CHAINSAW MAID EPISODE 0

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ONA ComedyChainsaw Maid

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  90/100
  How to construct a story in three easy steps.

  I usually begin these reviews by writing up my own plot synopsis of the anime I’ve chosen to discuss, but I can’t really do that this time, and that’s for two reasons. First, this anime is just over three minutes long, and I’m going to be going over the story and plot throughout this review. There will be spoilers, by the way. And second, look, what do you want from me? I can usually bullshit my way through a synopsis with an anime that doesn't give me anything to work with, but I already exhausted my bullshit reserves on the last review, and this one’s about half the length of the first one. What I will say is that Chainsaw Maid episode Zero is meant to be a prequel to Chainsaw Maid, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  Both shorts are about a maid using a chainsaw to defend her employers from zombies, but she seems a lot more comfortable fighting them in this one, where in the last one, it seemed like everyone involved didn’t know what zombies were yet. I guess it’s not entirely important, and I’m perfectly willing to ignore the timeline and treat the two clips as separate stories, because aside from that confusing bit about the timeline, I personally find Episode Zero to be superior in every way to the original short. Takena Nagao used what might be some of the most sophisticated and visually appealing models of his entire career for this outing, the characters have far more lifelike and expressive eyes, and good God, have mercy, there’s finally a soundtrack. It’s simple, but gorram is it chilling in some scenes.

  Speaking of simple, you may remember that being how I described the story of the original short. I called it extremely simplistic, and I stand by that... So how, you may ask, does a short that’s only half as long improve upon that? As a matter of fact, how is it even possible to tell a fully realized story in only three and a half minutes? Well, one of the reasons I decided to give this prequel its own review was because I actually think you can learn a lot about the way it tells its story, and I’ve been salivating over the chance to talk about it.

  There are several different ways to structure a story, based on what kind of media it is. Screenplays are paced and structured differently than books, and even within screenplays, what works for film isn’t the same as what works for television. Story structure can be extremely complex, or it can be loose and free form, but for the sake of this review, I’m going to explore a piece of advice that the late childrens’ author John Reynolds Gardiner gave us when he visited my school when I was a kid... Every single story requires a want, a struggle, and a surprise.

  First off, I’d like to define the difference between a want and a need. A want is an internal conflict, a need is an external force, and they affect the story in different ways, both of which are equally crucial. A want is how the story should begin... It’s what motivates a character, and informs the audience about who they are as a person. Having said that, a want does have to eventually lead, in some way to a need. If your character is motivated by their want throughout the entire story, they might come off as selfish, which is why at some point after their motivation has been established, some kind of outside force has to start pressing in on them in order to drive the tension of the narrative.

  For the maid and her charge... Who I’m going to call Alice, for fairly obvious reasons... Their wants are different, but connected. Alice wants to follow a white rabbit(see what I mean?) and the maid wants to protect her. Their wants drive them to a situation where they both find themselves pursuing the same need... The need to survive. It’s important to also stop here and identify what we’ve learned about them as characters... The maid is caring and courageous. Alice is curious and naive, and we can tell from the way she reacts to the sight of a zombie digging into a slowly dying woman that she’s never seen anything like this, wasn’t prepared to face it, and is suffering some very real trauma before our eyes. I also absolutely love how her fear is portrayed... She’s paralyzed, unable to act, unable to think rationally, frozen and helpless until her savior steps in.

  From here, we get our second beat, the struggle. Whatever the situation in a story may be, your main character needs to have some kind of plan... Which is doomed to fail. Generally speaking, any plan that’s detailed to the audience before being enacted WILL fail, it’s just how things work, but that’s neither here nor there. Every plan will have some kind of complication. Every plan will hit some kind of snag. If the hero was trying to prevent something terrifying from happening to exacerbate the situation, it HAS to happen, so we can see them step up and face something they were initially afraid of.

