Shadow Star Narutaru – Full Series Review

Soon Shiina begins to meet other children who have adopted other "Dragon Children" like Hoshimaru.  She befriends a quiet girl named Akira and her creature, Ensof, and the two encounter another boy named Komori who has some rather violent plans regarding the world at large.  Shiina and Hoshimaru defend Akira from Komori's advances, and eventually Hoshimaru uses Komori's dragon against him and kills him.  There are other children with similar intentions of taking control of the world by force, and they make themselves busy arming their dragons with weaponry and perfecting their modes of killing.  Eventually Akira is kidnapped by a flower-shaped dragon and a battle ensues between the renegade band of dragon-users and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces.  A poisonous cloud unleashed by the flower-shaped dragon decimates the soldiers, as well as citizens in a nearby town.  Shiina and Akira, shielded by Hoshimaru, watch in horror.

As these events and their aftermath die down, Shiina tries desperately to forge the type of connection with Hoshimaru that the other children have with their dragon children, a connection which links the two beings in mind and experience, which can be both beneficial and dangerous.  She meets a young woman named Jun and becomes embroiled in a feud between Jun and two old friends, the final result of which helps to make clear just how final and permanent the connection between human and dragon becomes if left to reach its destination.

That realization becomes all-too-pertinent as Shiina's friend Hiro, battered and bullied by a group of jealous girls at school and scolded by her father for missing just a few points on a test, finally unleashes the dragon that she's kept hidden all this time.  Her revenge is swift and deadly, and only Shiina may be able to break through Hiro's seething hatred and get her to stop.

Thoughts: There are two reasons why I became interested in this series.  The first is that I've seen it mentioned multiple times online as being very deceptive.  While the opening theme and the first episode are cheery and cute, resembling series meant for children, I was informed that it very quickly becomes dark and twisted without looking back.  There's a part of me that really enjoys the juxtaposition of "cute" with "screwed-up" and this series really embraces that.  I was also interested due to the author, Mohiro Kitou, who also wrote Bokurano.  I enjoyed the anime adaptation because it presented a bleak story that, under it all, was also very life affirming, and I'm looking forward to picking up the manga adaptation when I can.  As for this series, unfortunately the disjointed and poorly-paced story seems to lack a solid central theme (though it's at least possible to paste something together from the elements that are present), and with so many plot threads left dangling hopelessly at the close of the final episode it's difficult to see the violent and explicit aspects of the series as anything beyond  gratuitous though they may have originally been meant to help enrich the story.

What the show does right is that the story threads it does see through to the end aren't entirely focused on only the strange creatures inhabiting this world and the mechanics of their existence, something which might be more likely if the series were aimed at children.  Quite the contrary; while we're never given a complete idea of what the dragon children are and what the extent of their abilities might be, what's obvious is that many if not all the child characters in this series are leading very troubled lives. The act of bullying plays a major role in how the final story arc unfolds, and multiple characters are defined in how they participate in acts of bullying, whether it be as the perpetrator or the victim.  All of the characters seem plagued by an inability to effectively communicate their inner concerns and the nature of their sometimes abusive situations, and it's this fact, along with the seeming cluelessness and willful denial on the part of the adult characters that leads the anime to its conclusion.

Along those lines I was impressed with how the relationship between Shiina and her two friends, Akira and Hiro, was portrayed because even amongst the chaos of the final few episodes the logic of it seemed mostly sound, even if the strength of the relationship wasn't enough to prevent the horrific acts which occurred in the end.  Shiina insists multiple times throughout the series that she never wants to marry or have children, and part of that may be because she already serves as a mother figure to her friends, who both experience complete emotional disconnect from their own families.  She also has to mostly look out for her own well-being since her father, as well-meaning as he is, is a bit clueless and often absent due to his job as a pilot.  In a particularly awkward exchange between Shiina and her estranged mother, her mother states as much - that at 12 years old, Shiina must start looking out for herself, eating more so that her body fills out, and caring more about how she looks.  In short, fulfilling the role that she so desperately wishes to avoid. Akira clings to Shiina due to a history of having been picked on by her classmates (she exhibits strange behavior due to her link with Ensof and most of her classmates consider her strange due to her frequent fainting spells) as well as feeling distant from her parents and especially her father, who seems unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge Akira's suicidal tendencies.  Hiro is under the double pressure of doing well in school to fulfill the wishes of her harsh father, and also attempting to avoid the torment of her classmates who envy her good grades.  One of the more effective scenes in the show comes near the end, where Hiro and Akira, having both skipped school, meet by chance outside of Shiina's apartment and realize that their situations are similar and that Shiina is truly the only good thing in either of their lives.

