Overall Review: Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi

Yeah, even after an ending like this, I still really love the atmosphere of this series.

Kaminai is a series that few people seem to care for in a season like this one. It's fantasy, but not spectacular or overstated, and it's somewhat quieter a series that more boisterous shows in tone and plot. There's also the fact that it's a rushed and somewhat discontinuous story without a true focus, as well as the fact that the characters are a little on the shallow side, all of which are factors that lessen its impact among its more popular or better executed contemporaries. However, this doesn't make Kaminai a failure, or even a bad series, per say. It does, after all, present one of the most melancholy and beautiful worlds I've seen in a long time, even if it doesn't take advantage of this to do that atmospheric force justice. It's not every day that you see a story about zombies without a factor of exaggerated fear, nor one that makes the genre melancholy; it's what makes the execution of this series something of a shame; it could have been many things, and it wasn't.

What it is, however, is gorgeous. You don't need to think the plot is amazing or like the characters to appreciate the loveliness of the atmosphere, and that's one thing I think Madhouse really hit and concentrated on here. The fact that this is a sort of post-apocalyptic world is made very clear to us through the color schemes, the lighting, the open, vast, and deserted landscapes scattered with small groups of people. It feels almost like Ai and her companions are traveling through an open wasteland of sorts, a world that has died in some way. It's almost like being in a cemetery; the atmosphere is mournful and somehow lonely even though the landscape is lovely. I like that feeling, it's as if possibility lies far beyond the horizon that Ai sees, and in some ways I suppose that's what her character is about, even if it's rather static and doesn't grow much.

As to the stories themselves (for they are separate stories, barely connected if at all), they are, for the most part, interesting. I think the only arc I actively didn't care for was the Academy arc, and besides that the rest held a lot of potential. So much potential, in fact, that I think if just one or two of those arcs were more fully developed rather than following so many separate ones, we would have had a much stronger and emotional narrative; all the seeds for that were there, but they were not used effectively, and in the end, that's what hindered this series from greatness. As it stands now, it's a good show, a very well animated one, but not something most of us is likely to remember after a season or two. If Madhouse ever took this series up again, be it for a reboot or a sequel (both of which are rather unlikely), I'd like to see them try to slow things down a bit, fill in the spaces with story and character, but to keep that lovely and captivating atmosphere in the background, in just the same way.