  For the maid, the struggle is simple... Her chainsaw isn’t as reliable as she expected it to be, and it keeps losing power. Things might have gone south really quickly if it wasn’t for the surprise... A situation that’s gone so far south it can’t possibly be resolved is suddenly put to rest from an unexpected, but still entirely believable, source. In longer stories, it’s generally advisable to have this be something that was foreshadowed at least to some degree. You can use a Chekov’s Gun, if you have to(mention something in act 1 just so it can come into play later), just as long as you don’t resort to a Deus Ex Machina, AKA a last minute ass-pull. Episode Zero aims somewhere in the middle, having Alice take up a weapon and stun the last zombie long enough for the maid to get the upper hand, giving us the happy ending we all wanted.

  Now to be clear, a happy ending wasn’t strictly necessary. Nagao could have gone a few other routes. There are quite a few ways, for example, that the maid could have died. If she were to sacrifice herself to save Alice, that could have worked really well. Or, if he were aiming for some extra poignancy, she could have survived the fight but with a bite wound, forcing Alice to make a tough decision over whether or not to kill her beloved maid. Going another direction, Alice could have died, but a change in tone would have been required, either shifting towards a dark comedy, or just adding a few extra details to make her less likeable. In order to have them both die, you would have to have completely altered the tone of the short from inspiring survival drama to a dark tragedy, where you would set up some fatal character flaws to come into play at the end and make their mutual demise feel tragic, but inevitable.

  For me personally, I think this short has the best ending it possibly could have, because while it totally would have been possible to end on a darker note, it would have been very tricky to do so without letting the material feel really mean spirited and, yes, possibly even gore-porny. Okay, I think I’ve stalled long enough, I told you in the last review that I’d be getting more into that term this time around, so, why is this not gore porn? The vast majority of Takena Nagao’s work is full of lovingly rendered gore and viscera, so where exactly is the line? Why do I enjoy this so much, but find Lee Hardcastle’s work distasteful? Well, gore doesn’t cross the line into gore porn territory by virtue of how much of it there is, or how explicitly it’s portrayed, but in the way it’s used. What’s the point of it? Does the gore serve the story, or does the story serve the gore?

  To give you an example of what I mean, I’d like to quickly revisit one of the first anime I ever reviewed, Blood C. Spoiler alert, BTW. If you’re unfamiliar with the Blood franchise, it’s basically just a badass vampire chick killing demons. There’s more to it, obviously, but nothing that’s particularly important to C. Anyway, the character of Saya spends the series protecting people from demons, who are very creatively designed, and have some ridiculous and over-the-top ways of killing people, and Saya’s job throughout the story is... Being really, really bad at stopping them. Like I’m not even kidding, she is an impossible level of incompetent, she makes Aqua look useful. Out of the entire series, she only manages to successfully save one person, not including those with protective talismans. Even when a demon attacks her entire classroom, she doesn’t fight back until there are only three other kids left. Some hero, everyone.

  She winds up being easily one of the most incompetent and ineffective heroines in all of anime, because the story isn’t about her. The story is about the gore, and even as a main character, she’s just window dressing so they can pretend they have a plot. The point of the story was to deliver maximum carnage, all the way up to one glorious clusterfuck of an ending where people are graphically devoured by the hundreds by giant bunny-demons. Berserk didn’t have that problem. Berserk is full of blood and gore, but it always feels like it’s in service to the story and characters. The same can be said for Episode Zero, where the characters are fighting for survival, and it feels satisfying as all hell when they achieve it.

  Like I said before, I love Chainsaw Maid Episode Zero, I love it way more than its alleged sequel. It's more polished, it's more professional, and Takena Nagao’s camerawork and cinematography have improved dramatically since the first incarnation, award winning though it might have been. I’d also be a lot more willing to recommend this one compared to the previous one, as it isn’t quite as gruesome... The only thing that might earn it a higher content rating is that this version KIND OF has some mannequin level nudity in it... But aside from that, I consider this to be a far superior short to the original, and I feel confident that you will too. Watch it for free on Youtube, or in the embedded video on its Anilist profile page.

  I give Chainsaw Maid Episode Zero an 9/10.

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