While Halloween is typically thought of as a holiday revolving around spooky and scary things, I find that I have a lot more fun when there’s some spooky humor involved. Fear and laughter are often closely intertwined – how often have we experienced a jump-scare that leaves us laughing in the aftermath? It’s been a trend in my neighborhood this year for families to create funny scenes using the plastic skeletons that you can find for sale in the lead-up to Halloween. Some of my favorites have been a skeleton walking a skeleton dog on a leash, and a skeleton hanging off of a second floor balcony after falling off the roof during some roofing work (apparently). It takes a symbol of death and decay and makes it funny and fun!
Level-E is an anime series from the early 2010’s, based on a mid-1990’s manga by Yoshihiro Togashi (more famous for his other creations – Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter). It stars an alien prince, named appropriately Prince Baka Ki El Dogura, who arrives to Earth and wastes no time messing around with and trolling the people he meets. For someone of royal blood, he seems incredibly lackadaisical. He ends up rooming with Tsutsui, a high school baseball player who’s not especially happy with his new houseguest.
There are certain storylines that directly involve Prince Baka, but there are several others in which he serves a supporting or background role, and episode 4 is one of those stories. In it, a group of high school boys witness the murder of one of their female classmates. Not only that, but the killing involves the perpetrator fully consuming the girl’s body. They’re obviously freaked out – if there are monsters out there consuming people whole, they want to figure out who’s doing it and stay far away from them. As they begin their investigation, however, the members of their group start to go missing.
After pooling funds, they seek out the help of a special researcher who claims to have insight into alien species. After getting trapped in the researcher’s office, they discover that their group members haven’t been disappearing, they’ve just been seeking out the researcher’s help independently and then getting locked-in while the investigation has taken place. And while they’ve each spent an exorbitant amount of money on his services, the researcher comes through with what turns out to be a tragic explanation to the murders.
Of course, Prince Baka’s involvement is a factor that’s only revealed in the final moments of the episode. Learning the truth of what’s going on in this scenario turns it entirely on its head as far as tone is concerned and leaves one chuckling in the aftermath.
This twist ending keeps the episode from feeling too heavy, and that’s very par-for-the-course for this series. The episode, which has an unique visual style that tips the viewer off that something different is going on, definitely has the quality of someone telling a ghost story. And of course there’s just the right amount of gore and alien body parts in test tubes to cultivate a creepy atmosphere.
I really love this series. Because it’s often comedic, it certainly has a “your mileage may vary” quality to it and not all anime viewers will get the same pleasure from it that I do. But it’s become obscure enough now (and wasn’t particularly mainstream during its original run to begin with) that I now consider it one of my little secret treasures I can bust out when I want to share something surprising with other anime fans.
Unfortunately, though Level-E was originally licensed by Funimation/Crunchyroll, it appears to be long out-of-print and it’s no longer officially streaming anywhere, either. It looks like there are still unofficial versions available in the typical places (though it’s taken me some additional searching since there are more popular, current series with the word “Level” in their titles). If you happen to find an English dubbed version, just know that the part of Prince Baka is played by a certain “Vrk Mikniknog” (name altered, but iykyk), so you may want to stick to the Japanese dialog track.