Undead Girl Murder Farce

Undead Murder Farce screams exuberance and stylistic achievement from its very first moments, with no qualms about being absurd or perhaps even corny, and as mysteries go, that is the uniqueness that is to be desired. There’s so much media revolving around mystery, from your Agatha Christie novels, to your Conan Doyle stories, to the plentiful mystery anime and tv shows, so it’s difficult to create something memorable out of the vast sea of mystery media choice, and I’m happy to say that Undead Murder Farce stood out nicely, so come one, come all, into the pseudo-Meiji era, and enjoy the fun!

The anime title surely ... tells you nothing, but believe me, this is one of the most unique takes on mysteries I’ve seen a while, combining a wide range of mysteries with compelling action and witty humour, and also adding some major figures in mystery media, like Sherlock Holmes, Arsène Lupin, and many more. It kind of felt like the “Mystery Avengers” in a way, but with less action than your typical superhero flick, but much more focused on dialogue. To give a gist of the premise, it’s set in an alternate Meiji era, where an unlikely duo, an Oni Slayer, and a head in a cage suffered the similar fate of their humanity being stolen by the same person, and thus, they chase after this villain, encountering mysteries along the way, making a name for themselves.

Dialogue-heavy shows can be a slog, but this anime certainly manages to capture your attention without being boring, to the extent of each episode flying by in a matter of what you think were just a few minutes. The characters command each scene very well, and the voice actors are certainly to be praised, especially the two main characters in Tsugaru Shinuchi, and Aya Rindou, voiced by Taku Yashiro and Tomoyo Kurosawa, respectively. Tsugaru kept my attention because of his cheeky personality, often making fun of his partner Aya, as well as not taking things too seriously. His humour is witty, perhaps corny, but he definitely made me laugh quite a few times. Aya commanded each scene so well despite only being a head in a cage. Who needs a body after all? Her voice actor, Tomoyo Kurosawa, really nailed the role, as she had such a presence in each scene she was in, with her deduction skills and her tone of voice that captured every bit of my attention. The duo’s dynamic is in my opinion, the best part of the anime, as it brings forth such contagious eccentricity and energy that sucks you into the world around them.

Another main positive about this show was definitely the directing prowess of Shinichi Omata, who previously directed Kaguya-sama: Love is War, and Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, coming into play once again. The whole show feels like a stage play, with the characters feeling like actors, the dialogue bouncing off each character with such ease, the general flow of the story just so fantastic. The art and animation itself isn’t particularly pretty, and I suspect the budget for this show wasn’t huge at all, but Omata’s directing really elevated the show’s quality to greater heights, as there’s just a distinct uniqueness about how the show looks. The camera work and the storyboarding really embodied a style that felt “extravagant”, suiting the show’s setting very well. Furthermore, it has a sense of rakugo in it, and you can tell that Omata’s previous directing endeavours helped shape the way this show was directed as well.

From the compelling mystery, humour, and incredible directing, this has been one of the hidden gems, and potentially the best of the Summer 2023 anime season, and one of the more unique anime of this year. Was I surprised at how good this anime turned out to be? To be honest, not really, and that’s a testament to how much faith I had in the director. Man, this show really flew by, didn’t it?

Undead Girl Murder Farce was probably the talk of the season in many circles. From Reddit to various YouTubers, this anime showed a lot of promise to a lot of people, but unfortunately, it never delivered on its promise.

At the end of the day, I feel like it was still kind of entertaining. The fights were somewhat cool, the character cast was interesting, and the mystery parts in the show were also pretty interesting.

But unfortunately all of it fell apart when there was no proper "glue" to stick them together into a coherent, interesting storyline and there are a few key problems in the ... anime.

Firstly, the main plot and the premise of the show almost never actually progresses. The place we started in episode 2 is almost the same as we were at the end of episode 13. The anime consists of 3 arcs, but at the end of the day none of them contributed much, if at all, to the grand plot. Which leads me to my second point.

Another main problem is that the anime arcs were too different from each other and did not really know what they wanted to do. The anime tried to mix a detective mystery with an action show, which led to a tonal whiplash and in the end it just was not very good. The first arc for example was almost exclusively a mystery-detective style with no action, but then the second one did not have much of a mystery and was full of fights, and the third arc mixes both.

The character cast was colorful and we had a lot of interesting different characters which was nice, but at the same time most of them were not really that memorable as they did not have enough screen time or story rather than just being tagged from the "villain group" or any other group. Many were also chained to their respective arc and did not play a bigger role in the anime as a whole.

Finally, I do want to commend some parts of the OST and the cool OP song, and commend a few cool fighting scenes we had.

In short, it was an entertaining watch for its mystery aspect and some fights separately, but when combined together it all fell apart and led to a very mediocre product.

6/10

What I expected after the first episode - Discount Bakemonogatari.
What I got - Discount Fate Spin-off.

