An anime that starts fairly pleasantly becomes incredibly dark over these last few episodes.
What They Say:
It was at the entrance ceremony of Sakakino High School that Makoto Ito met Kotonoha Katsura for the first time.
Kotonoha was in the class next to Makoto's, lived along the same railway line, and caught the same train to school every morning. Although Makoto had a little crush on her, she was to be looked at from a distance...that was all she was.
Then, a message on Makoto's cell phone appeared:
YOUR ROMANCE WILL COME TRUE IF YOU KEEP YOUR LOVE INTEREST'S PHOTO ON YOUR CELL PHONE SCREEN FOR THREE WEEKS WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING.
As ridiculous as Makoto thought it was, he took a shot of Kotonoha on the train and made it his wallpaper, only to be discovered by Sekai Saionji, his classmate at the next desk, the next day.
Though the portent seemed to turn out to be of little consequence, Sekai volunteered to play matchmaker between Makoto and Kotonoha to make up for sneaking a look at his cell phone. From that day on, Makoto's ordinary life started to take a new turn...
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With these last four episodes, we come to the chilling climax for School Days. For a title that starts out fairly pleasantly, it certainly gets dark pretty quick-like. But despite a loathsome cast, it is still a fascinating look at how quickly relationships can go sour.
Please be warned, this series cannot really be discussed without talking about the ending, so this review will be filled with spoilers. If you do not want spoilers, skip to the “In Summary” section and move on.
The school fair has ended: Makoto has danced with Sekai, which suggests that he is picking her full time. He makes this official when he breaks it off with Kotonoha the next day. Of course, both girls are unaware that he had sex before the dance in the fair’s “break room” with Otome, who has liked him since high school.
With Sekai looking to be more of a girlfriend than just a lover of Makoto’s, he begins to tire of her the same way that he did Kotonoha, and he begins sleeping around. In fact, among the girls in school, sleeping with him becomes somewhat of a game, with not a few of them openly curious if the reality matches the reputation.
But as Makoto works on gaining carnal knowledge of every girl in school, the girls he left behind are having their own problems. With Makoto’s rejection, Kotonoha begins to lose herself in a fantasy world where Makoto is still her boyfriend and ignores any semblance of reality. She thinks she spends a lot of time talking to him on the phone, when in reality she is talking to automated operator errors, and she makes plans with him that she never realizes he does not attend.
For Sekai, her problem is more biological: she discovers that she is pregnant, and as she has not been sleeping around like her boyfriend, there is little confusion as to who the father might be. And when she confronts him in front of the entire class, his fatherhood becomes common knowledge. As a result, his popularity with the ladies drops off, and all of a sudden, Makoto is no longer finding sex wherever he turns. But a reunion with Kotonoha opens Makoto’s eyes to how much of a jerk he has been, but also seals his doom.
When talking about School Days, it is hard to really talk about it without discussing the ending (so take this as your last warning for spoilers). When he realizes how rotten he has been (particularly to Kotonoha), Makoto sets out to try and return to the simpler, more innocent age that he had been in not too long ago in the past. Unfortunately, this means rejecting Sekai exactly when she needs him the most, and being the unsympathetic jerk that he is, he is none too subtle about it.
Following this, Sekai herself loses it momentarily, and the next night she gruesomely guts Makoto with a kitchen knife. She regains her sanity when he calls out her name with his dying breath and runs away. When Kotonoha (still not really in her right mind) sees that Makoto has been killed, she then tricks Sekai into meeting her on the roof of the school—where the three used to have lunch together. Kotonoha accuses Sekai of lying about the pregnancy to get Makoto and attacks her with a cleaver, and cutting her belly open to prove it. One of the final images from the series is a shot from inside of Sekai looking out through the wound at a bloody Kotonoha as she peers in.
When the series first played in Japan, it had a bit of unwarranted controversy surrounding it. The night before the final episode was due to air, a high school girl murdered her father with an axe, a sensational story that made every news outlet by the next morning. With the murders in School Days happening in similar ways, many TV stations opted not to air the final few minutes of the last episode as they did not want anybody to make any connection between it and the real life murder. As such, School Days has gained a certain amount of notoriety that it might otherwise have avoided.
This is not to suggest that the ending is not horrific. It is, in fact, one of the most disturbing things I have seen in an anime—particularly as they did a good job of setting up the suddenness and starkness of the situation. But interestingly, the ending is much more disturbing out of context. Not long after the series ended, I remember reading an article about it, and the article included a short video clip of the final five minutes of the series. I remember being both horrified and fascinated because it managed to push all of the right buttons. And despite being disturbed by it, I really wanted to see the whole thing. Now that I have seen it, I am less horrified by the ending. Sure, the murders sort of came out of nowhere, but as the final four or five episodes descended into greater and more dramatic depths of psychoses and general negativity between the character, the ending seems less shocking.
Thoughts of the whole series:
If I had not known the ending to School Days going into it, I never would have believed that it would have gotten there after the first few episodes. It was certainly a drama, but the drama seemed like it was going to be a little more lighthearted than it ended up being. And frankly, it is like that for about the first half of the series. It is not until Makoto starts hooking up with Sekai, and Kotonoha starts going off the deep end, that the series really starts taking a dark turn. Granted, even up to that point, the characters are just about the most unlikeable bunch ever found in an anime, but that was more of a symptom of the plot than of any real darkness in theme.
But once Makoto officially moves onto Sekai, his relationships start falling south and so does the feeling of the series. Kotonoha refuses to believe that Makoto might be leaving her, so she falls out of all semblance of reality. She even gives herself up to Makoto’s friend Taisuke, though with his insistence and her emotional state, it could be considered date rape. When the final scene of the series shows Kotonoha having a romantic yachting trip with Makoto’s severed head, then it is obvious that she has a few problems.
Then there is Makoto’s insistance on sleeping with every girl he finds. Once he gets a taste of sexual relations, he cannot get enough, and he cannot see why he might be doing a bad thing. He cheats on anybody and everybody and feels no guilt over it. He even gets to sleep with Setsuna, Sekai’s best friend, if he just promises that he will never leave Sekai (a promise that he does not keep. And he completes his descent into jerkdom when he pushes Sekai away for having the gall to get pregnant.
And frankly, with all of this, School Days can be a bit uncomfortable to watch at times. It starts out pleasant enough; but by the end, no character has any redeeming qualities (some even go out of their way to be pure evil), and we have had to deal with the realities of vicious bullying, sexual deviance, rape, and murder. Even with all this, School Days is a very well done anime, but it is in no way a pick me up.
In Summary:
I really enjoyed School Days, but it is not an anime that is for the faint of heart. The opening episodes do not really hint at being a particularly dark anime, but it ultimately gets there, particularly with the ending. It is uncomfortable and disturbing from at least the midpoint, but it was so well done, that I appreciated it for going where it went. But it is certainly not a title that just anybody should go watch. If you do, be prepared to be hit with as bleak a love triangle as you are likely to find. Highly recommended.
Features
Japanese 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
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