DVD Review - Pumpkin Scissors

While there's no way any real army would name a regiment "Pumpkin Scissors," this post-war series shows a lot of promise. The two main characters make this series memorable. Also, very few anime cover war relief regiments, and it's actually more exciting to watch these characters giving back to the towns.

"Pumpkin Scissors" follows the adventures of the war relief regiment, the Pumpkin Scissors. The two main characters, Alice Malvin and Randel Oland, first meet in a town terrorized by the nearby renegade chemical weapons regiment. Together, with Pumpkin Scissors members Martis and Oreld, they get the antidote from the renegades to heal the villagers from the spread of chemicals in the town. The Pumpkin Scissors work in the next three episodes to take down a crazy murderous prince and convince a mining town to start working again.

The characters are probably the most memorable in these episodes. Alice Malvin is a member of the nobility who would rather help the oppressed than act like a proper lady. Randel Oland is a giant war veteran, a member of the 901 anti-tank regiment, bearing an extremely powerful rifle and taking whatever damage necessary to destroy a tank. Martis is a smart soldier, the first one to hear of Oland as an anti-tank fighting demon. However, probably the funniest character is Sergeant Major Lily Stekkin's humongous white dog, Mercury. The dog just sinks its teeth into anything that moves.

While there were only passing hints of a bigger story line in episode 4, this series shows a lot of promise. Although the opening sequence music is a little too techno for a World War I-era anime and the ending song about the dog is a little too goofy, this series looks amazingly good. Alice Malvin is a surprisingly strong heroine. Hopefully the next DVD will be even better.

DVD Review - When they cry (Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni)

Higurashi is a sadistic horror anime with plenty of killing. Yet, the sadistic (but cute) characters really make this anime hilarious. Yes, there is plenty of killing, but I really enjoyed watching the out-of-place cute youngsters turn into cold-blooded murderers for the most insanely unbelievable reasons.

Keiichi Maebara, a teenage boy, lives in Hinamizawa, a peaceful rural village. He plays and has fun with his friends, all girls. However, he learns from a photographer and a former nurse that Hinamizawa is a cursed town, in which every year at the Watanagashi Festival at least one person dies.

To make matters worse, his friends keep concealing the truth from him--that they killed those people. Each day, Rena keeps creeping up to Maebara with a huge knife. When Maebara sprains his ankle, the doctors injected him with needles. Eventually, Rena and Mion knock him out and try to inject him with more drugs. In self-defense, Maebara grabs the giant knife that Rena was holding and kills the two. Maebara, in a fit of insanity, eventually commits suicide by stabbing his throat with his fingernails.

And yet, after this fatal storyline, the characters seem to come back to life. Well, not really. I'll just say that there are multiple scenarios in the series, and the whole story line is similar to the movie "Groundhog Day," where the story repeats again and again.

However, this is a surprisingly complex soap opera, involving children who are abused by their aunts and uncles. The kids kill others for the most ridiculous reasons. Shion kills her friends in frustration, over the loss of her murdered love interest. Kana kills her uncle's fiancee for setting him up for a big financial divorce settlement. Okay, so maybe these story is a little too unbelievable, but the murderers' motives are so bizarre and strange that the series actually turns into a dark comedy. The alternate plots are very intriguing, each one revealing another piece to the fascinating plot which involves drugs, UFO crashes and, yes, bioterrorism (don't ask).

This series is crazy, bloody and definitely not for kids. However, the story line is very original, and the characters are hilarious. There's nothing better than watching little kids kill each other for the stupidest reasons in a crazy town filled with conspiracies. I highly recommend this.

The first three DVDs covered the first four storylines, "Spirited Away by the Demon," "Cotton Drifting," "Curse Killing," and "Time Wasting." Unfortunately, only three DVDs have been released because the publishing company, Geneon, was sold to ADV films. The parent company of Geneon, Dentsu, released a statement which said that they would stop releasing all of the company's DVDs after November.

It's such a shame that these DVDs have been left without a publisher. This is one of the best and smartest anime series of 2007. Yet, the storyline is so good that someone is bound to pick it up for publication.