Shadows House First Impressions

Welcome, weebs, to Animated Observations

*crawls out of bed*

“good morning everyone, today we’ll be studying a primary source in order to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation”

*waves hands over to me*

Yeah, so I have absolutely no idea what’s been going on with me recently, needless to say that sleeping for 12+ hours a day has not done a whole lot for my productivity. I guess in some ways I can actually relate to the main character of “Shadows House” a lot because, much like Emilico thus far, I have absolutely not a clue what is going on. The show itself also seems to be a bit disoriented, but not necessarily in a bad way. So, after watching three episodes of “Shadows House” thus far, here are my first impressions.

A drama, mystery series like this is inevitably going to spend much of its opening raising a lot of questions while making the audience privy to very few answers. This, of course, helps to build a lot of suspense and tension between different characters. “Lord Grandfather,” The “Debut,” “Living Dolls” and their relationships to their “Shadows.” All of these things have been explained on a surface level, but not much beyond that.

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We as the audience learn much of this from the perspective of Emilico, a new born living doll who serves Kate, who appears to be one of the younger Shadows living in this Shadow House. Emilico makes a lot of sense as the eyes and ears of this story. Seeing as how she is knew to this world, she does not have the same ingrained assumptions that other dolls or shadows have about this world, even despite the other dolls attempt to indoctrinate her into this cult of loyalty towards this mysterious “Shadow Family.” This makes her a perfect contrast as we explore the world for the first time alongside her.

There is also a lot of interesting metaphors built into the story itself. For example, their is the most immediate one which is divide of light and dark created by the shadows and the dolls. While Light and dark imagery is not new to storytelling, it is interesting that this contrast is being used to highlight nobility during a time when they would have been extremely powerful, even more so than today. Whether this critique is intended to be explicitly anti-wealth probably requires a bit more time, but it does appear to be trending in that direction.

CloverWorks has had a pretty good track record in the last few years, at least as far as animation goes. I am still reminded of those incredibly expressive scenes in the first episode of “The Promised Neverland.” As far as “Shadows House” goes, the animation has been fairly good quality. The scene with Rosemary being overtaken by scars was high intensity and engaging in pretty much all of the right ways.

Overall, “Shadows House” has been a great series as of episode three. If my recent experience with “Wonder Egg Priority” has taught me anything, though, its that their is always plenty of time to mess a series up, so only time will tell.

How do you all feel about “Shadows House?” Let me know in the comments below.

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