Anime Review: Mermaid Forest

Review Mermaid ForestWritten by WarpshadowRating good

If you watch enough anime you learn all sorts of things. In this case you learn that the Japanese have very different spin on the mermaid legend and let me tell it is nothing like the Disney movie.

Five Hundred years ago a fisherman named Yuta ate mermaid flesh. While all of his friends who ate mermaid flesh died or became mutants called deformed ones Yuta became immortal. The years have been hard on him and now he just wishes for a way to become mortal again. One day he meets a girl named Mana who by a scheme has been granted the same condition as Yuta. Together they travel and look for a way to become normal again.

Although it is billed as a horror show in actuality Mermaid forest is in actuality a piece about the weight of immortality on the human soul. The plot usually goes like this: Yuta and Mana arrive at a location (although two of the stories are Yuta's flashbacks) where someone has been chomping down on mermaid flesh and misery insues leaving all involved other than our main characters dead or an emotional wreck. Most of the stories are two episodes long so the actual details of the plot are often a bit more complex even if I did give you the basic gist. The stories do stand alone but do not add up to anything more than the sum of their parts and the series doesn't have much of a conclusion. Overall this is a good show but not one worth going out of one's way to watch.