"Who loves me so much that he would forsake his own dear life?"

That questioned is raised by Cossette d'Auvergne, a young French girl whose restless soul is trapped within the confines of a goblet of Venetian glass. Unseen and unremembered for 250 years, her spirit stews within its glass prison, waiting for the day when someone will help lift her curse.

Working at his family's antique shop, Eiri stumbles across Cossette's glass in a cabinet purchased from the d'Auvergne estate, and sees her tragic biography playing out before him, impossibly, in the glass itself. He sees Cossette's life of youthful innocence and aristocratic privilege ended, brutally, by her fiancee Marcelo Orlando. Marcelo, artistically obsessed with Cossette's perfect youthful beauty, slew the whole of the d'Auvergnes before turning his knife on Cossette in order to forever capture her beauty in its prime, how his portraits had forever captured her.

Unfortunately for Eiri, he is the reincarnation of Marcelo, and as such is recruited by Cossette to participate in a "pact of blood," in which he will bear the punishment for Marcelo's sins, undergoing unspeakable tortures in Cossette's underworld prison in order to free her. His spiritual persona begins to become more monstrous as Cossette puts him through his punishments, and his body in the real world begins to reflect his ethereal pain as Eiri wears brand of a painful wound on his chest. However, Eiri and Cossette's interactions aren't going unnoticed: the tormented spirits of the cabinet (souls trapped in the other glasses who witnessed Cossette's murder) are plaguing the surrounding shops, drawing the attention of a local priestess who tries desperately to free the tortured souls of the cabinet. Even as Eiri withdraws further and further into the hellish reality created for him by Cossette, his friend (and suggested romantic interest) Shoko tries desperately to understand what his "secret lover" is doing to him.

Spread across three episodes, Le Portrait de Petite Cossette attempts valiantly to balance style and substance, which is seems to have a little trouble doing. The problem with Cossette and its gorgeous visuals is that they seem to overshadow some of the other aspects of the anime. Even as we're having our eyes fed copious amounts of candy, from Cossette's hellish deadlands to slick post-production digital effects which add grindhouse grain, faux aperture wizardry and deliciously impossible lighting to select scenes, the story becomes lost under all of it at times. The world outside of Eiri and Cossette is crudely sketched out, even as certain characters are brought to the foreground. When the priestess lures Eiri into a trap to see if he is the beacon drawing the cabinet spirits out, she suddenly has the trap set up without any hint of premeditation on her part. She fades away just as quickly. While this is most certainly Cossette and Eiri's show, it seems as if screenwriter Mayori Sekijima wanted desperately to round out the cast, but these additional characters were written in after the fact as padding.

But when you're so drawn into the fascinating interaction between the two main characters, you can look past that at times. Eiri and Cossette's bizarre relationship raises many, many questions out of the viewer, even as they're being pounded into submission by the gorgeous visuals and the blatant undertones of pedophilia. Why should Eiri be forced to atone for the sins of a soul that he isn't even aware of? Even though he truly loves Cossette, is it right for him to suffer these tortures with no real reward? From questioning the ideals of love to the importance of beauty to society, Cossette is a pretty heady experience.

Produced by Gonzo (who are no strangers to producing gorgeous visuals, having also produced the hyperviolent Gantz and the impossibly textured Count of Monte Cristo), the presentation on the DVD is simply stunning. Colors are bold and clear, with solid blacks and whistle-clean whites. The character design by Hirofumi Suzuki is pure "gothic lolita" all the way, which both meshes and clashes with the backdrops, which range from blood-caked Hells to rolling green fields to clockwork nightmares. At times the CG-rendered moments seemed to run a little choppy, almost as if the workstation's processor was being overtaxed, but those moments were few and far between. Audio is available in either a Dolby 5.1 mix (for either the original Japanese or a surprisingly competent English dub), or a stunningly spacious DTS 5.1 Japanese mix. All three are damn near perfect, with the DTS mix's lower compression ratio offering up a wider field for the phenomenal soundtrack, which combines dark classical with techno and J-Pop very well. Extras include a peculiar Behind-The-Scenes featurette (which seemed like it was ripped right off Japanese television), a very gothic music video for "Houseki (Gem)" by Marina Inoue, and a handful of trailers for Cossette and other Geneon releases.

Le Portrait de Petite Cossette represents, in my opinion, the best kind of anime: unreliant upon its cliches and format, but instead using them to their full advantage. While the budgetary constraints would make a live-action Cossette near-impossible, it could still work in a "non-anime" format, which is what makes it so strong. Instead of big eyes and bigger tits, Cossette uses its animated nature to draw us into a world steeped in what Clive Barker calls "repulsive glamour," vistas so hideous and wrong that they take on almost an air of elegance. Cossette works very, very well, and deserves a look from anime and gothic horror fans alike.