anime. I have muchos pity for any Western licenser who intends to tackle this show, because I doubt we have the pool of talent or technique to match the emotional spectrum achieved in the voice work of this show. It's a weird situation for me to be in, all this VA appreciation lark, because the majority of my emotional connection comes from the writing rather than its performance, but that wasn't the case this time. Truly fantastic stuff.

The writing itself has had a lot of standout moments but as a cohesive whole it left me feeling a bit indifferent. As a character study of the four protagonists there have been flashes of brilliance and a constant sense of maturity that endeared me to every one of them. In this sense, as a character-driven show, Red Garden is a great success. Plot-wise, I'm not so sure. When you get the impression that the plot is secondary to its characters, acting merely as a vehicle to portray their moral and emotional dilemmas, then it makes accepting its quality difficult. And this is the case with Red Garden, I think. The circumstances for most of the events that take place rarely felt sophisticated or fully developed. Lots of why/how/when questions popped up as I watched the series and very few of them were resolved by its finale.

Tellingly, though, they somehow didn't do much to undermine my enjoyment, and herein lies the crowning achievement and the crippling flaw of Red Garden. No rational person could herald a show as 'excellent' when it has such overt weaknesses in something as important as plot. But equally, the sheer impact and power of its character-development steam-rolls over any previous criticism and makes it a firmly recommended show to watch. Perhaps depressingly considering its status as Too-Shōjo-To-Function (that final bloody scene!), Red Garden will initially stick out in my mind for aesthetic reasons (its style, voice-acting and so on), but happily that will lead to discarding the pretty veneer and finding its substantial depth and intelligence. An easy recommendation for anyone interested in robust characterisation, which is anyone with a brain and a soul pretty much!

And a Red Garden OAV you say? Why yes, yes please.

P.S. for an alternative view on Red Garden, check out Karura's take on the show. It's the antithesis of what I've been saying, but I do like a bit of caustic humour.