Jinji Ito's manga is an odd beast, which doesn't fully come together in this OVA adaptation. More vanilla than I was expecting, not the imagery or ideas, but mainly the story's assembly of the concept and social themes. An outlandish premise is set-up, although you wouldn't think it at first and its tone remains unpredictable throughout due to many genre switches, but the shallow script didn't take full advantage of its bewildering mystery or stereotypical characters. Neither one is successfully built upon, especially the characterisations. The protagonist is bland, not helping is that her journey (the focal of the story) to find her fiancé is just as colourless that she becomes part of the scenery. As for the mystery we get a strange explanation for what we are seeing blurted out in a revealing scene, but it's hard to comprehend, nor does it really answer the bigger picture.
So I found it rather frustrating, because you get a real air of catastrophic fear, and uncertainty plaguing the characters as they hopelessly watch on. While the imagery of the walking fish, drooling spider-sharks engulfed in clouds of death-decaying stench can have you going WTF! Sadly there's not enough of it. The first spider-shark encounter is furiously destructive and bonkers, it wets your appetite. After that, we get one more cracking set-piece with a spider-shark in the streets of Tokyo followed up by an octopus rendezvous of tentacle action. Surprisingly the gore is kept in check. Outside of those instances most of the imagery had hordes upon hordes of walking fish swarming Japanese cities. So it can start to wear thin seeing the same old scenes of 3D fish scurrying through streets, highways and doing nothing more then just that. But about half-way through, it offers another batty and grotesque surprise of metamorphic tin-pot bio-weapons, viruses and body configuration horror of apocalyptic consequences. So the walking fish threat becomes secondary to parasitic affected humans all bloated and gassed up. Oh, the fumes are overwhelming, to the extend the fragrance becomes its own character. Yep, WTF x 2!!!
So in a way it felt like I was watching something taking bits and pieces from such films as The Birds, The Crazies and Dreamcatcher. I know, what a cocktail. The animation is sort-of-plain, but serviceable, whereas the 3D images of the fish do pop out and give a novel touch. In the end it's ridiculously entertaining, but you can't help expect a little more from it.
So I found it rather frustrating, because you get a real air of catastrophic fear, and uncertainty plaguing the characters as they hopelessly watch on. While the imagery of the walking fish, drooling spider-sharks engulfed in clouds of death-decaying stench can have you going WTF! Sadly there's not enough of it. The first spider-shark encounter is furiously destructive and bonkers, it wets your appetite. After that, we get one more cracking set-piece with a spider-shark in the streets of Tokyo followed up by an octopus rendezvous of tentacle action. Surprisingly the gore is kept in check. Outside of those instances most of the imagery had hordes upon hordes of walking fish swarming Japanese cities. So it can start to wear thin seeing the same old scenes of 3D fish scurrying through streets, highways and doing nothing more then just that. But about half-way through, it offers another batty and grotesque surprise of metamorphic tin-pot bio-weapons, viruses and body configuration horror of apocalyptic consequences. So the walking fish threat becomes secondary to parasitic affected humans all bloated and gassed up. Oh, the fumes are overwhelming, to the extend the fragrance becomes its own character. Yep, WTF x 2!!!
So in a way it felt like I was watching something taking bits and pieces from such films as The Birds, The Crazies and Dreamcatcher. I know, what a cocktail. The animation is sort-of-plain, but serviceable, whereas the 3D images of the fish do pop out and give a novel touch. In the end it's ridiculously entertaining, but you can't help expect a little more from it.