Netflix’s latest anime venture,The Summer Hikaru Died, lives up to its horror branding with its terrifying imagery and disturbing psychological story. From its first episode, it is the true horror toDeath Note’s superficially goth-themed thriller. There is already incredible tension between “Hikaru” (Shûichirô Umeda) and Yoshiki (Chiaki Kobayashi), which will surely spiral in the face of additional threats.
The Summer Hikaru Dieddepicts the events in a rural Japanese town after the title character is lost in the mountains and is replacedwith a mimicking supernatural being. As the harrowing consequences of this development become clear, his old best friend is pushed to ask himself, how far he will go to keep this secret, and why.
The Summer Hikaru Dies Perfects The Atmosphere Of A Tranquil Small Town Where Something Sinister Lurks
The Animation Focuses On The Town & Doesn’t Romanticize The Characters
The Summer Hikaru Died’s animation and sound perfectly capture the environment,a village full of chirping bugs, discordant school choirs, and people going about mundane tasks. It has a nice flow and stillness at different moments, conveying the mystery of your perfect fantasy small town where anything can happen, almost begging for a horror monster to descend upon it.
With crystal skies, gleaming rays of sunshine, and high school students complaining about the heat, I can almost feel like I’m there, and the ephemeral nature of a remote place during “the summer when it happened” is the setting for many dark coming-of-age stories. But as the first episode visits and returns to specific images, we are reminded that Yoshiki’s whole world is teetering.
The Summer Hikaru Died Subverts Expectations Fast, Then Sets Up A Deep Character-Driven Narrative
Yoshiki Gets What Needs To Be Said Out Of The Way Fast
If you go into this anime having read nothing but the synopsis ahead of time, the swift progression of the plot is a cold shock.Rather than a slow, dreadful build to the necessary realization for the real story to happen, Yoshiki voices the ugly truth within the first five minutes,before the series dives into a much more twisted story.
Yoshiki and new Hikaru are set up to have a co-dependent relationship that explores dark but real teenage insecurities.
The primary question here is: What would cause a teenage boy to accept the fact that his best friend has been replaced by an uncertain entitywho possibly killed that friend? It turns out, a lot of things: grief, loneliness, and the need for validation that even the real Hikaru did not provide.
The emotional beats land and aren’t necessarily pretty;something as straightforward as Yoshiki crying in his bedroom because Hikaru is still dead, despite everything else, is effective.Yet piling atop that basic emotion of grief is a lot of personal baggage, as we see flashbacks to the old Hikaru’s callous personality and the eager and friendly face the new one puts on.
Yoshiki and new Hikaru are set up to have a co-dependent relationship that explores dark but real teenage insecurities against the backdrop of a small town that too easily creates outsiders. Some of the credit here goes to the manga, but the adaptation so far has excellently spread out its revelations and crucial questions, so each one reaches its fullest potential.
The Summer Hikaru Died Is Downright Terrifying In Some Scenes
Not Your Starter Horror Anime
The other place where the animators go all in is with the horror elements, specifically with the nebulous physical form of whatever is pretending to be Hikaru,a creepy local crying out in warning, and the panicked buildup to a murder. It all made my skin crawl, especially as agents elsewhere hint at the nature of what has landed in this town.
The Summer Hikaru Died is sure to be a heavy hitter for Netflix among anime fans and can only get scarier from here.
This subplot is one of the weaker points of the first episode, but the series still has plenty of time to tie it into the main storyline. But I suspect that this anime will always be at its strongest when it is focused on the small-town horror and keeps the secret agent intervention to a minimum.
Some unique artistic choices are also used to highlight the real fear of a person who is really still a child, as well as Yoshiki’s simple grief that Hikaru is dead.The Summer Hikaru Diedis sure to be a heavy hitter for Netflix among anime fans and can only get scarier from here.
