Red Garden Volume I – Live to Kill

Reviewed by Carolyn Garner

ADV Films

Based on Subtitled episodes 1-4

Rated TV MA (Canadian Home Video Rating 14 and up)

What it’s (basically) all about: Kate, Claire Rose and Rachel are four young women living very different lives in New York City.  One morning, each of them awake feeling unwell and with no memory of the day or night before.  While at school on Roosevelt Island, they discover a fellow student, Lise, has been found dead miles away in the suburbs.  School is canceled for the rest of the day, but rather than go home, each girl is strangely drawn to a park by red butterflies only they can see.  A woman named Lula and her brother approach them, revealing to the girls that they too, died last night.  The girls are shocked, and in a state of disbelief, they are unprepared for Lula’s absurd instructions to kill an approaching man-beast or die in truth.

A pitched battle in a parking lot finds the girls paralyzed by fear as they try to elude and then confront the monster.  He tries to kill each of them, wounding Kate and Rachel in the process.  The girls only succeed when they work together to lead him into the path of an oncoming truck.  The next day at school, their wounds have healed, but other scars remain, making each of them seem very different to their friends.  As the story progresses, more nightmarish details of the girls’ deaths and their newfound duties unfold. Can these girls hold up and stay sane under these extraordinary circumstances?

Nitty Gritty: Each of Red Garden’s 22 episodes is approximately 23 minutes long, presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and enhanced for anamorphic playback.  You have a choice of English dubbed (presented in Dolby 5.1 Digital Stereo) and Japanese language/English subtitled versions.  If you have autoplay enabled on your DVD player, you’ll see two commercials after inserting the disc, one for Anime Network on Demand and another for Newtype USA.  These can be skipped, if you want to go straight to the menu.  The interactive menu is straightforward and easy to access in Volume I and has a striking red and black butterfly illustration over muted character artwork.  There is also simple instrumental music that plays along to add a bit of atmosphere. Navigation You can select an episode or go to the Language or Extras sections.  Extras include clips of the opening and closing animations, without the credits, ADV Previews (Pumpkin Scissors, Kimera, Blue Seed, Le Chevalier d’Eon, Innocent Venus, and Welcome to the NHK.)

The DVD packaging for Red Garden is filled with dark shadowing that surrounds the unique character designs of its leads.  However, the overall design lacks contrast and doesn’t use the characters to full effect, causing it to not stand out compared to similar releases. The back cover is more successful in that it uses some larger portraits of the four leads with another muted, dark background behind them. The blurb is laid out well as it doesn't reveal the whole story and uses interesting typography effects. The production information fills up a chunk of the bottom in a red on black layout.  The bottom technical grid is expanded to include more specs, logos, ratings, and some website information. No insert is included, nor is there a reversible cover.

Survey says: This disc is rated TV MA for violence and there is quite a bit of it, although it’s more intense than graphic, with plenty of blood spatters and lots of screaming during fights and flashbacks.  There’s no profanity in the subtitled episodes.  However there’s some sexually ambiguous touchy-feelyness between Paula and Kate that hints at a possibly overly close relationship between the two.  I ended up putting this title in the adult section because our teen users skew young.

Personal ad: I thought that the strength of Red Garden was its visuals, from the retro mod opening sequence to the unique character design with the focus on contemporary fashion rather than costume.  The opening theme, “Jolly Jolly” by JiLL-Decoy association is a jazzy and uptempo track, with bright, colorful collages of retro-like prints and patterns.  Going by this sequence alone, you might be unprepared for the underlying sense of menace in each episode.  The backgrounds of New York City are rendered in lush detail, and it’s interesting to see certain aspects of NYC through a Japanese point of view.  It’s not social realism, by any means, but it adds to the off-kilter psychological mood of the show.

Unfortunately when I wasn’t focusing on the pretty eye candy, I realized there’s a lot of talking going on between the four main characters, to the exclusion of the development of other characters that showed a lot of promise (like the cops investigating Lise’s death).  It’s not the kind of conversation that moves a series along, so I ended up sitting through a vicious cycle of teenage girls denying the situation, fighting among themselves, whining, wailing, sobbing, and then fighting again.  There is an authenticity to the constant bickering (Who doesn’t get snappy under stress?), but the pity party gets old fast.  What could be a neat mystery ends up being hidden under superficial suffering.