Karin

Information of Anime

The Maaka family are vampire living in Japan.  They are living in secret from the humans in order to live a peaceful life.  Karin Maaka, the eldest daughter, is different from her family members.  Instead of drinking blood, she produces blood.  An large amount of it, which causes her to have nosebleeds.  One day, a new student named Kenta Usui is in Karin's class & for some reason she gets a strange reaction from him.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

It's basically a relationship between Karin & Kenta.  At the beginning Karin was avoiding him & Kenta tries to figure out why.  When he catches her with a nosebleed, he didn't know the reason for it & assume it was natural for her.  When he catches her in the park where she gives blood to a businessman, Kenta assumes Karin was into old men & keeps it a secret for her.  Karin realises what causes her vampire reactions from her brother, Ren Makka.  Vampires are drawn to people carrying a certain aura.  In Karin's case, she is drawn to the blood of unhappy people.  Meanwhile, Kenta doesn't know that Karin was a vampire until he catches her giving blood to his mother & suddenly becomes energetic.  There he learns that Karin is a vampire with the help of her sister, Anju Maaka.

After learning the secret & meeting the Maaka family, Kenta agrees not to tell anyone that they are vampires.  He already had this in mind since he felt it was wrong to drive vampires away.  For the good amount of the show, Kenta watches over Karin & cleans up her nosebleed messes for her to cover it up.  One day, a transfer student named Winner Sinclair appears & proclaims himself to be a vampire hunter.  This concerns Karin & Kenta.  To make things worse, Winner is drawn to Karin's beauty & thinks Kenta is getting in their way of their relationship.  From here Kenta protects Karin from Winners from letting him know that she's a vampire.  Not only that, Winners believes that Karin is the girl that he met in his dreams.  Later in the show, we discovered that Karin had bitten Winners in the past.  He was her 1st victim.  She bit him because he felt miserable about his Vampire Hunter training & Karin's bite give him the energy to become what he is now.

Next, we move on to a situation where Ren want to bite Fumio Usui.  Because of Karin's secret that Kenta promises to keep, she tries to stop him from bite Fumio by biting her first.  Her plan backfires as her increasing blood growth causes her to go berserk & tries to bite Kenta instead which was unsuccessful.  Although Karin's father stops Ren from biting Fumio due to the secret agreement, Karin is afraid of losing Kenta.  After giving it some thought & how Kenta wasn't mad at her for trying to bite him, she realizes that she loves him.

Next we enter a new arc where Karin's grandmother, Elda,  finally awakens & goes on a blood sucking spree.  With it, she targets on Kenta & Karin & Anju tries to stop her.  We learn about Elda's reason on why she does this from her past where she fell in love with a human who later betrayed her after biting him.  Elda's taste is for a person's love which was why he tried to kill her.  With that, Elda is determined to bite Kenta for Karin's own good.  However, Kenta's words to Elda about not know what the future will bring helps Elda come to her senses.  Along the way, she discovers that Karin is a blood maker & decides to search for clues to help Karin instead.  However, Karin is confused whether human & vampires will coexist based on Elda's words.

Later on in the show, the relationship between Kenta & Karin gets stronger as Karin is still bothered by the differences in worlds between humans & vampires.  Interesting twists comes in as Winner's grandfather comes to Japan & Elda found a way to make Karin into a true vampire, another thing that bothers Karin.  With his grandfather, Winner finally discovers that Karin is a vampire & learns the truth about his past with Karin when they see her & Elda.  Given the responsibility to shoot Karin, he refuses since he loves her.  Now tragedy strikes as Kenta, who's been begged by Ren, tells Karin to go be with her family & become a true vampire.  Hearing this, Karin is sadden about it as well as Kenta.

After leaving her, Karin & her family are fighting against Winner's grandfather as they are trying to perform the ceremony for Karin to become a true vampire.  However, Kenta can't give up on lossing Karin &, with Winner's help, goes in search for her.  Luckily, Kenta is able to stop Winner's grandfather from killing Karin who's about to change to a true vampire.  He stops it by letting Karin bite him, causing her to return to normal.  To prevent Winner's grandfather from chasing them again, each Maaka family member bites him.  The story ends where everyone returns to normal & Kenta & Karin are in love in a small way.

My Personal Review

Karin is a bit weird, but I can't put my finger on what it is.  It's funny to watch, but it doesn't draw a lot of interest for me.  It's probably because of the nosebleeds or the characters.

Animation

The drawings are unique.  Kenta really has strange eyes & the series does point that out to the viewers.  Karin really looks like a vampire.  Her sharp eyes gave me that expression.  They look different from the other girls as they are more round in shape.  They looked great to watch, but when the show progressed over time, they looked a bit ugly to me.  I'm thinking it's due to the sharp chins of the faces.  Also, it's probably because they are drawn pretty thick.  The black outlines seems to stand out a lot.

The backgrounds are pretty good.  But, I felt it was pretty colourful.  The dark forest night & the rooms inside the Maaka mansion was too bright to give off the feeling of a dark area.  Luckily, the bright colours didn't crash with the characters.

The animation movements are quite natural at times.  Running movements aren't bad even for those silly moments.  They are more on the realistic side.  Karin's nosebleed scenes are a bit on the beauty side.  The animators make it look like art as her drops of blood look like flower petals.

Sound

The sound effect are a mix of reality & cute.  However, they are some sounds that are over exaggerating.  For example, Karin's nosebleeds sounds like a water fountain.  The volume level is good with no fuzzes.

The voices varies.  Kenta's voice isn't bad.  Karin's voice can get a annoying at times.  I didn't like it when she was screaming as she gets a nosebleed.  Winner's voice was terrible.  It was too feminine & surprisingly annoying.  Almost made my ears bleed.  I never thought there would a male character that would have a high pitched voice as a normal voice.  The rest of the cast was not bad.

The music is ok is mainly on the cute side.  I like the opening & ending theme songs.  The opening is like a dance track while the ending is a ballad.  The soundtrack is, as mentioned, is cute & consists of dance & ballads.  There are a few rock style ones, but it rarely occurs.

Story

The story is quite interesting based on the vampire backgrounds.  For example, vampires aren't afraid of garlic.  They have very sensitive noses, so the smell of garlic is too strong.  Also, holy water doesn't hurt them.  It is unknown how that came about.  Things like that are quite interesting & funny.

As for the main story itself, this is no doubt a comedy love story.  But, it's not a very appealing one.  The love relationship finally builds up at the midway point, but it's still one-sided.  A little after that, it starts to pick up.  However, after the Elda wakening arc, there was a lot of filler episodes.  Even with the tense chase of Winner's grandfather hunting the Marker family, it drags the show for some strange reason.  Although the ending tied things pretty well, it seemed quite simple.  But overall, it ended the show well but wasn't very interesting to watch.

One major problem I had with the story is how people sees Elda as Karin.  The face looks like it, but it's really stupid.  The hair length of Elda's bangs are so long & Karin's is short.  Plus, Elda has longer hair & the hair colour is different.  If you want to go further, breast sizes are different as well.  It really pissed me off seeing how people easily mistaken Elda for Karin in the show.

Overall Conclusion

Karin is an average anime show.  It's not exciting & it's not boring.  I lost interest in the show before the halfway point.  At this time, I would suggest watching this if you have nothing else to see or want something to laugh about.  That's pretty much the reason why I continued watching it.  However, don't expect your lungs to die out on you.

Karin gets a seven out of ten  from me. The story is plain & the relationship between Karin & Kenta doesn't move anywhere until near the end.  The show didn't have a lot of potential of getting better.  It was pretty boring, even though the fanservice level went up a lot after the midway point.