Kizumonogatari Part 2: Nekketsu

The middle of the trilogy. To recover the vampire Kiss-shot's limbs, Araragi has to fight three hunters one at a time: a rigid warrior, a mercenary, and a con artist who treats the whole thing as a joke. The film is almost entirely these three encounters and each is given its own visual language. Tatsuya Oishi solves combat as a design problem rather than a physical event, with empty frames, flat single-colour planes and abrupt shifts of scale. The emotional matter of this part is that Araragi does not notice how far he is moving from being human. It is the most action-driven entry in the series and technically the most showy. Who it is for: Monogatari viewers and anyone who loves Shaft's visual craft. Who it is not for: those who have not seen the first part, since this continues directly.