This Week in Anime

Buggin' Out With Aragne: Sign of Vermilion

Nick
Well Steve, it is Halloween season, and since it's too early to talk about the new Higurashi anime, we're left with scarce few options. So of course editorial thrust Aragne: Sign of Vermillion on us and let me just say:

So if that intro wasn't obvious enough, I don't think either of us has much positive to say about this movie. But this particular production is a very unique beast; essentially a solo effort by Director/Writer/Composer Saku Sakamoto for a crowdfunded budget of just under $18,000. And since this is such a personal project I want to preface that any criticisms we have of it are solely with the work itself, and not anything against the man behind it. I don't know him and I genuinely admire the ambition to make a feature length film almost on your own with such a shoestring budget.

With that disclaimer out of the way: This movie is dog shit and I hated watching it.

Ok Steve, explain yourself. Quick.

You're stalling.

You're on your own there. I love overly ambitious messes and horror a whooooooole bunch, but this movie was genuinely an ordeal. When I say I hated watching it, I mean the act of looking at it was actively difficult at times.
See, one of the ways the movie makes up for its low budget and limited animation is by CONSTANTLY shaking the frame to imitate handheld camera footage, and slathering on fake lens flares and effects over nearly every scene.

I don't have a gif of it but there are multiple scenes in this film that gave me motion sickness, and I sat through Hand Shakers with a stable stomach.

Worst part is when they do lock down the shot you're left with the...let's say unique character models.

You're on your own there. I got very tired, very quickly, from having to look at Angela Anaconda's big sister.

I just think if you're making a movie about spooky bug monsters, those monsters shouldn't be measurably less scary than any medium shot of a regular human.

Glass houses, lady. Glass houses.

Oh sure, and in fact there are a few isolated moments of scene that manage to overcome the visual issues long enough to be genuinely tense horror. Even if the larger narrative amounts to nothing, this movie isn't 100% awful.
But whenever I think about Aragne all I'm going to remember is shit like this

This is your brain on bad bug anime. Just say no, kids.

But ok, we've both established our feelings on the visuals. Let's get into the real meat: Steve, please explain the plot of this film to me and the audience. I dare you.

Now now, you're skipping over the part where it's rumored that the serial killer is actually a dissident from a cult. That's very important to remember (Note: It is not).

Ahahahahaaaaa we'll get to that.
But first: more bugs.

Oh and at some point Rin runs into a weirdo from the Bug Hunt cult who gives her a magic necklace to make up for tossing out her antipsychotic meds. This part turns out to be SUPER important even though the guy dies like 30 seconds later.

Uh oh, looks like somebody got their ghost story in this scientific monster movie! Hope you're ready for absolutely nothing to make sense for the rest of the movie!

Then Rin runs away, except somehow she ends up in this one apartment where it seems like the bugs were living, and then she meets...well at first I thought it was the ghost of the girl she was stalking but no, it's a different black-haired, dead-eyed middle schooler. 3 guesses what this girl's favorite DDR track is!

Y'know maybe you were right about that survival horror video game angle. I could see having to do that in one of the bad Silent Hill games.

You say human experimentation, I say important research into the science of SHAFT anime characters.

Don't worry, a different, good(?) magic bug shows up to save her from the evil bug zombie. The day is saved!

Also the day ISN'T saved because after falling down a pit for the 4th time in this movie, Rin runs into the REAL villain of this story: A random lady with a baby stroller we saw once 60 minutes ago who...I think has been feeding corpses to the bugs? Or something? This is where I gave up.

See I thought that's what happened to, but no. Because Rin's DEAD at the end of the scene when stroller lady shows up. And then the brain bug scene happens and THEN Rin reverses time to come back to life and becomes Bug God. Why? Fuck you, that's why. We've got 8 minutes left to wrap this up.

I get that, but the combination of plot twists piling up like an accident on the I-95 and the total sensory assault that is this movie's cinematography just turned into sewage runoff in my brain. Like hey turns out Rin as a child threw her best friend down the stairs and then...pretended to be her? Maybe?

I can make a lot of leeway for broken plots in the name of making a point thematically or for characters. But this climax makes 0 sense and is totally inscrutable because then Bug God Rin trades places with her comatose counterpart.And we know this is literal because Other Rin wakes up in a hospital in Bug World from the part of the movie where Rin had the brain bug vision. The End.

Imagine. A world where bugs come out of the ground like plants. And all the water is replaced by moth's. This is Bug World. It's real

We are just not gonna see eye to eye on this. While I've sat through worse things that were longer than this, Aragne is generally one of the most unpleasant, unrewarding viewing experiences I can remember having. I closed the video legitimately feeling like this.

I just cannot recommend this when there's so much other stuff you could watch. Like hey, that Made In Abyss movie's still available for screening right? Do that instead. The piss machine will still be less questionable than this.

Wait a second...I think I know what's happening. THEY GOT TO STEVE.