Jigoku Shoujo ("Hell Girl") ~ First Impression
Friday, August 1, 2014
"Would you want to try dying once?"
The first two things that attracted me to this anime like a magnet is the horror genre and the beautiful main character with long, straight black hair and hipnotizing red eyes. Obviously, she's not a normal girl, yet something more special. Now it comes the best part...... the plot! I'm not gonna lie but I haven't got a clue what is the anime about! >o< Now, I know and it won my heart as it's just fascinating!
Rumour is spread, that there's a website that gives you a form to fill in. You type in the name of someone you really, truly hate and a ' Hell Correspondant ' will grant your revenge.
This person will suffer for eternity in HELL.
Yet, you need to sacrifice one precious thing of yours - your soul. There would be two graves - one for someone your hate and for you. When you die, it's impossible to go to heaven, only to hell; suffering in pain for eternity. But, who would you hate so much, that you would sacrfice even yourself?
So in the first episode we see a middle-school girl who is bullied by 3 most annoying and horrible classmates. They stole her the money (without her even notice) that the whole class gathered and entrusted her. Of course, they took oportunity to blackmail her. This pure little girl was too scared to tell anybody and got even in more trouble. They created a rumour, that she's wondering around in 'adult' places and was saw with older guys at late time. Her form teacher, have a great trust in her and believed it was false rumor. Yet later they forced her to obtain money from a random guy because she 'hasn't bring any'. Finally made a picture and sent it. The girl got in trouble and her parents would be informed. HER WHOLE LIFE WAS RUINED! Now I believe why would someone would sacrifice their soul. This kind of bullying (which comes from girls) is terrible in many ways and is horrible to experience if you have no strength to fight against it.
If you read the plot, you can actually see why I'm so fascinated. When I read it, it made me think about my situation and I would never sacrifice my soul for someone whom I hate :/ My curiosity toke over me and I watched 3 episodes in a row. Forgot mention that it contains 26 episodes in first season, and the same amount of episodes in second (Futakomori) season and third (Mitsuganae) season. Stupid me...... what have I done?! It's 78 episodes altogather! That's what happens when you don't analyse much but I hope it will be worth watching.
At that time I wondered if the whole anime will give this girl a bigger role or just have many different stories in each episode. The answer is 'different story in each episode'. Some parts are the same or similar, which are repeated in each episode. It certainly gives a charm to the anime but it can result to boredom (i hope it won't happen to me). Personally, I think the way she takes the revenge is unqiue each time and also the stories. It belongs to horror genre but it's not that particularly scary, yet in exchange we get that mysterious, exciting and dark atmosphere which I just fell in love <3 .The building up tension is amazing. In addition it's not like that straight away give up their soul, the 'Hell Girl' gives them time to think about it as it's very hard decision to make. The character leaves it at last resort.
After only 3 epsiodes, I'm surely satisfied; music, animation, graphics, atmosphere, story-telling is unbelievable!! It's obvious for me that at some point the plot need to change as you can't have so many episodes of story-telling. The only two questions in my head are; "Will I get bored of it at some point?" and "Does the Jigoku Shoujo likes humans so she's doing revenge because she wants to help, OR she doesn't care about the reason, she's just doing her job?"