Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 23 · 8:13pm Dec 14th, 2021
Featured items this week are Gunslinger Girl and Slayers, after the break. There are 2 series I was hoping to get finished so I could include them in this week's blog, but I couldn't quite get through them, and now I'm afraid I'm going to forget a couple of details I wanted to discuss on them. :( Next time, then, which would be... the 28th, between Christmas and New Year's. Not expecting much of an audience then, so I'll probably push it back a week.
First, however, one bit of business I forgot to cover two blogs ago on O Maidens in Your Savage Season. As I've said before, I usually prefer dubs to subs, but translating the dialogue isn't the only thing a show needs to do. Shows will also frequently translate text, and to be fair, most of that is extraneous. I don't need to know what business signs in the background say, for instance. But there are times being able to read the text is important to the plot, like seeing whose name turns up on a list that startles a detective, or reading a text message exchange between friends. This series did not translate any text, and it did turn out to be important enough in several places that I had to rewatch a few scenes as the subbed version so I could see the translation. That's also happening in another series I'm currently watching, though in that case at least I can get the gist of it from the characters' reactions.
To Gunslinger Girl, then. I first watched this when IFC used to do a Friday night anime program, but it didn't last long. That's where I saw Hell Girl's first season and two other series I haven't gotten to reviewing yet. I'd first heard of it from a show I've referenced before that was on G4TechTV that just had mood music while playing gameplay footage, and it wasn't until I saw the anime that I realized it was more than a game, and that the game hadn't come first. IFC only had the first season.
And that first season is great. I love the characters, I love the atmosphere. There's an arm of the Italian government that carries out their dirty work, assassinating crime lords and terrorists outside the purview of the law. They take such people by surprise by operating as teams of two, consisting of an experienced agent (most look to be in their upper twenties to early thirties, though a couple are older, and they're all men, though there's nothing to imply they have to be) and a little girl. Of course, nobody would expect a little girl to be an assassin, though there are a few vague rumors of it circulating around the underworld.
They have to select the girls carefully, so when the organization needs to replace one or add a team, they scout out potential recruits. The ideal girl will be someone with no family connections, so that nobody will be asking what's happened to her or where she is, and who has some sort of terminal illness or mortal injury. They approach the hospital where the girl is under the guise of a charity and claim they can cure her if they're allowed to take custody. The hospitals are only too happy to agree; no family connections means nobody's paying the bills.
To be fair, they do cure the girls, by means of fitting them with cybernetic components to make them stronger, faster, and more resilient than normal humans. Aside from blowing them up, the only reliable way to kill one is to shoot her in the eye, since that's the only unshielded way to reach the brain, though the enemies don't know that. They're also brainwashed to follow orders, value the safety of their assigned partner above everything, and, thankfully, forget their tragic past. It does put a strain on them: they try to recruit girls who are about 8-10 years old, and most wear out and die by the time they're 15. Which does make an interesting case of one of the girls, Triela, who's 16 and still going strong.
It's up to the older partner how much of that brainwashing they want to use, and normally they'll start low and fine-tune it upward as needed, though the team the series focuses on has handler Jose going for the minimum possible on Henrietta, since he wants her to have as normal a life as she can.
All that's background, though, and comes through in bits and pieces. The series throws you right in, going along on missions with several of the teams, and I have to say, it's one of those shows that starts out strong and kind of fizzles out. There are really five standout moments to me, and three of them occur in the first three episodes. I love the stark demonstrations of the girls' devotion to their partners and mission, and Henrietta is endlessly cute.
Plot is a bit of a weak point. There are two going on, one about trying to thwart some terrorist organization and another about a team that's discovered dead and wondering who got the drop on them and how. The former never comes to a conclusion, and the latter does, though... it's kind of anticlimactic and broadcast well ahead of time. Though the actual moment everyone figures it out is rather dramatic and one of those standout moments I spoke of.
The art is great, the music is fantastic, and the premise was cool, and while the plot started out strong, it trended a bit downward. It's more of a character-based series than plot-based, though, so I still rank it among my favorites. It's one of the few I've bought the DVDs of.
Rating: excellent.
13 episodes, relevant genres: action, thriller, drama.
As I said, the series doesn't really come to a conclusion. It's not surprising, since the manga was still going, that the reason why is because they intended to continue it. But it got endlessly delayed, and eventually a different studio picked it up. I was warned by several people not to bother with it. But for the sake of completeness, I recently watched it anyway. And... it's not so bad.
Really, I think the major problem is that it doesn't compare well to the original. Some of that is the studio's fault: making changes to things that didn't need to be changed, and in a few cases didn't make sense to. But were I watching it as a standalone thing, I would have thought it was pretty good. It doesn't stand alone well, though. It does rely on viewers understanding references to the first series, while still going over a fair amount of exposition. So, Gunslinger Girl – Il Teatrino – . What went right and what didn't?
