Anime Review: ‘Gosick’

This is another review I originally produced for a different site. At the time I wrote it, I was considerably less familiar with anime and anime subculture, so I have edited it to give (I hope) some better insights and context. At the time I originally watched it, the series was streaming on Crunchyroll. While no longer available on that service, it has found a home at Funimation.

Gosick, directed by Hitoshi Nanda. Starring Aoi Yuki, Takuya Eguchi, and Hidenof Kiuchi. Studio BONES, . 24 episodes 25 minutes (approx. ). Rated TV-MA.

An oddball anime with an oddball name, Gosic is a 24-episode series based on a set of light novels by Kazuki Sakuraba. Kalium at MegaTokyo described it back when it first appeared as more-or-less the best anime series of , and though it has some obvious flaws, it is overall quite good. Gosick is an attempt to blend four genres: Gothic horror, murder mystery, political thriller, and a more-or-less typical high-school romcom likely deriving inspiration from Toradora!

Victorique and Kujo stand in a graveyard.
Trying to be moody.

These four genres jostle each other on stage and frequently fail to get along, and the show’s well-meant attempt at Deep Meaning™ ultimately falls flat, but the visuals are consistently beautiful and Gosick succeeds exactly where it might be first expected to fail: Despite its use of shop-worn tropes, it is a well-crafted love story. Though weak in some ways, it accomplishes its main goal and does it with an unusual amount of class.
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Art: Featuring Gosick

Ah, Gosick. This was one of my favorite anime at one point, and I was really sad when Crunchyroll lost the rights and took it down. I’m glad I got to watch the whole series before that happened. I reviewed the show once at my old site.

The premise of Gosick is simple: what if you took Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and replaced them with Taiga and Ryuji from Toradora?

The result is pretty poor as a Gothic mystery series, but not bad as far as anime teen rom-com goes. It’s basically a poor man’s Toradora with the mood of Rozen Maiden. But it came from Studio BONES, so the production values are quite high, and the atmospherics and personable characters make up for the lousy murder mysteries. It flunks in the research department, featuring automatic elevators and phones with “disconnect” signals … in the 1920s (not to mention southern Europeans who think black hair is weird). It also wreaks inexcusable havoc on the history of World War II.

But, hey, I love the protagonists. This and Toradora were the two major inspirations for the relationship between Jake and Dana in Jake and the Dynamo.