Plot: Kazuna Takashiro has been feeling odd lately. He gets a sudden urge to visit his old house where his estranged father and older sister, Chizuna, reside. When he was a young boy, he was ‘abandoned’ by his father after his mother died. He’s been living with his uncle and aunt ever since.
He discovers that his father committed suicide six months prior to his visit, and his sister is the only resident now. She tells him about the Takashiro family illness, something that basically amounts to vampirism. They get sudden attacks where they have an incredible lust for blood. Only when someone provides blood for them to drink can they fully recover from the attacks. Most of the people in the Takashiro line with the illness went insane and killed themselves. Chizuna’s only barely coping with pain medication while Kazuna is quickly feeling the effects of the Takashiro family illness.
Breakdown: This series…..is dumb, and a slight chore to sit through. I don’t even really know what to talk about.
It’s a four episode OVA series that basically amounts to two people coping with bloodlust….and there’s incest. The end.
What I can squeeze out of it is:
— Why doesn’t this family stop churning out kids? This isn’t an uncommon family trait. It seems like nearly everyone blood-related to the Takashiro line gets this illness. So why keep having children if they’re likely to be damned as outcasts, will be wracked with terrible pain forever, or go crazy and commit suicide?
— Are they vampires or not? They obviously don’t get the cool powers, but they have some glimmer of psychic powers? Why exactly do they gain weird ‘tastes’ for blood that damn someone to being a main blood supplier? Blood is blood, unless you’re a legit vampire. And even then, it seems weird that only one person can be a suitable blood donor after the first taste.
By the way, human teeth are blunt. Even with canines, you’d need to work pretty hard to bite through human flesh. It’s not just ‘nom’ and you’re done. That’s one of the reasons why vampire lore includes fangs to begin with.
— Are happy or angry emotions a thing in this series? I can’t really recall any scenes with smiling that weren’t also coupled with sadness. Which just makes Takashiro’s line to his non-incestuous love interest, Yaegashi, about not liking girls who don’t smile seem even stupider.
— Speaking of which, poor Yaegashi.
— Oh yeah, incest. Kazuna and Chizuna fall in love or so I’m told. The overtones were there several times before they kissed, but they all have such wooden personalities that it’s impossible to have chemistry. Because just having siblings be attached to each other in a non-sexual way just doesn’t make sense, right? It added so much to the series by the way. /sarcasm
— Spoilers! While a lot of the series drags on and on and on, the end is basically Chizuna destroying her heart by taking an overly high dosage of her pain medication since her father, her main blood supplier, committed suicide. She escapes from her hospital room to spend her final moments with Kazuna back home who, despite Chizuna’s desperate pleas to try his hardest to live, decides to also maybe kill himself because he can’t live without her (even though he’s lived with this illness for all of a few weeks, if that, while his family lived years with it.) It’s possibly because of her blood, but it’s obviously meant to be romantic. Because, yeah, I was totally invested in this uninteresting and bland incestuous flash-in-the-pan couple.
The reason I said ‘maybe’ kills himself is because he tried to kill himself by taking the same drug that his father used to kill himself, but Chizuna tells him that she lied in order to give him an out as comfort if he ever feels like it’s too much. However, one of the final shots is of him lying face down on her body as the empty pill bottle rolls on the floor, so it’s unclear whether or not he’s dead.
But honestly, I don’t care. He had no personality, she had no personality, no one had any personality except Kazuna’s guy friend who appears in like four scenes to do nothing. The only reason I felt for Yaegashi was because she seemed to somewhat care about Kazuna and accepted him illness and all – she even offered her blood to him.
Art and Animation: This is probably the worst Madhouse production I’ve ever seen. The background art is decent, the character art is merely passable but gets off-kilter at times. Details are really lost when zoomed out, like faces lose all of their features merely a few feet away. The animation is really cheap, and you can tell they cut all sorts of corners. The worst example of this being the goddamned repeated footage.
Let me ask you – are you the type of person who gets easily fed up with magical girl transformations and quickly skips over them when watching magical girl shows? Or basically any time when you know stock footage is going to be used? Then you will deplore this series – and this is coming from someone who actually likes watching those magical girl transformations over and over. They repeat shots and entire scenes so much that I started rolling my eyes whenever it happened. But, unlike in magical girl shows, you never know when they’ll repeat footage here, so I can’t jump to fast-forwarding, and they repeat scenes from the same episodes even if the scene in question happened a minute prior.
Another way they cut corners is by refusing to animate talking or conversations sometimes. They’ll frequently cut away from a shot to show someone walking while having the continued conversation from the previous scene be played over the walking. Or they’ll have two characters in a room having a conversation and one will move their lips when they talk and the other won’t. It drove me crazy.
On a technical level as well, the editing was sloppy, and the colors were really washed out. It’s an overall ugly series to watch. In some occasions, that might be on purpose. I noticed that scenes got even more washed out when bad things happened, but that doesn’t make it any better. If you wanted an effect like brighter colors=more hope, washed out/black and white=depressing, make it a bigger contrast because I only barely noticed the change at the very end.
In terms of character designs, they’re pretty bland. No one really has an original or memorable design. They’re not that bad, I’ve seen worse, but they’re completely forgettable.
Music: Background music is decent enough but gets really repetitive. ED is okay, but ultimately forgettable.
Voice Acting: Japanese – They were probably directed this way, but everyone was really wooden and there was barely an emotion to be found. The voices themselves were fine, no one got on my nerves, but hardly anyone actually acted like a human being.
Bottom Line: It’s ugly, the recycled footage quickly ate at my nerves, it’s not breaking any new ground, the characters aren’t compelling, the pacing is off, and, despite being labeled as a horror show, it’s really more of a non-emotive soap opera. There’s no chemistry between the characters so you don’t care about any of their relationships, and it’s overall just unpleasant. I’ve seen much worse, and it’s a quick watch at four 30 minute episodes, but there are much better things you could be watching.
Additional Information and Notes: Hitsuji no Uta (Lament of the Lamb/Song of the Sheep) was directed and written by Gisabuto Sugii, who has worked on Astro Boy, Dororo, and the original Lupin III film. Also, this OVA isn’t listed on his Wiki page at all. That’s kinda telling. It was produced by Madhouse (Not this one.) and currently has no US license.
Episodes: 4
Year: 2003-2004
Recommended Audience: There’s self-harm in order to feed the Takashiros, non-graphic suicide, non-graphic murder, incest that at worst amounts to kissing, a minor sexual assault and a little violence. 13+
