Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru

When Shoutarou Tatewaki first meets Sakurako Kujou, he knows his life will never be the same. Initially believing her to be responsible for a disappearance in the neighborhood, he later learns of her true talent: analyzing bone specimens. Sakurako has quite the collection of reconstructed animal bones, but she wishes she had more of the human variety, much to the chagrin of those around her.

Soon, Shoutarou begins accompanying the eccentric osteologist on the many different unsolved cases she comes across—usually in the form of decomposing bodies. But with so many incidents happening around them, could there be a larger mystery at work in their lives?

Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru is a story of two unlikely partners, each showing in their own way that bones can tell how one died, but only people can tell how they lived.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kujou, Sakurako Main

Itou, Shizuka Japanese

Tatewaki, Shoutarou Main

Enoki, Junya Japanese

Isozaki, Itsuki Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Kougami, Yuriko Supporting

Imamura, Ayaka Japanese

Chiyoda, Shouko Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Imai, Haruto Supporting

Kakihara, Tetsuya Japanese

Hanabusa Supporting

Koyasu, Takehito Japanese

Sawa, Ume Supporting

Isobe, Masako Japanese

Touma Supporting

Toki, Shunichi Japanese

Utsumi, Hiroki Supporting

Takahashi, Hiroki Japanese

Katou, Makoto Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Sugawara, Teruaki Sound Director

Minamikawa, Tatsuma Episode Director, Storyboard

Suzuki, Kaoru Episode Director

Reviews

Dec 23, 2015

LeaderTGW

Recommended

I'm going to start off by saying that I loved! Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru. Personally I thought it had a really great story, character (to a certain extent) and a good sense of enjoyment. Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru is maybe a 7.0 out of 10 on the dark story meter. What I mean by that is the story focuses a lot (judging by if you read the title of the show lol) bones, death dead bodies etc. There is horror in it, however it is natural horror, it's not like an all in your face look at ... the bones look at the dead bodes blah blah horror that we usually see in anime's like this one. Another thing I liked about the story was the pacing. Overall the stories pacing of events going on are slow, however the writers do a great job of making this slow pace less annoying by adding additional mystery or mysterious elements. For example they will throw in a detective setting to keep things interesting, like "what was the motive for this murder?" etc. The music is "fitting" for the show. It is the type of music you what expect to hear in a show that revolves around death and mystery. Lastly, the art. The art style used in the show looks like something from late 2010's so nothing too special to point out other than Sakurako is kind of hot. Overall I think this show would be great for anyone to watch in their spare time however I do not think it's for everyone. Overall I give it 9/10 for that nostalgic sense of mystery and wonder.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Dec 23, 2015

HaXXspetten

Mixed Feelings

Sakurako-san is another one of those unfortunate anime which could potentially have been really good had it just done a few things differently, but instead sadly ends up fumbling upon itself thanks to a handful of slip-ups. It's quite similar to Hyouka as far as its theme and plot progression goes, but the pacing is significantly worse.

The story follows a normal high school boy named Shoutarou who has a not-so-normal friend called Sakurako. She has an unhealthy addiction to bones of all things, and finds it fascinating to study their history. By some strange coincidence, whenever the two of them are together they just so ... happen to get themselves accidentally involved in numerous bizarre cases, usually where a corpse or a skeleton is found and they have to figure out its story. So it's a mystery anime, which is definitely something I appreciate since we don't get to see too many of them nowadays, and it's also one of the more interesting genres in fiction in my opinion.

