Sunday Without God: Complete Collection

In this anime series, life suddenly and bizarrely changes: people stop dying (or rather, when they “die,” they continue to live as sentient, slow-decaying corpses—not mindless zombies), no more children are born, and a few individuals find their wishes abruptly granted. All of this is interpreted as God abandoning the world, either from lack of interest or admission of failure. Perhaps in a final gesture of divine mercy, the "gravekeeper" appears, a breed of shovel-wielding para-humans who alone can dig holes in which the deceased can finally lie at rest. A little girl named Ai is a gravekeeper (even though she can't possibly be younger than the "abandonment" 15 years ago, and as gravekeeper she shouldn't have the emotions that she does). An encounter with a gun-wielding albino (who may be her father) propels sheltered Ai through various sorties: to a progressive all-dead city, and a fortress-like academy that imprisons children with super-powers, and a town trapped in a pocket universe where time repeats every year. This moody, enigmatic saga (derived from comics and a series of novels) annoyingly backslides into some too-familiar anime clichés—inappropriate cutesiness and fan-service communal-bathing and breast fetishism—but still manages to maintain an aura of mystery, even if it also feels like a bunch of semi-developed, weird situations strung on a loose framework of unending end-times, with no firm resolution. Presenting all 12 episodes from 2013 in separately available dual-language DVD and Blu-ray editions, rated TV-MA, this is a strong optional purchase. (C. Cassady)