erky sixth-grader Shiina Tamai is the daughter of a kind but ineffectual pilot and the contemptuous successful businesswoman who abandoned him; she's a terrible student and not necessarily very bright, but she compensates for her defects with a relentlessly cheerful attitude and an apparent desire to push and challenge herself. This gets her into trouble one day when she's visiting her paternal grandparents near the seaside, and she forces herself to swim far out to sea, to the site of an old shrine. Just before succumbing to exhaustion, she spots something strange: A creature like a huge, fleshy yellow starfish, but with large, startled-looking eyes, staring at her from the seabed.
Shiina passes out, but instead of drowning, she turns up safely on shore. Returning to the water later, she again meets the silent starfish creature, which she dubs Hoshimaru. It clearly wants to be friends: It transforms into something like an organic flying surfboard and takes her for a ride, and it hugs her like a lonely child when she asks where it lives. So she takes it home, and it becomes her constant companion, not to mention her organic backpack and staunch bodyguard.
She's never seen anything like Hoshimaru before, but having met it, she quickly encounters others of its type. That process begins with Akira Sakura, a meek girl who joins Shiina's kendo class to toughen herself up, but doesn't want to actually hit or hurt anyone when she could run away instead. She has her own Hoshimaru, but she's psychically bonded to hers, to her misery and horror. And then Shiina and Akira both have an unpleasant encounter with a cocky boy who refers to their alien-looking companions as "dragon's children," and sets his own weird alien ally to attack and harry Shiina while he casually discusses genocide and his intended new world order with the terrified Akira. The fact that his is larger, odder-looking and more dangerous than theirs makes the outcome seem obvious, but Hoshimaru has some weird tricks up its lack of sleeves.
Not your average anime
So begins Shadow Star Narutaru, an anime adaptation of one of the more interesting manga series being reprinted in America over the past few years. It's an unusual series in many ways; its characters are gawky, spindly and not at all attractive, they're deeply flawed emotionally and possibly intellectually, and they're generally not the stuff of which television heroes are made. Shiina in particular is an academic failure who's simultaneously a pathological overachiever, prone to overcompensation in the form of excessive enthusiasm. She's not over-the-top happy in the bouncy, chipper manner of so many anime heroines; she's brash and overconfident, and prone to earning trouble for herself. She's not a revolting protagonist, but she's not entirely a sympathetic one either.
And Shadow Star Narutaru isn't shaped or paced like a normal series either. These episodes pace along slowly, establishing Shiina's family and home life with no effort to rush into plot hooks or wrap up on cliffhangers. With its reserved pace and low-impact story, it sometimes feels like it's aimed at fairly small children, but the level of violence tells a different story.
And then there's the sheer weirdness level. These four episodes raise far more questions than they answer, but mostly they offer up a series of disturbing images of Shiina and Akira with their bug-eyed, doughy-looking, eerily uncommunicative charges, and their new enemy with his own companion, which looks something like a flying blade with one immense eye. The dragon's children, as he calls them, are incredibly creepy creatures, no matter how benign they act, and their sheer alienness is enough to make this an intriguing series, because they give so little away that it's impossible not to wonder what's going on in their heads. Shadow Star Narutaru starts off a little slow and uneven, and it could use a little less of Shiina's thoroughly generic family life, which repeatedly takes center stage over the more central and interesting mystery, but overall this is a promising start to the adaptation of a series well deserving of more attention and curiosity.
I've read only the first few books of the manga series; currently, six are available in the United States, through Dark Horse Comics. Seeing this really made me want to get caught up on the comics.
— Tasha
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