Gunslinger Girl & Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino: Review

I stumbled randomly across Gunslinger Girl in my post Shigurui frustration with samurai/sword-slashing anime and ended up really enjoying this creepy and yet strangely fascinating anime about brainwashed little girls turned into cyborg assassins.

Plot

The two 13-episode seasons of this anime series are set in Italy, where the government-run Social Welfare Agency, under the guise of caring for young children, takes the hopeless cases, gives them cybernetic implants, and then brainwashes ("conditions") and trains them into killers to do the government's dirty work. Throughout the two seasons, the gov't fights and kills a whole bunch of terrorists and their various factions. The girls go on a bunch of missions and shoot up bad guys with different types of guns. But that part of the show was always the least interesting to me. The most interesting things in the show are character-driven.

Characters

The best part of the show for me was its characters and their relationships with each other. Each girl is paired with a male handler, and the pair form a fratelo, Italian for siblings. The girls are brainwashed to look up to and obey their handler and to protect their handler at all costs. It's a little creepy, but it's enormously interesting to watch. The first series focuses on 6 different girls and their handlers, and very different they are. Each pair's relationship has a completely different dynamic, and it is fascinating to watch all the characters interact while they are committing heinous acts of violence against terrorists.

The second series, Il Teatrino, also fleshes out some "bad guy" characters, including a pair of explosives experts and a boy assassin named Pinocchio. I love it when shows humanize the "bad guys" and feel that Il Teatrino does it extremely well. All that character work made the climactic fight at the end of series two all the more gripping, because I at least wasn't quite sure who I was cheering for...

Animation

I really enjoyed the coloring and animation of this show in its first season, which featured dark, subdued colors. In the second series, Il Teatrino, the show gets uncomfortably brighter and much more colorful, and the character designs get changed for the worse, which I'll discuss below. The action sequences were ... fine. I don't really have much of an opinion about that: for me, guns are a lot less interesting to watch than swords. Then again, the action scenes aren't what make this anime worth watching, so I didn't really care.

Series 1 v. Series 2 (Il Teatrino)

This review points out that some of my gripes with the second series of Gunslinger Girl. The brightened colors and redesigned characters really bothered me. For example, the redesigned Jose looked... just like the redesigned Hiltshire. (Why do all the male characters look and sound alike?) I also largely agree with that reviewer's complaint that the second series lost the beautiful nuance and subtlety of the first series. The viewer definitely got beaten over the head with the girls' affection for their handlers, and the affection definitely got creepier.

Another thing that bothered me was the return of Angelica, one of the cyborgs, in series two. I thought she had died at the end of series one (in a great and poignant final episode), though to be fair I guess the show left it ambiguous. Even if they didn't have to have her die, though, I thought they should have. The Angelica of series two was annoying and uninteresting, and I thought it would have been much more interesting if she had died. Apparently she does die in the manga; I'm very curious about the effect her death will have on both her handler and the other girls (and their handlers). Since the anime wasn't gutsy enough to explore this, though, I guess I'll have to actually read manga to find out...

Still, gripes aside, I thought the character work on Franco, Flanca, and Pinocchio (some of the so-called bad guys) in Il Teatrino was really excellent, so on the whole I still really enjoyed the season.

Overall

I was pleasantly surprised by this anime. The premise sounded uninteresting, not to mention kind of gross and amoral, and it seemed like it was just going to be a bang-bang shoot 'em up anime that exploited the little-girls-as-killers motif. But despite the random and not-that-compelling plot and political backdrop, the heavy emphasis on characterization and relationships really made this anime enjoyable.

There is still an OAV out there that is a follow-up to Il Teatrino that I have yet to watch, but I have it on my Netflix queue. This review is To Be Continued, I suppose!

Shigurui: Death Frenzy: Series Review

With a name like "Shigurui: Death Frenzy" and a cover image like the blood-spattered one to the right, I knew this was going to be a bloody one. As it turned out, this 12-episode series was . . . surprisingly boring and hard to finish. As in, I couldn't finish it. It was just too boring.

Storyline & Characters

The story is intriguing. Two master swordsmen are dueling at Sunpu Castle. One is a blind cripple; the other is a one-armed man. Theirs is a long, twisted, and violent history going back to their battle to become the successor of the Kogan sword style. It was an interesting premise, which was what drew me to the anime in the first place. Unfortunately, the storytelling style was impenetrably minimalistic. (See below...)

The characters were all abominable and disgusting human beings. There was nothing to like about any of them, really. Flawed characters can be fun to watch, but these characters were a little too flawed. For example, the Kogan sensei? Drooly, senile misogynist rapist who slices off nipples and wants his daughter to conceive a successor in front of him and his men? Really? You couldn't have any more nuance than that? The anime had little to offer in the way of human characters, which meant I found myself not caring enough to want to know what happens next.

