Kizumonogatari Part 1: Tekketsu

Koyomi Araragi, in his final year of high school, meets a vampire in an empty subway underpass who has lost her arms and legs. She asks him for blood. He gives it, and from that moment he stops being human. By morning he cannot stand in the sun, he has no shadow, and Hanekawa, the only person he knows at school, tells him what he has become. This is the first part of a trilogy and runs about an hour on its own. The story is short and the style is extravagant: geometric sets, sudden screens of text, long silences where nobody speaks for a whole scene, and photographic textures pushed inside the animation. It wants to direct where your eye catches as much as to tell the story. Shaft produced it. Tatsuya Oishi directed, with Akiyuki Shinbo as chief director. The wait was long. The project was announced in 2010 and then went quiet for years, stalled while Oishi worked out how to adapt the book. It was confirmed as a trilogy in 2015, and the first film opened on 8 January 2016. Who it is for: anyone following the Monogatari series and anyone who likes animation that goes to formal extremes. Who it is not for: newcomers to the series. Nothing is explained, some scenes dwell needlessly on the female character's body, and watched alone the film is incomplete.