Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi
Alternate Titles:
A Sunday Without God
Sunday Without God
Plot:
God creates the world and then abandons it, saying that heaven and hell are too full, the world is too crowded, and he has failed humanity. Upon God’s abandonment people can no longer reproduce or die. If someone is killed the dead will keep moving even after their flesh begins to rot. The only way for people like this to find rest is for a Grave Keeper to bury them (or having dirt shoveled by a grave keeper hit the dead person). Grave Keepers are God’s final miracle sent to the world in the form of human-like creatures with massive amounts of knowledge and lacking social skills.
Ai Astin is one such person, through she is very different from most Grave Keepers. One day her life is forced to change and she sets out from her small town to discover the world with a naive hopefulness.
Air Date: July 2013
Episodes: 12
Source:
Light Novel by Kimihito Irie with 8 volumes, started in 2010, still ongoing.
Manga started in 2010 with 4 volumes, still ongoing.
This is the first Television adaptation.
Studio:
Madhouse
Staff:
Yuuji Kumazawa – Director. A relative newcomer with a very short list of total credits to his name. Also directed Oda Nobuna no Yabou or the Ambition of Oda Nobuna. I have a feeling this newcomer may have gotten overwhelmed from adapting the source material.
Shinichi Miyamae – Character Designer. This is his first Character Design credit, however he has been involved in a lot of big product as Animation Directors and Key Animators such as Chihayafuru, NANA, and FMA: Brotherhood, to name a few.
Hiromi Mizutani – Music. Also worked on Hell Girl, Toriko and the Wallflower.
Sound/Visual:
Kamisama is GORGEOUS. It was like eye-porn to watch. I loved the coloring done and the animation. The music was fantastic and the character designs were excellent. The sound and visual made a lot of this show worth watching for me, as someone who is very big on presentation.
Review:
This is an anime with an interesting premise that has a lot of potential. At its core it is a different take on a zombie-apocalypse story. You have people that keep moving after they die. But, what sets it apart for me and intrigued me right off the bat was their approach. Rather than your normal hack-and-slash gory zombie rundown Kamisama offers a different approach. Despite being dead and rotting, lacking beating heart, etc, the “Zombies” (I’ll call them loosely) still maintain their humanity. They can still talk and interact as though they had not “died.” This, of course, opens a lot of opportunity for how people react to these people who are “dead” but still able to move, speak, and interact as they once did.
However, the adaptation of this anime and the way the story and characters are handled presents a great deal of problems. The first arc revolves around the girl grave keeper Ai. We meet her and learn that she has inherited her mother’s duties as the town Grave Keeper from a young age. She is raised by the town and lives there with the townsfolk. Then, the town is destroyed by a man named Hampnie Hambart. What does she do with this maniacal murderer who killed everyone she loves? She decides to go on an adventure with him!
The world that gets set up through this first arc are fantastic. The characters also do shine, but the problem I always felt came in with many of the interactions between the characters. It was as though they created this amazing plot and ruined it with characters who couldn’t carry it sufficiently.
The anime returns to a better focus, IMHO, when they move onto the next arc which is the city of Ortus. This city is ruled by the dead and we’re back to investigating the questions of how the dead should be handled. If they are capable of living “normal” happy lives should they be “put to rest?” But even this arc I found disappointing as it generally felt too light hearted. It had all of these potentials for tense drama and real discussions on the plot and the world and what the implications of things mean and spent it with character-focus to the point of practically ignoring all the rest.
The final arc (or final two, depending on how you want to split it) of the show reminded me, of course, I am still watching anime. I don’t mean to sound like a hater, but why must we always end up in a school? We end up in Goran Academy where all the kids are special because they have had wishes granted by God. But, they are forced to study and cannot escape. So what do they try to do? Escape.
I’m not saying good things didn’t happen in this arc. But, was the school setting really necessary? Beyond that, out of all the others, this arc felt to me like it was the most out of place for everything that had been built up so far and completely rushed to make the viewer care about what is going on in the Academy in a short 3ish episodes.
This drops us into what I’ve heard some say is a fourth arc, but I kind of lump it all together as an evolution of the academy arc. Ai’s friend from school, Alis, has a goal that is fundamentally against Ai’s character morals (I won’t say for spoilers, but one guess is as good as the next) and she decides to HELP HIM. This is one of the weakest female characters I’ve ever seen. “I want to go on an adventure, oh I’ll go with you I guess. You’re an awful piece of shit? That’s cool, I’ll just ignore that fact.”
In any case, the last arc actually is okay. We stopped the rampant introduction of characters and had a lot of excitement right toward the end. There were decent twists and the management of them by the characters was as rewarding as it was dramatic.
This show wanted to say a lot about God, humanity, and their relationship specifically through the notion of wishes – which I would analyze to be considered “prayer.” But the story felt rushed and crammed into 12 episodes and then everything focused on the characters at the expense of – I feel – a far better story/plot.
The anime started out very strong with setting up the world and, despite the already present genre-clashing and character annoyances, the first 3-5 episodes presented this anime in such a way that I thought it truly would be one of the best in the season. However, once the city of Ortus was introduced and we were dragged into the academy things went to BARELY average until we got to the final arc again.
This anime’s main crime is ambition. The anime set out to try to do too much in too short a time. I almost wish the first arc could have been really developed as a beautifully done OVA. Or, the entire series got 24 episodes to really have time to focus on the characters (as much as they apparently wanted to) AND the world. The world ends up feeling ignored and the main character Ai doesn’t feel like she really changes at all throughout the show despite having the most focus on her and the most potential for development.
This is a show I really wanted to like, after the first 3 episodes I was fairly sold, even with the genre clashing and “WTF are you doing” character problems. I saw the potential for an excellent world to be built and evolved upon. But, with the majority of the cast having less development than the main character the notion of it being character-driven fails for me because I think character development is essential to character driven shows. Since they sacrificed plot/world for character focus then we miss out on the interesting nature there and everything ends up going from a potential to be amazing to just, blah.
[starrater]