Animation

The animation in this anime was . . . minimalistic to say the least. A lot of still scenes, low frame rate, surprisingly little movement, extraordinarily slow pacing -- even in the action scenes. The anime was done in a certain style, trying to evoke beauty of some kind, but it really didn't work for me. I know what the director was trying to do, but he made it extraordinarily difficult to know what the hell was going on, and eventually I just lost patience. I like dark colors as much as any other gal, but this anime took dark and completely stripped it of color, which made everything extremely confusing.

First off, all the characters look very similar. Because of the lack of color, everything was gray, so it was hard to tell who was who. To make matters worse, the anime interlaces past scenes with distant past scenes. And everyone still looks the same. And the narrator, who at times is The Omniscient Narrator and at other times is one of the characters, sounds the same. So the viewer has pretty much no idea what is going on, who just chopped off whose head, etc.

I also did not care much for the fight scenes. There was no fluidity to them. I understood that, again, the scenes went with the atmosphere of the whole series. The action often ended after one or two moves. That's fine with me and is probably more realistic. But . . . at least show what happens. The over-art-ing of the action scenes was just . . . annoying after a while. Yeah, yeah, he draws his sword so fast that the top half of the woman's head falls off. Okay, yawn, whatever. Nothing to see here. Yawn.

Sound

There was no music in this anime, which is all well and good and goes with the minimalistic art style generally. But good golly, the lone drums, the cicada calls, and the random plucking of strings got extremely annoying after a while. With the extraordinarily slow pacing of the series, the anime could really have used some movement on the music end. Instead, we got slow minimalism all around, which really put me to sleep.

Gore & Nudity

Many reviews of this anime commented on the unnecessary gore. I like my samurai action flicks nice and bloody, and I don't mind gore, and yet I still tend to agree with others who have said the gore was unnecessary. Did we really need to see a retainer tear out his intestines in the 1st episode? Did we really need to see the assistant master eat a woman's sliced off nipple? How did that contribute at all to the story? The answer is "it didn't," which means it was pointless gore for the sake of being gory.

There were also a lot of pointless sex scenes, or implied sex scenes. Did we really have to see a random rape scene in the mill with the not-so-subtle mill-grinder-as-male-organ imagery? Did we really have to see the twin brothers butt-rape some random servant boys? Did we really have to see the Kogan sensei grope his own daughter's breasts? Again, what does it add? Everyone is already a deplorable human being. How much more deplorability actually adds to a character's characterization? While I appreciate that the women in this anime were not high-pitched annoying brats for once, the anime was showing breasts for the sake of showing breasts, and I just got fed up.

Overall

I was disappointed in this anime, which was recommended by several anime blogs I frequent for those who liked Ninja Scroll or Basilisk or samurai anime generally. Some reviews said it starts off slow, so give it a chance. Well, I forced myself to watch 6 of 12 episodes. I really did give it a chance, but I really can't see myself wasting another 120 minutes on the rest of this series. I just don't care enough.

And that's saying something. I hate leaving things unfinished. Even with Afro Samurai, I made myself finish before reviewing it and tearing it to shreds. But Shigurui and I really just did not mesh.

XY's Book Corner: The Windup Girl

Grade: B+/A-

I received The Windup Girl as an early Christmas Gift and breezed through it. I enjoyed both the pacing and the plot of the book. The setting is dark: industrial corporations have unleashed man-made plagues to attack food sources and to create demand for their plague resistant food supplies. The story follows an agent of one of these corporations looking for new genes from old/lost foods for the company to manipulate. His life intersects a number of other characters with different motives and purposes, including a "windup" genetically modified person. The book reminded me of Altered Carbon, which I thoroughly enjoyed. While the writing is immersive, I felt I could have used more background into the story world - Bacigalupi has written a number of short stories and in retrospect, I would have read those before reading The Windup Girl.

Basilisk: Series Review

Romeo & Juliet and dueling ninja clans--that's the 5 second description of Basilisk, my most recent animated series conquest. It took me a little while to get convinced, but overall I enjoyed the series.

The basic plot of Basilisk is that there are 2 great ninja clans, Kouga and Iga. They hate each other and would kill each other but for this non-hostilities pact, which promptly gets dissolved at the beginning of the series when the shogun decides he will pit the clans against each other to determine who will become the next shogun. Ten warriors from each clan will fight to the death, and whichever side the surviving clan represents will claim the shogun-ship. Sound stupid? Yeah, to me too, which is why it took me so long to get into this show and made me reluctant to start in the first place.

