Dead Flowers, Red Garden

One volume in and I begin to wonder which Gonzo made Red Garden. Is it the one that made Last Exile and Gankutsuou or the one that made SpeedGrapher and Real Bout High School? Cheap-shot mentioning RBHS, I know. I guess either way, Red Garden promises to be horrific, though obviously I pray for the good kind.

The premise of Red Garden is the four high school girls we’re following died and have been given temporary lives. In order to maintain these temporary lives they have to kill or die. The reason why they died and why they have to kill isn’t given out in the first volume, which is expected, but will hopefully leak out in a satisfying way over the course of the series. In the very beginning there’s a hint that these girls are valuable somehow, as there was a fight to gain possession of a fifth dead girl. The four opening episodes concentrate on revealing who these four girls are rather than going deep into the plot. I found myself a disturbed by the girls’ fear when combating the horrors, but found the actual horror they had to face kind of vanilla.

Red Garden’s character design is a fusion of antique-modern chic and the grotesque, particularly that Lula chic with the vulture-esque nose and greed deformed lips. For some reason I keep thinking of an old Depeche Mode video when I look at Lula’s nose. It’s a great character design for her role as this sinister guide revealing this ugly new world that the four girls find themselves in.

I love how ugly Lula looks!

I do like that Red Garden looks odd and is largely what got me to put it in my Netflix queue. I was about to say that it didn’t look like typical anime, but I think studios have been diversifying the art direction and character design a bit more in recent years. Gonzo in particular seems to be pushing against the confines of the so-called “anime style” with some of their shows like Gankutsuou, SpeedGrapher and this one.

Now if only Gonzo could put a little more effort in the pacing department. There’s a little slowness in the pace here, but I’m fine with letting the characters breathe and reveal themselves a little bit in the beginning.

The setting is a little confusing. It’s in New York, but I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be current, near past, or near future in feel, but did get a kick out of Gonzo trying to get one New York detail in there with a reference to the infamous Soup-Nazi made famous by Seinfeld.

English Dub Notes

It feels like I’ve been hitting a lot of Stephen Foster dubs lately, not that I’m complaining, I enjoyed the Red Garden dub. Though due to the whole habit of getting discs back in the mail to Netflix as soon as it’s done caused me to skip watching the Japanese dub — I’m so unwashed. Foster does well with the atypical anime shows, which is why I think shows like Red Garden and Le Chevalier land on his desk. I like each of the leads and the secondary characters, the girls’ friends, give us so much information about them just by the way they speak. A good bit of that is in the writing, but the direction really brings it out. When we get to the scary moments for the girls, I found their screams and their gasps made me uncomfortable, which rocks.

Parting Shot

The opening four episodes of Red Garden felt like a solid start to what might be an interesting series. It’s a Gonzo show and I’ve watched enough Gonzo productions where going forward I have to keep my fingers crossed in hope that they can keep Red Garden flowing beyond the initial concept. I also want to know the deal with the butterfly swarms. Butterfly swarms remind me of Boogiepop Phantom (which I love) and I’m curious to see what the butterflies represent in Red Garden.