The Monogatari Series, or, more accurately, its anime adaptation by studio Shaft, has had an absolutely profound impact on the industry. Yet, compared to similar era-defining shows such as Evangelion or Madoka, it spawned a shockingly low amount of straight-up imitations. And it's not hard to see why, an author has to have at least 150 IQ to even attempt to write this type of story, as well as immense confidence not to be afraid of unfavorable comparisons with Nisio Isin. Though IQ below 100 and the Dunning-Kruger effect is ... also an option, Bunny Girl Senpai exists as an ostensive example of how NOT to imitate Monogatari. Undead Girl Murder Farce is not THAT bad, but it’s still way too far from being good. A more accurate comparison would be with Cube x Cursed x Curious - both of these series successfully manage to replicate some aspects of Monogatari while failing as a story overall. What’s also interesting is that these parallels in execution exist despite the fact that the two imitator series in question focus on entirely distinct elements of the Monogatari formula. C3 is an action harem where the protagonist does psychotherapy for girls with supernatural afflictions. And Undead Girl Murder Farce is a supernatural detective full of verbal foreplay between a human-turned-supernatural invincible MC and his aristocratic, sharp-witted Yamato Nadeshiko girlfriend. Which doubles as a description of one more series, Kyokou Suiri, by the way, when I call all these shows “imitations,” I REALLY mean it.

But enough about their similarities, the actual important part is the differences. The unique selling point of Monogatari is the best prose ever created by man and post-modern reflections on the otaku culture. The unique selling point of Kyokou Suiri is the namesake “made-up deductions” deconstruction of the murder mystery genre. And this is where the troubles with Undead Girl Murder Farce begin, it just doesn’t have a unique selling point. It’s set in the XIX century Europe, except it’s not really the XIX century Europe, but rather The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen cinematic universe, with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Arsene Lupin and so on appearing as characters. Which has been done to death. There is also the fact that the supernatural in this universe exists in the open, as an organic part of society, but the story barely explores this aspect. The series just doesn’t really do all that much, and what it does, it doesn’t do very well. Nothing illustrates this better than putting the titles of all these shows next to each other:
Bakemonogatari - Ghostory - a pun and a factual description of the content.
Kyokou Suiri - Made-up Deductions - also a factual description of the content.
Undead Girl Murder Farce / Cube x Cursed x Curious - this is just trying too hard to advertise the expected quirkiness of the genre without any meaningful substance of its own. It’s shallow and derivative. Like, the word "farce" has an actual meaning, and there is nothing in the show that fits it, it is not a farcical show, using this word for the name is just pretentiousness.
The only well-made part of the story is the banter between the protagonists (which is the single easiest step of the formula to imitate, even Bunny Girl Senpai had decent banter). Outside of banter, the writing is subpar. Including, but not limited to:
The characters aren’t developed and act nonsensically at times, like when an entire family barely flinches in response to their relative getting killed after being revealed as a murderer.
The dialogue often exists to dump plot points on the audience with no regard for how natural it is to actually say those things at the moment.
Old-timey murder mystery cliches, like telling a person’s entire life story based on the stains on their clothes, are mindlessly reproduced without anything meaningful done with them.
An abject failure of the murder mystery element, it’s full of contrivances and plot convenience. It even commits the biggest sin of detective fiction: not telling the audience all the information necessary to solve the case. For example, the circumstances of one murder depend on the mansion’s layout - a layout that wasn’t actually shown at any point before the reveal.
Every single memetic XIX-century character (Sherlock Holmes, etc.) in existence is vomited into the same story arc with no sense of restraint.
Gratuitous battle shonen cliches, a character can’t just be a demon slayer by himself, he has to be a member of a special Demon Slayer Corps full of nakamatachi with distinct silhouettes straight from Kimetsu no Yaiba. The series gets progressively more battle-shonen-esque as it goes.

The direction of the adaptation weirdly parallels the writing. It’s lacking in all but one aspect, which is the pacing. I think everyone and their mother have commented that every episode feels like it only lasts 5-10 minutes, it’s very engaging. But outside of pacing, the direction isn’t all that much. The series director is Omata Shin’ichi, a Studio Shaft graduate also known for Kaguya-sama and Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. You can clearly see this with the visuals of the show being full of recognizable “shaftisms,” yet those feel like mechanical surface copying without any underlying substance, especially when measured against other ex-Shaft directors such as Itamura Tomoyuki (Vanitas and Youfkashi no Uta) whose “shaftisms” look like a genuine artistic vision.
For example, the "glitchy green screen" and the "archaic wipe transition" effects are just failed "ironically bad" stylizations. Because stylizations are supposed to have style to them, there is nothing stylish about a wipe transition, anyone can do them in Windows Movie Maker, it takes no thought or effort. And wtf do green screen effects have to do with a murder mystery set in the XIX century? It's the last genre you'd expect to see CGI special effects in, there is no thematic connection, again, it's just pretentiousness.
The director also took the worst possible lesson one could take from working on the Monogatari franchise: how to fuck up the narrative by arbitrarily changing the arc order. The anime starts with an (original?) lore-dump episode that irreparably ruins the actual first arc of the story (episodes 2-4 of the anime) by retroactively turning all the plot points revealed there (for the first time, in the proper order) into pointless repetition (like the reveal of which exact supernatural beings the main couple are), as well as deflating many intended to be tense moments (like when the main character who’s been acting as a goofy clown for the entire arc reveals himself to be an insanely strong fighter in the arc finale - but we’ve already been spoiled on that by the first episode).
And then there are fight scenes that are pure cringe, with characters double and triple jumping in the air as if it’s a match of Super Smash Bros.
On top of all that, the anime is hamstrung by being single-cour, we just see a few disjointed criminal cases, without any meaningful progress to the overarching narrative (assuming the original source material even has any).

4/10 for a subpar adaptation of subpar source material.