First Impression: HAIGAKURA

Ichiyo is a “Kashi,” a shaman who uses dance and music to capture gods in his sacred beads, known as “Sai.” But among all the Kashi, Ichiyo is known as the weakest, the “infamous” one, who is unable to complete tasks, forge unviolable contracts with his servant gods—the playful Tenko and the childish Kaka—or even sing properly. But perhaps none of that is truly important, at least not to Ichiyo himself. His ways may be different from the other Kashi, but so, too, are his goals. In a world where his fellow Kashi are trying to reinstate some eight million gods, including the ominous Four Perils, whose disappearance ushered in a time of hardship, Ichiyo looks to release one—his adopted father, Hakugo.

Rie Kugimiya as a transformed Kaki is the high point of episode one

Anime viewers tend to complain when a series isn’t showing on Crunchyroll, but here’s an instance where they should be happy that one has been relegated to Prime Video. Though there’s some fun to be had and creativity worth praising in the first episode of HAIGAKURA—a screamo kagura practitioner with cool transforming gods is a nice concept—the execution is awful. I’m not familiar with the source material, which could be fine (indeed, the series feels like a typical adventure shonen), so I’ll shift the blame toward Typhoon Graphics, a newer anime studio that has ruined at least one cool series already in Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion. Like with that adaptation, the direction in HAIGAKURA is awful. The transitions are non-existent, the tone and sounds shift abruptly, and the veteran voice actors in the show sound amateurish (Rie Kugimiya in her role as the fit-throwing Kaki being the lone exception). The production value is low, almost as if this were a thousand-episode children’s series, and it particularly suffers in comparison when considering that the other really cool kagura user in recent anime memory is Tanjiro, whose scenes when performing Hinokami Kagura are breathtaking, while the one we see in episode one of HAIGAKURA is simply okay. But here’s the worst part: the last four or five minutes of the episode lacked subtitles, at least if you watched on Amazon, so I’m not really clear if there was something in the final 20% of the episode that indicated that the show might get better. I doubt it, as the first 20 minutes showed me enough; maybe Amazon felt the same way and quit it even more quickly than I did.

I mean, not really…or do you mean the part where the subtitles disappeared?

HAIGAKURA can be streamed on YouTube and Prime Video.

Twwk
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3 thoughts on “First Impression: HAIGAKURA”

  1. How was Raeliana ruined? I certainly agree that it went down in quality in the second half of the first(?) season, and I’ve never read the LN, but it didn’t seem to me like the show was ruined by direction. Maybe it’s because I watched the dub.

    1. Brutal adaptation for the subtitled version—it was sooo slow. Zzzzzzz. The character of Raeliana explains so much instead of just allowing the action to play out. Poor adaptation, maybe because (and I’m just making a connection here that might not be true) the studio couldn’t afford to add additional animation. I should have added that yes, the dub was better, SO MUCH BETTER. Macy’s script made it much more interesting. I was going back and forth for the first few episodes but then fully invested in the dub afterwards.

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