Burrowowl

Hey look, I found another cartoon to watch. Hooray for me. How bout I tell you about it?

Chaos;Head is about a (wait for it) socially-awkward high school boy and a (wait, wait, you’ve never heard this before) bunch of beautiful women who intrude in his life, resulting in (oh precious suspense) awkward semi-romantic situations intended to titillate the socially-awkward male demographic. This is all terribly formulaic, all very focus-group-tested and sanitary.

But this isn’t a romantic comedy, no no no, this is a suspense/thriller. There is a string of bizarre deaths in Shibuya, where the protagonist lives. The protagonist is an unreliable witness, which is the key leverage used in telling the story. He is prone to delusions. He lives in a cargo container on the roof of a building where he collects anime-related figurines and plays video games all day. He has an imaginary friend (an anime character he thinks is his wife). He thinks somebody is watching him, sometimes even in the solitude of his own room.

The pacing of Chaos;Head is excellent. The intro and ending theme music are hideous. The character designs are visually pretty typical for a romantic comedy, which adds to the creepiness of the paranoid tale of supernatural horror. The invisible super-swords are retarded. The production quality is uneven; sometimes nice but often lackluster. Clearly this is a product of a production crew with a limited budget and timeline trying to cram a very complicated video game plot into half-hour chunks. So far they’re making an admirable run of it. I look forward to the next episode, and so should you.

Bonus points for including nutty URLs on-screen that you can actually visit online. Nice.