It bears noting that while it may chronologically be the first installment of the long-running Monogatari series, Kizumonogatari was clearly written with the die-hard fans in mind, the people who have been waiting on baited breath for years and years wondering if Nisio Isin's much lauded prequel Kizumonogatari, often considered the best installment in his entire series, would ever grace our theaters. It's not an easy film to watch, erratic and bizarre even for Monogatari, and if fans will be taken aback by the animation then newcomers will be downright confused. It also says very little about the Monogatari universe besides this: it is a strange lonely world, quiet, spacious, a universe without people, and without a firm concept of time.
The first film opens with a slow but erratic sequence of a boy running through an abandoned shopping complex, running out just as the sun comes out and bursting into flames while surrounded by a bed of crows, running around in pain before collapsing off the side of a building onto train tracks below. The animation here immediately stands out. The Monogatari series is known for still shots of spacious architecture that seems to defy the laws of both gravity and practicality, but here those same backgrounds are given to us with camera movement, frequently panning across or circling around the odd structure in question. These backgrounds also feel somewhat rotoscoped, or at the very least life-like, which creates an even heavier contrast to the new dynamic art style that the characters are rendered in. They move quickly and at odd angles, with the colors tending more towards softer tones of red and orange rather than contrasting pastels like in the original series. It feels arrestingly fluid but also deeply unsettling, and I would almost call it disturbing.
As a fan who had been awaiting the film for a long time, I completely forgot that it was a prequel, telling of the fateful Golden Week which would forever change the life of the solitary Araragi Koyomi, even as that impactful first scene showed his fate in no uncertain terms. So when the next cut goes back to show him walking along a deserted sunset road, encountering the busty Hanekawa who would later be his best friend, and watching a slow-motion cut of the wind blowing her skirt up to reveal all her underwear, I thought of it as a simple nostalgic throwback to Bakemonogatari's opening shot, forgetting completely that they weren't friends at this point in time. She takes it in stride; if anything, we get a somewhat out-of-character level of embarrassment on Araragi's part, hiding from Hanekawa's piercing cat-like smile that will stay on her face for the rest of the scene, and indeed the whole trilogy. Their fast friendship is one of the cornerstones of Kizumonogatari, lighthearted and grounding Araragi in the reality of being a human.
The next scene brings us back to the building from the start, but as we see Araragi entering rather than leaving we see the source of the film's opening, namely the contact with the wounded vampire Kiss-shot-Acelora-orion Heart-under-blade, where she demands all the blood in his body in order to keep herself alive. Sakamoto Maaya's performance as the vampire is particularly fantastic here, changing from a proud immortal haughtily allowing Araragi to give his life for her to a helpless and scared mass of blood, screaming desperately while on death's door. However, like the excessive use of Hanekawa's cat smile in the scene prior, Araragi's flight from the scene and subsequent self-sacrifice to her all feels less native to his character and more like a way to add impact into the story, especially considering how his change of heart isn't externally prompted; he just looks within and decides to throw away his life. In fact, with the subtly different style of dialogue, drastically different character animation, and these out of character moments, Kizumonogatari feels more like a side story to the larger series, a spin-off or sister work rather than a prequel.
This feeling drastically changes later. The second film brings Araragi into conflict with the vampire hunters who nearly took Kiss-shot's life, and the struggle forces his fundamental nature to come forth. At first the fights are hard, and he struggles to accept his new reality, fighting to bring Kiss-shot back to her former glory. Then the fights become easy. His new vampiric powers come to a peak at the very end of the film, in an instantaneous reversal of strength. Here the contrast is not with his new reality, but with the old reality, the life of a perverted student with his new busty and unbelievably clever friend Hanekawa. The film's final fight certainly leaves him on top of the world, but it calls those tender moments with Hanekawa into question.
The third film turns it all on its head again. Named the “cold blood chapter”, it is not Araragi's lack of humanity that ruins his character, as we would expect, but his humanity which pervades at all costs. Kiss-shot observes him to be someone who looks out for others while they're weak, which fits those incongruous first scenes with her in the subway into place. I felt a bit tenuous about this characterization of Araragi, as it reframes his will to protect Hanekawa from the vampires and hunters as a bit too chauvinistic, especially in light of the more even back-and-forth we're more used to seeing from them in the earlier Monogatari installments. But for all his white-knighting and crazy lewdness towards her, she pulls through with the rationality needed to bring the film into a dramatic final balancing act, where Araragi and Kiss-shot are trapped with no way for either to avoid deeply hurting each other. Even then, they manage to find possibly the fairest, yet unhappiest, resolution.
And while the third film could be said to have the least progression of the three, it also left me the most in shock. Both of the earlier films could have been a few minutes shorter, with a lot of time being spent on reaction shots or dramatic establishing shots. The third film has even more, but rather than establishing the scene, they add gravity and weight to everything happening. The final fight scene borders on comedy in many places, with heads rolling and limbs flailing wildly, but the style of Oishi Tatsuya's art and animation direction is even more captivating than it was in the first film, blowing past dozens of unspoken lines in animation to create a thirty-minute montage of beautiful carnage. And yet it has all the silence and loneliness of the first film, even when the frame is full of movement.
As to the earlier films, I like how they've given the non-dialogue-driven scenes more room to breathe, pulling back the camera a bit further than usual to establish wider shots. The wideness works especially well due to the very few characters who appear. Beyond Araragi and Hanekawa, the three forms of Kiss-shot, the three vampire hunters who come for them, and the supernatural expert Oshino Meme who pulls all the strings, not a single human appears, not even in the background. It's hard to understate the effect of this slimmed down cast combined with the quieter, wider shots that dominate so much of this story. Never before has the Monogatari universe felt quite so foreboding, and so eerily empty. It's as if nothing outside Araragi and the conflicts in his immediate view—the conflicts that he would later lock deep within his heart to never speak of again—exist.