Movies: ×××HOLiC, Vol. #3

Of the episodes in volume 3 of the DVD, there are two that stand out as favorites from the original manga. The first involves the four of them — Watanuki, Yūko, Dōmeki and Himawari (and Mokona, so that’s technically five) — gathering in the still of the night and telling ghost stories by candlelight. This being Yūko’s house, of course, such a thing has a nasty way of bringing the real honest-to-goodness ghosts to their doorstep. The other corker of an episode, the last on the disc, has the four (five, sorry) of them retreating to a summer home for some time off … although this particular place is far from placid. It seems to have been inspired more by Matheson’s Hell House and those endless J-horror movies about ghostly girls with their hair hanging over their eyes than anything you’d see in the Great Getaways catalog.

Oddly, the episode I had the most hopes for — the one where Dōmeki has his soul stolen away, through a mechanism entirely too complicated to explain here — didn’t click for me as much as I wanted it to. The point of the whole adventure is, I suppose, to push Watanuki and Dōmeki all the closer together by making the former responsible for the latter in a big country way (you know, like restoring Dōmeki’s soul to his body, that kind of thing). The pieces are all there, but the whole episode is too labored and long-winded, and I think the fact that they bring back some of my least favorite characters in the whole ×××HOLiC franchise — the airboard-riding tengu — might have something to do with it. But the rest of what’s on this disc is good-to-great, and more than make up for one clinker.

© CLAMP · KODANSHA / Ayakashi Workshop
Himawari takes an unexpected shine to Mokona.

Video: As with just about all the Funimation versions of recently-produced TV shows, ×××HOLiC looks terrific — it’s in 16:9, so it’ll look great on your widescreen system (assuming you have one), and the compression doesn’t create any visible problems even on a larger monitor. Again, the only gripe I have is that since this was authored for TV broadcast, there’s no progressive flagging, so you may want to turn on your deinterlacer for the best results.

One other thing that might stick in people’s craws is not the video itself but the character designs that CLAMP adopted for the show. I’ve heard euphemisms like “noodly bodies” and “two tons of wet spaghetti draped over a couch” used to describe said look — Yūko in particular is so spindly, you’ll wonder if your TV’s aspect ratio setting is wrong. But it’s all part of a whole, and anyone who’s savored the art of decadents like Aubrey Beardsley or the lushness of Alphonse Mucha will warm right up to what they see.

Audio: Once again, those who prefer the Japanese audio get the slightly shorter end of the stick — it’s Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Surround for English, but only Dolby Stereo for Japanese. Still, even the standard stereo tracks are fine; the big audio attraction here is the lush score (well worth a CD release here, especially that addictive opening song) rather than effects.

Menus: Static slates with music loops and well-chosen art from the series comprise the menus, although there’s an annoying quirk which seems to be common to all Funimation releases: the title itself is widescreen, but the menus are not.

Dialogue: The English voice-casting choices are pretty solid. Most critical (to me, anyway) is the casting for Yūko, and Collen Clinkenbeard’s Yūko has exactly the languid, slightly haughty delivery that the character demands. Todd Haberkorn’s Watanuki doesn’t sound like the voice I had in mind for the character — at least based on what the Japanese voice actor sounds like — but the more I listen to his delivery, the more it seems to click, and the way he has fun with Watanuki’s freakouts is priceless. (Carrie Savage’s Mokona may grate on the nerves, though.) The translation’s also good, with a couple of concessions for brevity: the Japanese version has some terms explained in the subtitles, while the English version settles for more generic language that’s still relatively accurate.

Extras: Curious that a show this potentially rich with bonuses doesn’t get very many — there’s an image gallery, textless songs and a spate of trailers from the rest of the Funimation stable, and that’s about it. Some cultural notes would have been nice, but a good many of the most crucial things are explained directly in the subtitles … that is, assuming you have them turned on in the first place. The image gallery is nothing special — just a bunch of extremely tiny stills from the show. You could get the same thing yourself — better, even — by using the screen capture function on your player.

The Bottom Line: Despite one episode that didn’t really come together as well as I would have liked, this is still a solid disc in what’s proving to be a series that retains all the charm and strangeness (and quark, ha ha) of its manga counterpart.

© CLAMP · KODANSHA / Ayakashi Workshop
What starts off as a summer getaway quickly turns terrifying...