Sunday Without God is a 12 episode + 1 OVA anime based on an award winning light novel, which started airing in 2013 throughout Japan. To be honest, it took me a while to finish this anime even though only has 12 episodes. It comes under the genres of mystery and fantasy.
This anime is about how God abandoned the world so that no one can have children or die. Anyone who dies comes back to life by becoming an undead and can continue on as a normal human being despite their eventual rotting flesh. As women are also unable to bear children and it seems like the world will slowly be filled with the undead. However, before God left he gifted the world with gravekeepers, who are distinguished by their shovels that they carry around everywhere. Gravekeepers have the ability to bury people that are actually dead, which stopped them from reanimating and allows them to pass.
The story is set fifteen years after God forsook the world centering around a 12 year old girl called Ai Astin. Ai, one of the very last children of the world who finds herself as her village’s gravekeeper after her mother passed away. There are 4 arcs throughout the 12 episodes and we meet many different characters in each arc. However, Ai is always the main character portrayed in all episodes. The main gist of the series is about Ai’s adventure as a gravekeeper and her journey out of her village for the first time with the people she meets along the way. Out of all the characters we meet on Ai’s journey, Scar (girl) and Julie Dmitriyevich (male) are the only two that sticks with her to the end.
Without giving too much away, each arc is about 3 episodes in length, which in my opinion is very short and definitely not enough. I would probably spoil this whole series if I was to talk about the story in each arc but I was left confused and surprised at the beginning and the end of each arc. Honestly speaking I can’t say much about the good points of this anime or if I enjoyed it at all but I guess the strongest point of this anime is the artwork. Every scene and character was thoroughly drawn and none was done halfheartedly. Animation was also done very well and I have to commend the developers for that. Character building wise, Ai is the only one that receives the most attention but despite that, there were not enough episodes for real depth of character, which is quite disappointing. In saying this, the creators tried to add some background story for some other characters but it was so rushed that we couldn’t relate to the characters. It just seemed there were too many characters for such a short anime.
Coming into this series just from reading the synopsis at the back of the DVD, I thought this would involve fights between gravekeepers, the undead and the living but don’t set your expectations too high because there is not much of that. I had my hopes up after episode one with the starting scene showing an interesting fight but by the end of the series you can pretty much count all the action scenes with the fingers on one hand. This anime pretty much killed itself for me after episode 3, which is the end of arc 1 but I won’t spoil it in case you are interested in watching this. There isn’t any strong plot to this anime and it took me quite a while to muster up my strength and interest to finish watching it. By the end of it I was very annoyed and speechless about how abrupt the ending was, it seemed like there might be a season 2, which I do not hope for.
I could go on and on about how bad each arc was but I think this review is enough to get my point across. If I was to summarise this entire series to one word, it would be ‘weird’ and I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone unless you have a unique mind that can grasp the uniqueness of this anime. It might be an award winning light novel but definitely not an award winning anime.
A review copy was provided by Madman Entertainment to the author for the purpose of this review.
