When a disgraced violinist finds himself shut out of the performance circuit, the only route left is a private academy with lots of girls. And a tentacle demon.
What They Say
Far beneath the prestigious violin school, St. Cecilia Academy, lies an evil secret. A monstrous colon-slurping demon lives underground, granting power to the one who plays the demon violin, Kannone, in exchange for copious amounts of its favorite meal. To fulfill his half of the bargain, the headmaster begins an ambitious program to enlist only the most beautiful women into his special classes. But Yukina is not about to lie down and take it – she has the holy violin of St. Cecilia and she’s going to fight back!
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release brings us the original Japanese language track in stereo and the English language dub, both of which are encoded in stereo at 192kbps. This track and the Japanese track have a standard stereo mix to it with a lot of emphasis on the center channel outside of the music in the opening and closings. There isn’t a lot of other sounds really going into it beyond the vocal pieces, such as action moments or much in the way of incidental sounds, so it’s a clean and straightforward piece. We didn’t have any problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback on either language track.
Video:
Originally released in 2005, the transfer for this two part series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. With fresh materials and no editing done to it as the original opening and closing sequences are present, the source has some very noticeable and distracting problems. There’s a fair bit of cross coloration throughout that hits in a number of areas beyond hair, but even more problematic than that is the amount of dot crawl that’s visible. With a lot of soft colors, this is pretty noticeable since it stands out so strongly, especially where there are pinks, light purples and flesh tones. A lot of the sex scenes are rife with it and it’s very distracting. Outside of that, the transfer looks good but there’s simply a problem with the source material itself.
Packaging:
Focusing on a single character, the illustration for the cover here is gorgeous as we get her laying down chained at her feet and her school uniform falling off of her. With the soft palette for the colors combined with some great looking detail and overall design, this is a fantastic looking cover that I wish didn’t have the logo on it at all so we could see every piece of it. The back cover has a similar illustration with less of her uniform on taking up a third of the cover while the rest has a few shots from the show and a brief summary of the premise. The release is otherwise pretty standard with a good technical grid covering all the information you need to know at a glance.
Menu:
Using a softer and lighter version of the front cover and zoomed in a fair bit as well so that it loses some of its allure, the main menu is a good looking piece that’s slightly washed out. The logo takes up a huge chunk of space here while the selections are listed in a row along the bottom as a bit of instrumental music plays along, as well as a bit of sniffling from one of the girls. Access times are decent and we had no issues with navigating the disc, but unfortunately the disc is authored so that the slates are the first listed English subtitles so our presets didn’t work well.
Extras:
None.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
When a master violinist finds himself disgraced during a performance where he couldn’t move his fingers, he finds himself eventually falling into the role of a teacher at a prestigious academy. His tenure there hasn’t been the cleanest though as he’s been influenced heavily by a devil infested violin called the Cannone. This violin has a strong desire for young pretty flesh and through Yashiro the headmaster, it’s able to feed on a pretty regular basis.
Yashiro’s fall from grace isn’t quite as deep as it seems at first as he’s helped out in a very simple way by a young girl just moments after he finds himself out in the rain and out of luck for his career. This simple act of kindness by her has given him something of a sliver of hope but as he shifted to his role in the academy, the influence of the devil violin in his possession has buried a lot of that. When Yashiro finds out that the young girl is now enrolled in the school and named Yukina, he refuses to let her become the latest victim of the violin. But it’s too strong for him and it begins to overwhelm him even more as other girls are taken down and eventually even the beautiful and naïve Yukina finds herself being blindfolded and forced onto all fours so the violin’s influence can cause her to do some nasty stuff.
Yukina finds some refuge in the church at the academy and through the Sister that is there, she begins to understand some of the “holy war” there exists between the demon violin and a holy violin named Cecilia. But it takes time for her to get to a place where she can be an active participant for good, which means that those girls that are already captured and under the sway of the demon only perform more evil. Numerous girls are captive and through the help of toys and the demons tentacles which seem to spring from out of the violin, they use all their methods to induce the girls to… take a poop. Yes, a poop. Because demon violins get their sustenance from such matter. Everything that they cause the girls to do to each other which results in a lot of embarrassing pleasure is all in the end to get them to open their ends.
Demon violins are too good to eat a toilet I guess.
Obviously, with the big scatological aspect of the show, I really didn’t care for certain parts of it. Thankfully it’s not something that’s in every scene or even dominating a scene but when the poop plops, that’s the center of attention. This is something of a shame because the character designs are really attractive, the outfits work up the religious schoolgirl style very nicely and there’s a lot of lesbian scenes since it’s an all girl school. Yashiro does get involved from time to time and there are plenty of tentacles floating around for everyone but it’s a good mix of different scenes overall, and most of them with quite good looking animation even with a couple of simple shortcuts.
In Summary:
There’s something to be said for tentacle demons who have the good graces to remove the girls bras and panties and give them a bit of pleasure so it can have a proper meal, but when that meal is all scatological in nature it just sends me running for the hills. Outside of the actual video issues, this is a really good show that’s marred by certain elements. But really, with a title like Anal Sanctuary, it was pretty obvious that we’d get into that realm in some form. Fans of that will really like this show and those who aren’t may still find a lot to like here provided they don’t mind looking away once in awhile.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: C
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: C
Packaging Grade: B+
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: May 31st, 2006
MSRP: $29.95
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio:1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
