When They Cry (season one box set)
Creator: Studio Deen, Chiaki Kon
Publisher: FUNimation
Release date: August 25th, 2009
MSRP: $69.98

When They Cry is set during the summer of 1983, where a group of five kids in a rural Japanese town spend their days going to school and playing games together. It sounds like a limp slice of life show, where the main character begins to fall in love with one of the girls, followed by incredible amounts of angst and teenage drama.

However, When They Cry disabuses you of that thought in the opening minute of the show. The first episode begins with a hazy screen and the moist sound of metal hitting meat. The labored breath of the main character, a high school age boy named Keiichi Maebara, is heard as you see he's striking something over and over again, that something being the broken bodies of two girls in a room. The camera pans to his face, wide-eyed with hysteria. Then the show goes to its opening theme. Watch the first thirty seconds of the video  below and you'll see what I mean.

I have never wanted to see more of a show than after I saw the above clip. It threw me for a loop that something with cute characters could even suggest that a blood bath would occur, much less promising that there WOULD be a blood bath.

The show then becomes the cutesy school comedy that the art suggests it is, but there is always something amiss. The way that characters act and the secrets they obviously hold, as well as Keiichi's growing paranoia, always reminds you that nothing is as it seems.

And it's done after four episodes. By the end of the fourth episode, the gruesome end foreshadowed comes to fruition and the show seemingly ends. Yet, the fifth episode starts with everybody alive and well. The show goes into a different story with the same characters in the same world, with the relationships slightly tweaked. The shows does this for all of the first season. The characters will start all happy and smiling, yet slowly devolve into paranoid maniacs as the mysterious deaths occur and the bodies start to disappear. After a bloody end where the viewer learns more of the menace the haunts the town, things are reset and the cycle starts again.

The first season covers the four question arcs (which set up the mysteries of the town of Hinamizawa) and the first two answer arcs from the original game. While this season does have an ending, it doesn't solve any of the overarching mysteries of the town, leaving the following season and several OVAs to pick up the slack. That's not to say that you'll finish this box set and be dissatisfied, but you'll definitely want to have the rest of the material so you can get to the bottom of the Hinamizawa murders.

However, don't expect to get the second season of When They Cry, unless magical things happen and puppies rain from the sky. Thanks to Geneon's mismanagement with the promotion of the show, it didn't get the attention it rightfully deserved when it first came out in 2007. What do I mean by mismanagement? Take a look at the box that Geneon originally put the show in.

Cute, very much so. Truth in advertising? Not so much. People walking by and looking at the box would not know that it was a show for adults, much less a murder mystery that has paranormal and psychological elements to it. If this had been given packaging like the current thin-pack release by Funimation, then it could have been  successful and we would be getting the second season and OVAs.

Back to the show proper, I have only two complaints with the show. First, the art takes a drastic nose dive in quality as it goes along. While it never really wowed me with the fluidity of its movement or the intricacy of its character designs, it was serviceable until about 10-12 episodes in. By the end of the show, you see some pretty busted stuff like this.

The art was improved afterward for the OVAs and the second season. Season one though suffers through janky animation and misproportioned characters right through the bitter end. The worst moment is a climatic fight between two characters at the end of the show on a roof top, which looks like it was animated by people who only had the basic idea of what a humanoid should look like.

Second, the dub sucks. The original Japanese voice acting isn't fantastic, but it is serviceable (and also improves in the second season.) The English actors try to sounds like high schoolers and young children, but fail at high impact moments, such as the one shown above. The adults that come in sound bored and accents are forced. It borders on the line of parody at times, resembling the "Casey & Friends" parody that floated around when the series debuted in 2006.

Despite these flaws, When They Cry needs to be in your collection. If you can stomach the occasional violent scene (and they do pop up at least once, sometimes twice in every arc), you' can enjoy one of the smartest and most subversive shows out on the market. The mysteries in When They Cry will continually keep you guessing. You'll also never look at cute little girls the same way again, trust me.