The Series (5/5)

    OK, I love a nice atmospheric mystery series and Sentai Filmworks have just released one in the form of Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigations based on the light novel series by Shiori Ota. The series is 12 episodes long, and is compromised of a series of individual short mystery stories, and also a series of 2-parters.

    Sakurako Kujo is a detective who is obsessed with the ownership of bones, literally bones. She has had this obsession since she was younger, and her cat died, and she even has its bones. She has recently taken on a 17 year old assistant (who also appears to have a more than minor crush on her) Shotaro Tatewaki. Sakuraro is played up as a typical Sherlock Holmes style detective, very observant, cold, calculated, and in depth in her investigations which tend to begin around the discovery of bones.

   The writing here is sort of cliché mystery stuff, but for fans of the genre this is like warm hot chocolate on a cold winters day. The relationship between Sakuraro and Shotaro is also a high point of the series, and they are written with an excellent chemistry in mind. Animation is solid, and I certainly hope that this show does continue on past this initial 12 episodes.

Audio/Video (5/5)

    Sentai presents Beautiful Bones in a splendid 1:78:1 1080p AVC encoded transfer preserving the original OAR. Everything here looks fantastic, the Earth tones colors of the show are well represented, detail is excellent, and I could find nothing to complain about.

    Audio is presented with a Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0 track. Dialogue and score coming through clearly, and again no complaints.

Extras (1/5)

    Just a clean opening and closing animation.

Overall

    A wonderful mystery animated series is released to Blu-ray from Sentai Filmworks. The Blu-ray looks and sounds fantastic, but is limited in extras. RECOMMENDED.