Narutaru

Narutaru:  C+

I was going to put a picture with some of the happy lies of the opening

but this one is much more honest.

Sometimes called Shadow Star, Narutaru is kind of a 'what if' on Pokemon: what if kids had these massively dangerous little monsters that obeyed them?  Narutaru then goes "But what if they lived in the real world, where people want things they can't have, and threaten and hurt people who are weaker than them, and are cruel to one another?  What would happen then?"

Narutaru is another series in the same category as Mirai Nikki and Bokurano: a show about humanity at its worst, about cycles of suffering and how evil perpetuates itself.  For the first eight or nine episodes, the series is 'relatively tame,' with only a few deaths, threats of enslavement and awful people.  Then around episode 10, it decides that it isn't horrible enough yet and starts digging deep into the collective horrors of childhood, the final two episodes reaching the darkest examples of children being cruel I've ever seen.

And really tragically, it does a bunch of truly heinous things to elementary school kids and then ends.  We don't get to see what the characters have learned, how the suffering has made them grow, what choices it has caused them to make.  It's just suffering for suffering's sake.

And that's really too bad: suffering this well-orchestrated doesn't come along every day.  The writing's good and well-thought out, this is a very deliberate setup.  There's some really apocalyptic potential to the plot that they've got here, but they don't actually include any of it in the anime.

I actually stole a few glances at the characters' wikipedia entries, looking for voice actors, and learned a bunch of things that are spelld out in the manga that are clearly present in the anime if you know about them, (in particular one girl has been sexually abused by her father and EVERYTHING that happens with her makes more sense knowing that), but the show never gets around to explaining the vast majority of it.  Even the very end makes much more sense if you know what the main character's relationship to her little star-monster is, and the growth that I really wanted to see from the suffering IS present in the manga, but the anime doesn't get any points for that.

I can't honestly recommend Narutaru to anyone.  I watched it because I heard it was nightmarish and it was.  I love me some horrific shit (I've seen a number of series that individually deserve the title of 'Most Truly Soul-Flayingly Horrific': Elfen Lied, Bokurano, Mirai Nikki, Perfect Blue, the Fate/Stay Night Visual Novel, even Hell Girl) but I seriously need to curl into a ball and try to gouge my eyes out after this.  If you want to watch a show that pierces deep into the horrors that we are capable of, then I guess go ahead, but I would recommend Mirai Nikki over Narutaru in a heartbeat, and probably Bokurano too.