When They Cry: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

When They Cry: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 26, 2016

One of the more darkly amusing sequences in Groundhog Day followed hapless weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) making repeated attempts to end the seemingly endless time loop in which he found himself by—well, ending himself. Over and over in a variety of horrifying and yet grimly comedic ways, Connors “bites the big one”, only to wake up the “next” morning to discover everything is “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.” Substitute killing oneself for some pretty gruesome murders of others and you’ll have at least one element of the rather odd When They Cry, an anime entry that seems to be plying pretty standard shōnen territory (despite a graphic opening sequence featuring someone bludgeoning someone else with a baseball bat), only to slowly but surely pull back the placid layers of a small town (kind of a Japanese stand-in for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in fact) to reveal something more sinister going on. There’s a seemingly deliberate tonal disconnect wafting through When They Cry, and in fact the first episode would seem to be yet another introduction to a kid moving from the big city to a little village, matriculating into small town life and making friends at the local school. Aside from that aforementioned opening sequence and just a couple of brief other moments scattered throughout the first episode, everything seems almost distressingly (and, frankly, fairly uninterestingly) normal. One of those peculiar moments involves a photographer at a landfill who seems to go into a trance while discussing the dismemberment of a murder victim, something that simply sticks out like a sore (dismembered?) thumb at the time, but which slowly (perhaps too slowly) over the course of the ensuing episodes starts to make more sense.

The kind of almost rote and standard feeling that When They Cry at least initially offers might be seen as a rather cheeky kind of misdirection. The series is narrated by male student Keiichi Maebara, who has recently moved to the quaint village of Hinamizawa. Keiichi has actually managed to blend in rather well, and in fact has already made several female friends, whom he introduces with little character briefs as they wander on screen. The first two of these girls are Rena Ryugu, a kind of traditional moe type whose eyes turn into little hearts when she thinks affectionately about Keiichi, which she’s prone to be. doing At least a tad more tsundere like is the next girl hebintroduces, the upperclass student Mion Sonozaki, who is for all intents and purposes the BGOC (Big Girl on Campus). The opening arc of When They Cry seems to simply be the tried and true rut of Keiichi joining the after school club and getting to know his classmates.

The first hint that things are a little “off” comes when Keiichi and Rena visit the local landfill, which is for all intents and purposes a kind of “curio shop” for the young girl, who finds all sorts of “treasures” there. It’s here where Keiichi has that bizarre interchange with the photographer, but more importantly, where he stumbles across an old newspaper that seems to be documenting a really disturbing murder in Hinamizawa several years previously, one which included dismemberment of the corpse and which may have been related in some way to a huge dam project that was being built in the region. According to the article, at least one of the suspected murderers is still at large.

That shocking revelation is pushed to the sidelines at least a little bit with the announcement that Hinamizawa’s annual Watanagashi Festival is about to happen, a yearly fête honoring the village’s “patron saint” of sorts, a deity known as Oyashiro. Keiichi is shocked to hear reports from his gaggle of girl friends (as opposed to girlfriends), which also include Satoko Houjou and Rika Furude, that bad things have tended to happen around the time of the Watanagashi Festival. In fact, for several years running, murders and disappearances have attended the Festival, which many townsfolk have attributed to a curse emanating from Oyashiro.

This disturbing piece of information starts to make Keiichi fear for his life, and, ultimately, his sanity, as he becomes more and more convinced that the girls are keeping secrets from him and that something truly nefarious is going on in his new adopted village. All of this still plays into a fairly standard anime formulation, with its hints of yōkai or other supernatural forces impinging on the “everyday” world. But then When They Cry does something rather unexpected after the fourth episode, something that won’t be outright spoiled here other than to state it has a certain similarity to that aforementioned Bill Murray film. It’s here that the anime seems to be swinging for the structural fences, and it gives the series a nice shot of adrenaline, something that tends to recur regularly in what turn out to be a sequence of four episode (more or less) “mini-series”.

When They Cry is based on a so-called dōjin soft sound novel series, and in reading through some online synopses of that original version, it appears that perhaps more questions were answered there than are ultimately offered in the anime version (perhaps because the creative staff wanted to “leave room” for a second season, which is due on Blu-ray in a few more months). That means that viewers live (and re-live) a series of events in When They Cry, at least occasionally with a kind of Rashômon-esque change of perspective, but perhaps never get the payoff they might be expecting. Adding to the at times lurching quality of this narrative is the really disparate tones that are on display. It’s a difficult task for a show to segue from a cute little chibi professing her undying love to a scene featuring a hapless victim getting pummeled to death in an extremely violent manner, but that’s exactly what When They Cry attempts to do—repeatedly.

When They Cry: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

When They Cry is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. While Sentai's packaging touts a progressive presentation, PowerDVD is displaying the resolution of this release as 1080i, and there are certainly some anomalies and artifacts to support that thesis. Banding is apparent from the get go, blotching through several opening scenes in various gradients. But what tends to be a recurrent issue is what I would term near stair stepping—it often never devolves into true, unmistakable "jaggies", but it comes awfully close a lot of time, especially in midrange shots on line detail like the outlines of faces and bodies, but at times it's completely evident in an almost "upscaled from standard definition" sort of way (see the lined paper in screenshot 14). Those issues aside, there's some decent image quality here, especially with regard to some of the palette (ironically, the sharpest, best detailed and most colorful sequence is the credits, which play out under a glut of text, unfortunately). A lot of the series tends to intentionally soften and/or distress various moments, though even here banding and stair stepping are often on display.

When They Cry: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

When They Cry features DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 tracks in both the original Japanese and an English dub. This release is authored so that the languages must be changed via the Languages menu (in, other words, they're not "toggleable" with your remote), meaning that if you select the Japanese language track, English subtitles are forced (the subtitles are not separately removable). Both tracks sound nearly identical in terms of overall mix, though as tends to be the case with these dual language releases, the English track mix sounds slightly hotter to my ears. Fidelity is fine across both tracks, delivering both dialogue and the sometimes kind of disturbing sound effects (especially during some of the murder scenes) with force and clarity.

When They Cry: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animation (1080i; 1:32)


• Clean Closing Animation (1080i; 1:56)

When They Cry: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

When They Cry is one of those anime whose structure is fascinating, but whose story sometimes falls into ruts (and not necessarily ruts created out of its Groundhog Day formulations). The weirdest thing about this series is how widely disparate its tone can be, lurching from sweetness to horror at the drop of a hat (and/or axe and/or baseball bat). There's some really interesting content here, but I'm not sure it ever gels very successfully. Those who like shōnen offerings with a twist may want to check this out, but the series requires a bit of patience before things start falling into place. Video quality is inconsistent and spotty at times, but audio is fine.