Dies Irae

Episodes 0-1

This visual novel adaptation got a lot of negative attention for its debut episode, because it decided to start with an episode 0 introducing the series' main Nazi villains—without making it clear that they were the villains. Despite dancing around the use of actual Nazi symbols, the group bore enough strong resemblance in philosophy, naming conventions, and uniform styles that their allusions to Nazis must be clear and intentional. It's also hard to ignore that the show seems to be idolizing a character whose historical counterpart was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust (turning him into a veritable god) in addition to including other characters with Nazi-connected historical counterparts. Nazi sympathizing is certainly an actual problem in both Japan and the world abroad, compounding the potentially objectionable nature of it all, so I can easily understand the widespread distaste that the series has already engendered.

The series' true episode 1 more clearly shows that the story isn't going to primarily focus on these Nazi characters, though they will be present. Our real main character is Ren Fujii, the young man with the scarf shown confronting Reynard Heydrich near the beginning of episode 0, and episode 1 begins the story of how he got to that point. The execution of this first episode is typical of more dramatic-leaning adult visual novel adaptations. It introduces Ren and a passel of girls surrounding him, including his obnoxiously loud-mouthed longtime friend Kasumi, an upperclassman named Rea who teases both Ren and Kasumi by implying that she's fooling around with him during a phone call from Kasumi, and a mysterious girl who manifests from an old guillotine in a museum exhibit and appears to Ren in his dreams, singing a disturbingly catchy song about a guillotine and bearing a suspicious scar around her neck. (According to other online info, the girl's name is Marie, which is doubtless intended as an allusion to Marie Antoinette given the French Revolution look of one of Ren's dream sequences.) There's also a sexy nun in the picture and a missing male friend whose vicious fistfight with Ren landed the latter in the hospital.

Nearly the whole episode is standard relationship antics mixed with occasional ominous imagery, including a mysterious shadowy figure Ren occasionally sees; the only strange element are the literal holes in the walls connecting Ren's apartment to Kasumi's and his missing friend Shirou's. He hasn't manifested any mystical powers by the end of the episode, though given the connection he's made with Guillotine Girl, that will happen sooner rather than later. Some of the secondary characters from episode 0 also start to pop up around the end of the episode, though their exact motives in this modern era aren't clear yet. All we know now is that they are the bad guys, but whether or not they have anything to do with the decapitation victim discovered by Rea and the sexy Sister remains to be determined, as does the guillotines purpose in any of this; records do exist of the Nazis having executed more than 16,000 prisoners with guillotines, so associating it with German-themed villains would not be a stretch.

Whereas episode 0 laid the CG imagery on thick, episode 1 has a more typical look with CG use mostly just popping up in the animated red skull pattern that flashes on the villains (which is frankly evilness overkill). Nothing much stands out about the character designs besides the aforementioned neck scar and a freaky eye design; I've seen that used in other anime series but never much cared for it. The animation quality won't win any accolades, either. On the musical front, the organ music and dramatic vocals from episode 0 return when the villains pop up, but otherwise Dies irae offers nothing special on that front, either. This show will clearly have a taste for graphic violence, shocking imagery, and maybe a little fanservice down the line.

Starting the broadcast with episode 0 was a risky move because of its potential to alienate, but it may have been the right play nonetheless, because little about episode 1 catches much attention positive or negative. With a series title that references a Latin liturgical describing the Last Judgment (commonly-used in funeral Masses), you can bet that this story is working toward something apocalyptic, but these episodes are taking a slow path to getting there.

Rating: C+

Dies irae is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.