Unfortunately, based on a pattern established early in the series, it's clear that despite any happy revelations there might be the plot has already irrevocably entered a spiral of violence and despair that can't be avoided.  Most people with any knowledge of this series are probably aware of some of the content and how shocking it is. Rather than list off every single instance of brutal violence or unexpected sexual conduct, I'll mention that a lot of the more startling content makes more sense if one seeks out more information on the manga that spawned this anime adaptation.  For example, it was obvious that Akira had a fear of being touched and that she was desperate for love to the point that she would attempt intercourse with a classmate in the school's infirmary.  What wasn't obvious to me and what makes this behavior make complete sense is that she was sexually abused by her own father, causing her to become the withdrawn, timid person she is in the show.  The specific cause of her behavior and the reason she eventually stabs her father to death doesn't appear to be addressed within the show itself, but knowing this background at the very least helps to alleviate the sense that her actions were nothing more than random acts of misdirected violence brought on by the treatment she received at the hands of her classmates.  Considering how shocking so much of the other content in the show is, I'm surprised that this small bit of information wasn't addressed.

Of course, that seems to be the major issue with this series, and the reason why it ultimately feels unsatisfying - it allows multiple plot threads to emerge that either reach dead-ends or are never addressed in a satisfactory manner.  In short, the series feels half-finished and the manga (at least in its entire, unedited form) is extremely difficult to locate in English so it's more taxing than usual to fill in the blanks.  Had the show been more focused on one or two of the plot elements, say, the role of abuse in the characters' lives and how they resolved the turmoil that resulted from that, along with maybe more focus on Shiina and Hoshimaru and why Shiina can't link with him, I think that the overall product may have felt more unified.  Instead we have the additional burden of a world-destruction plot which never comes to fruition, the angle about Shiina's mother and how her research is related to the dragons, the appearance of the bizarre character Mamiko who seems to serve no other purpose beyond acting weirdly-disconnected and not wearing clothes, as well as the introduction of Takeo and Norio who seem like benevolent characters but ultimately serve no purpose within the anime (though they are both quite important and meet brutal ends in the manga, so I've heard). 

The technical and aesthetic aspects of the series are something of a mixed bag.  The animation is serviceable, though it does have that strange look of early-2000's series where the joining of digital elements seems smoother than the rest of the animation and thus feels poorly-incorporated (this is mostly evident in panning shots with little other movement, as well as a few scenes with Kumori's dragon rotating against a static background).  The character designs, which mimic manga author Mohiro Kitoh's illustrations well, sometimes appear too lanky and out-of-proportion when animated (something which also bothered me about the xxxHolic series - sometimes intense faithfulness to the manga isn't the best course of action).  The cutesy character designs do serve as a good contrast to the actions of many of the characters.  Hoshimaru resembles a cute, dumb animal, so the fact that he's used to murder a child is made all the more chilling.  The youth of the characters is obvious, so when the instances of bullying and killing become more common later on, it's very unsettling.

The music often does a very good job of setting the mood - returning to the scene between Shiina and her mother, the  dissonant piano theme playing really helped to emphasize the discomfort inherent in that encounter.  The cheery opening theme song, however, almost seems like a slap in the face considering just how dark the later episodes become, and most of the time I felt compelled to skip it.  It almost seems formulated for the sole purpose of duping young children into watching the show.

If I had to take one thing away from the series, I think it would focus on Kumori's cryptic and threatening line directed at Akira.  He tells her that she has a choice; she can allow the world to "shave" her to fit its image, or that she can shave the world around her, then hands her his pocketknife.  In the context of the series, this means that Akira can give in to the abuse she's suffered and commit suicide, which she has attempted many times, or she can fight back, which she eventually does, killing her abusive father. While the series features plenty of violent, frightening examples of children embracing that ideal, taking revenge on the people who have hurt them and establishing their own persona in the bloodiest ways possible, at its core I think that this message speaks to the ideals of individualism.  Despite all the forces at work that seem to take pride in hammering down protruding nails (in this case, the bullies) there are ways to assert one's individuality.  This series, however, takes that idea to its brutal end, and I doubt very many people will find much with which to identify.

DVDs: The Region 1 DVDs of this series were distributed by Central Park Media, a company which recently folded, so the discs are out of print.  I was able to find them fairly easily on the Amazon marketplace used, and paid an average of about 5 dollars per disc.

Most of the extras are your standard trailers and some artwork, though the final two discs feature some voice actor biographies (of the Japanese actors) as well as some interviews and a commentary track on the final disc. 

There are both English and Japanese language tracks for this series but what I heard of the English (however brief) really turned me off so I stuck to the original Japanese with subtitles for the majority of the series.

Pros:

• There are some elements of a decent, straightforward story here somewhere, they're just buried beneath all the extraneous material.
• The music does a good job of establishing the mood of the series.
• The central message regarding individuality is sound, even if its expression is bleak and violent.

Cons:

• The show introduces way too many plot elements that it can't address, making the end product confusing and unsatisfying. The manga isn't available in English to fill in the gaps, either.
• The early-2000's animation doesn't blend its various elements very well.
• This show is incredibly, shockingly violent and there is an instance of rape which may offend many viewers fooled by the cheery theme song.

Recommended? No.  While I didn't find the series to be terrible by any means, the poor plot construction coupled with the extreme amount of violence was a little too much for me to handle, and that's even considering that I knew a lot of what I was getting into when I bought the show.  There's an overall bleakness about the show that isn't balanced enough by anything hopeful, and that would make the show hard to connect with for many viewers, I think.  The fact that the manga was never completely translated and that it's difficult to find in unofficial translations is another strike against the series, since so much is left unexplained in the anime.