Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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Somewhere in Tokyo, in a version of the 1800s that is not our own, a man in a circus, nicknamed the Oni Slayer, fights one of the last youkai for the entertainment of a screaming crowd. He’s not thrilled about this; all the people in the crowd, and the oppressive ringmaster organizing the show, are, in his view, more monstrous than he or the demons he kills could ever be.

So opens Undead Murder Farce, the first post-Kaguya-sama anime from director Shinichi Omata, and the first full TV series from studio Lapin Track that doesn’t involve their original creative brain, the legendary Kunihiko Ikuhara. To float a truly imperfect comparison; the first episode sets it up as something broadly akin to a gothic, Meiji-era Bakemonogatari. It’s hard to imagine that staying true for long—if nothing else, we have reason to believe that our leads will be departing for Europe eventually—but for now it provides a nice, if rough, baseline. Our lead, Tsugaru Shinuchi [Taku Yashiro], that “Oni Slayer” previously mentioned, is a charming asshole with a surprising amount of wit about him. His incredible strength is due to a transfusion of literal oni blood, given to him unwillingly by a foreigner only distinguished by the mysterious cane he carries, marked with the initial “M.”

The other half of this equation is Aya, our other lead who’s been tracking Shinuchi down, since she’s in a predicament of her own. You see, Aya is immortal, but, because of an incident with another oni-blooded hybrid just like Shinuchi, she is without most of her body. Yes, one of this show’s leading characters is a severed head in a bird cage. Amazing.

Most of the episode revolves around these two “getting to know each other”, which entails immediately falling into a wildly entertaining haughty girl / dryly witty guy dynamic. That’s pretty good on its own; when paired with the dynamic directing, it’s an absolute treat to watch, and has a real theatrical edge to it.

The conversations themselves are interesting too, as they paint a portrait of Shinuchi as someone who is clearly very much angry at the world but is past the point of actively despairing or raging about it, instead, the farce of the title seems to refer to how he presently views his situation. Using a kind of humorous, performative mask to cope with his own feelings of powerlessness. Aya is much more of a question mark, which seems deliberate at this early point in time.

In general, this is a very subtly strong first episode. Most of the show’s more bombastic points—the demons, the gothic overcast to the setting, Maya’s attendant Shizuku being a delightful murder maid—are leveled out by much more low-key strengths in directing, composition, and even-handed pacing. Keep an eye on this one. It’s definitely playing its cards close to its chest, and much about the general direction of the story is still a mystery, but I feel like good things are on the horizon, here.

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