Unfortunately however, Sakurako-san is not what I would call a "satisfying" mystery anime. The reasons being a) it's episodic, and b) it's rushed. All of the cases in this anime are resolved in either 1 or 2 episodes, resulting in a myriad of short stories instead of a longer ongoing problem. And quite frankly this is a very bad thing for a series of this genre. Think about it; a complete mystery story needs:

1. A foundation to establish the setting of the case
2. A problem to be solved needs to pop up (like a murder for example)
3. The detective must look around for clues
4. After all the clues have been gathered, the detective must be given time to think about them and try to put the puzzle together (which of course lets the viewers do so as well at the same time)
5. The case must now be solved, the truth brought to light and, if possible, the culprit arrested
6. Finally everything must be wrapped up and the aftermath of the entire incident presented

So all-in-all, that's quite a lot of ground to cover. In fact, that's way too much ground to cover in just 1-2 anime episodes. There's simply not enough time to go through all the steps properly without either rushing it completely or making the mystery so simplistic that it's not even interesting to begin with. And this is the main problem with Sakurako-san as an anime, namely that it time and time again tries to do too much in too little time.

Instead it almost feels like the anime is trying to cheat the system by skipping a step or two. The whole investigation and pondering phases are almost cut off completely. How? Well simply by making Sakurako be absurdly overpowered as a detective. By that I mean to say that it doesn't matter whether the case in question ends up revolving around human biology, psychology, chemistry or 19th century painting techniques; no matter what it is, Sakurako knows everything. She can figure out any mystery within minutes with almost no clues to work with. In other words:

a) Every case ends up feeling very unimportant due to how quickly and easily they are solved
b) It gives the viewer almost no time to think for themselves (which is without a doubt the #1 most important thing in a detective story so this is a huge problem)
c) There is very little semblance of tension since you always know that Sakurako is going to save the day within the next minute no matter what
d) It significantly lowers the story's sense of realism as it doesn't really feel believable a lot of the time
e) As soon as a mystery is resolved, we're back to the status quo again. In other words it kind of feels like the story doesn't even matter in the long run. Although there are brief tie-ins to previous story arcs on rare occasions, it's not anything particularly noteworthy

So I've talked a lot about Sakurako, but what about Shoutarou, our supposed protagonist? Well... there really isn't a whole lot to say about him. He's just "there" as a sidekick, and Sakurako is the one always dragging him along and calling the shots. It's almost like his sole purpose in the show is to be someone for Sakurako to show off to. There are also a bunch of other characters in the show, but they're about as forgettable as it gets. Really the entire anime revolves around Sakurako herself and no one else, which would be common for a detective series, but given that she's hardly what I'd call a well-written detective for a mystery story I still can't consider it a good thing.

In the end though, despite the fact that there are tons of issues with Sakurako-san as an anime, they all stem from the exact same source. The heart of the problem is quite simply that the total episode count is *way* too small. They should have taken the same amount of content and adapted it in maybe 24 episodes instead of compressing it into merely 12. Everything comes down to that. The rushed pacing means that every mystery story gets way too little exposition and instead they have to fill the holes by using Sakurako as a cheat code, enabling them to skip out on half the steps in every arc. That's like a band aid measure, it doesn't actually resolve the problem itself whatsoever. What makes the mystery genre so fascinating is the process of solving the matter at hand; you investigate for clues, try your best to put them together, and then finally present the solution. Sakurako-san however basically skips out on all that and just blatantly gives you the answer right away. Talk about taking just about all the fun out of it.

With all that being said, Sakurako-san is still a decent anime which might be worth checking out. It just annoys me because I sincerely believe that it could have been really damn good had it just been paced better (or not been episodic to begin with), but instead we're left with an incredibly flawed final product. Good mystery anime are quite rare to come by, so it saddens me when a series like this pops up with all the potential in the world, only to fall flat for a quite needless reason.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Feb 8, 2016

Flawfinder

Not Recommended

You know what my big problem with light novel adaptations are? They never have a good story. Okay there's one or two exceptions, but for the most part, when their plots aren't being dumb, they're just non-existent in general. It's always world-building or character-building for its own sake, which is basically showcasing the finest bullets in the world without a gun to actually fire them with. Impressive-looking bullets my friend, but unless you're planning to make the bad guys swallow the damn things, I don't see how they're going to help us here.