But once you get into it, the show is actually quite interesting, partly for the spectacularly fantastical and bloody fight scenes, but also for the character development and intrigue. What is this ninja's secret power? What is his/her back story? What motivates this ninja? Who is going to kill this ninja? How is he going to die?

And die he/she shall, because with 10 ninjas from each clan dueling it to the death, the body count is deliciously high. Some characters die off quicker than the rest, and with less development, but some characters get a lot of development, and it's great. I enjoyed that sometimes the show would go back and develop characters that had already been killed via flashbacks, etc. Very well done.

Strengths: I would say the show's greatest strengths were its storytelling and attempts at character work. The series kept you wanting to know more about these ninja, their abilities, histories, and their eventual demise. The character designs were great and, I thought, very creative. Each character had a unique personality, skill, etc. The animation and fight scenes were pretty good, but I did not find those to be the main draw of this anime. For fluid animation and fight scenes, I would go to Sword of the Stranger (though that's a movie) or Samurai Champloo.

Weaknesses: Weak female characters. This annoys me about anime generally, but ... the female characters in this series were really disappointing. In a flick about awesome kick-ass ninjas slaughtering each other, could you really not have more compelling female characters than these?

On the Kouga side, we had Kagouro, whose special power was related to her sexuality. Plus she was stupidly in love with Gennosuke. We also had Okoi, whose character design was very tomboy-ish, and yet HER special power was ALSO related to her sexuality.

On the Iga side, we had Grandma Ogen, who I suppose was a pretty good character. And Hotoburi or whatever her name was -- the girl with the snake and butterflies. She was pretty cool, except that she was a simpering lovergirl too. Then we had Akeginu, who was not bad, I suppose. But she was ALSO a lovergirl--just unrequited. And then we had the enormously annoying Oboro.

If the women on this show weren't showing their breasts, getting raped, or crying, it was a relief. Sure, they had scenes where the girls kicked some ass and killed people, whether using their special powers or just using their knife skills, etc. But while the girls are off whimpering about how they love so-and-so or whatever, the men are using their eyes to make people kill themselves, or shape-shifting, or just being all-around more awesome. Oboro's "superpower" was to neutralize other ninja special powers, for example. All right, I understood the narrative significance of that, but couldn't any of the women have a superpower that was OFFENSIVE and AWESOME and that didn't require men to fall for her sexuality? Geez.

So I did have beef with the depiction of women in this series, but that is by no means unique to this series. Japanese anime in general tends to have really annoying, simpering women. Weak, annoying female characters that have giant eyes, pretty hair, and high-pitched, soft voices. Ick. This is one of the reasons I love Avatar: The Last Airbender so much.

Anyway, I digress. Overall, the story was a strong one, if not all together very exciting. Again, I kept watching because I wanted to find out what everybody's powers were and how they would be killed (and by whom). Ultimately, the show satisfied on that front, so I enjoyed it. Definitely not the best or the worst series I've seen. Fairly short time commitment, so ... pretty worth the entertainment value.

Sword of the Stranger: Review

Sword of the Stranger is a samurai action movie, just as I like it: bloody, dark, and well-animated. I am definitely considering adding it to my DVD collection, although given my current financial state of affairs (and that I don't own Samurai Champloo yet either), I should probably hold off on the frivolous purchase.

Anyway, so, the movie.

Other reviews on the 'net have pointed out that there is nothing much original to this movie, and I would probably agree with that assessment. Nanashi seems to be a colder, bloodier version of Kenshin from Rurouni Kenshin--i.e., he has a bloody past, killed one too many people, and refuses to kill now on principle. Except Nanashi is cooler because he isn't annoyingly cheery and actually unleashes the beast at the end, rewarding the audience with an incredibly awesome action sequence. So I guess Nanashi is a blend of Kenshin from the Samurai X OVAs and Kenshin from Ruruoni Kenshin. He combines the best parts, really. I would have liked to have seen more of the character's back story, but... oh well.

The other series that this movie reminds me of is Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. Namely: Young child needs protection from an awful fate, and fate steps in by pairing the child up with an amazingly talented warrior. The two become close as they journey together. Talented warrior protects child with everything s/he's got. The end.

So in a way, I've seen it all before.

But I don't mind at all. The movie is still wildly entertaining, with some of the finest action sequences I have seen in anime--better than Samurai Champloo, I would say. That last fight sequence was simply breathtaking. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Bloody, well-animated, and awesome.

Plus, the movie did add a twist of its own. The bad guys were Chinese Ming as well as traitorous Japanese retainers. That was pretty cool.

Overall, an entertaining samurai flick. Even though it borrows heavily from other fare, it is worth watching just for the great action scenes.