Well, impressive may be giving most light novel adaptations too much credit because ... they generally look like ass on top of their other problems. But to be fair to Beautiful Bones, it does look nice for the most part - even if said niceness is often undercut with choppy direction and awful usage of filters. If this is going to be the norm for all of Studio Troyca's output, then you can add them to the list of fledgling studios that failed to make it big, because it's not a good look. I guess we'll see what happens in their future stuff, but for now, let's focus on Beautiful Bones. From what I remember, there were a bunch of people who were excited about this because it had the mystery label on it, along with word that it looked like Hyouka except not boring. Word of advice my friends. No matter how bad a KyoAni show is, any anime where the phrase "it looks like this KyoAni show except actually good" can be applied to it will always turn out bad. No exception.

And Beautiful Bones is pretty damn bad. It's not just the direction that's choppy, but the storytelling is mismanaged as well. For starters, just like the other Fall mystery show, it begins in medias res so it pretty much assumes you already know who our main duo is and thus we're supposed to find it cute when Sakurako guzzles over bones and solves mysteries with a Deus Ex Machina power because that's who she is. And also like that other Fall mystery show, the characters have no personal stakes in regards to any of the cases besides revealing token bits about Sakurako's past, which I'll get to later, so I'm not really sure why I'm supposed to care about them or the mysteries they're involved in.

I'm not sure if Beautiful Bones is worse than The Perfect Insider, but it's definitely not as fun to take the piss on. They both take their premises seriously whilst being horribly paced and completely lacking in tension, but whilst Perfect Insider couldn't stop banging on about how intelligent it is despite not realizing it was playing with a firework that had been soaked in sewer water, Beautiful Bones is sort of comfortable in its own inanity and proceeds to just go about its life like it's nobody's business, wallowing in mediocrity rather than striving to be anything more. There are multiple episode where there's not even a case happening, instead taking time to focus on the characters just going on about their lives despite the fact that I have no reason to care about seeing their lives. And when a case does happen, it's always clumsily executed due to the police being legendarily thick and the motivations being as sensical as Michael Jackson's singing.

Not that Sakurako's or her boy toy's motivations are any better. Beautiful Bones tries to sell us on their relationship as the glue that holds everything together, completely unaware that it's the cheap kind you'd use in elementary school because it's completely lacking. A good relationship-driven show is supposed to have the characters complement each other in a way that drives the story, but Beautiful Bones can't even get as far as to do the complementing in the first place since Shotaro is mostly there to act in awe of Sakurako's skills whilst being her morality pet and personal joke-punching bag whilst Sakurako...just goes on about life as always except now she has a kid hanging around her. Actually, I don't recall what the two do either together or separately other than hang out and solve mysteries. I understand it's supposed to be some Holmes/Watson thing, but Watson had a story. He was an army doctor who just got back from Afghanistan and needed to settle down. We never learn about what Shotaro's deal is until the final episode that details how he and Sakurako first met, and without spoiling anything, let's just say I don't see him going into any war zones soon.

As for Sakurako herself, the show builds up a story regarding her past and some villain that's manipulating all the cases around her to the point of ridiculousness, because my suspension of disbelief doesn't go so far as to accept that one man can manipulate both the case about a trapped child under a floorboard and the one about a cursed painting considering how little they have to with each other. And all it really tells us is that Sakurako is fragile on the inside. Wow. Great characterization there, Holmes. Not that that's automatically a bad story, but in addition to all the crap surrounding it, when I see buildup happening throughout the course of a show, I expect there to be some fucking payoff! And that's another problem with light novel adaptations by the way: they never end. It's like in order to get your series approved, you have to aim to be some Tolkien epic despite the fact that you don't have nearly the same amount of world-building skills that he did and you never will because you're working in an industry where all talent is to be left at the door when you enter the publisher's office. I'm pretty sure it even spells that fact out in the contract you have to sign with those guys.

So between a mismanaged cast, shoddy direction, tension-less mysteries, tension-less non-mysteries, and an ending sequence where you leer at Sakurako's naked body for some reason, at the end of the day, the show is basically like an un-sharpened #2 pencil: completely pointless.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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