The bad: Henrietta's given a more outgoing personality. And to echo what I already said, that wouldn't have been a problem on its own, but it needlessly differs from the first series. Rico, the youngest team member, was always a bit on the exuberant side, but they made her almost like Cowboy Bebop's Ed in being more random than just happy. Ed can pull it off. It doesn't work well for Rico. They bring back a character who'd died in the first series as a major plot point and completely hand-wave how it happened and the implications that has for how the girls in general eventually wear out and die. It continues the same plot about a terrorist organization, and it similarly doesn't come to much of a conclusion. Though like the first series, I wouldn't necessarily have expected it to, since it doesn't finish out the manga. In general, the girls are less formidable and easier to beat in a fight, and they're noticeably less concerned about being seen working in public. A couple of scenes that show a large dining hall would seem to imply the organization is a lot bigger than any other evidence does. The art is understandably different, but it's also sloppier in the background elements. I thought the music was pretty good, though I accidentally bought the OST years ago thinking it was from the first series (whose music I really liked), and what's on it isn't that good. It's odd, since it seems like the music that gets the most playtime during the show was only a small part of the OST, so they stacked it with the worst stuff?
The good: The first series had gone into Henrietta's and Rico's back stories, and this one fills in Triela's, showing it as a flashback, no less, rather than just talking about it. It personalizes the bad guys more, even spending several episodes with them. For the most part, they're still scum, but they do a pretty good job of making one in particular sympathetic. They also introduce a new girl, and while they barely use her, her major appearance is as a good foil for another of the girls, Claes. And for her part, Claes is given a nice slice of life episode about what she does all day (her circumstances are explored in the first series, and I won't spoil that). Two of the points I mentioned in the bad section do result in something good. Triela goes through a bit of an identity crisis over losing a fight, and the character needlessly brought back to life at least has a good arc about her difficulty in returning to duty.
Rating: good.
13 episodes + 2 OVAs, relevant genres: action, thriller, drama.
Slayers is an oldie but goodie, and I've decided to go ahead and cover it piecemeal, and I'll organize it in two groups. I'm only about a third of the way through all of it. The original series starts with a girl named Lina Inverse, and she's a young teenage sorceress who's become infamous for both mastering unbelievable levels of magical power at such a young age and being destructive with it (and they attribute it to malice, whereas accident is closer to the truth). She soon encounters a warrior named Gourri who's looking for someone he can sign on as protector of. He won't take no for an answer, though he's grossly underestimated her ability to protect herself. They also eventually accumulate a sorcerer (Zelgadis) looking to undo a curse on him, a soft-spoken lady versed in healing magic (Sylphiel), and a young girl (Amelia) also learning to be a sorceress, but more a paladin type, focused on light magic. They're engaged by a priest to take down a major demon, and the plot goes about like you'd expect it to, complete with the occasional twist. It's more about the characters and the comic moments, though the battle scenes are pretty good.
I first watched this series not long after it came out, and it was the first one I'd ever encountered that had breast shaming as a comic motif, since Lina is portrayed as flat-chested. I found it amusing at the time, but of course countless animes have done so, and I just find it tiresome now. It's not the only source of comedy, though, and the rest is reliably funny, plus the action keeps up tension well. There are some interesting mechanics that come up in the world-building as well. The one that stuck with me the most is how spells are pleas to various gods to lend you their power, which puts Lina in a bit of a bind more than once when the god who'd govern that spell is the one she's fighting. Why would they lend you power so you can use it to hurt them, after all? The VAs for Lina and Amelia are enthusiastic, but the rest largely sound like they're having trouble staying awake. Art and music are fine for their era.
Rating: good.
26 episodes, relevant genres: fantasy, drama, action, adventure, comedy.
Slayers Next eventually brings all those characters back, plus introduces a couple new ones: their seeming patron, a sorcerer named Xellos, and a lady named Martina who feels wronged by them due to something that happens in the early going and tags along as a frenemy the rest of the way. (Martina's VA in the dub is the same as Revolutionary Girl Utena and Misty from Pokemon, which was amusing.) They're all independently searching for a legendary spellbook, and Xellos is directing them towards it, but he has his own agenda as well. They navigate through some intrigue involving various underworld gods, and it was just as compelling a plotline as the original, but they did a better job of building tension, having subtasks to complete along the way, and not tipping their hand on future twists, such that it was a more engaging watch. Lots of leads for the spellbook end up at dead ends, and they're various degrees of amusing (the karaoke one in particular) or interesting. They do track down two versions of the real one, and both were very well done, particularly the kind of virtual reality one with its caretaker. She was a neat character to introduce, and it was also cool in that Lina takes to her immediately even though she's pretty off-putting. And toward the end, there's a maddening romance tease. They used the same VAs, who suddenly decided to take their jobs more seriously, and there's a noticeable uptick in quality. Better plot, better voicing... I really liked this one. Since I'm only partway through, I can't say what chronological order things are supposed to be in, but this was the third item released in the series.
Rating: very good.
26 episodes, relevant genres: fantasy, drama, action, adventure, comedy.
The rest I've seen so far, I'll handle as a group. There's the movie Slayers: The Motion Picture (second item released), the OVA series Slayers Special (3 episodes, fourth item released), and the OVA series Slayers Excellent (3 episodes, eighth item released). These are a different continuity. Maybe. I'm not sure whether they're prequel to or AU of the main sequence, but Lina is the only character common to both. These feature her as mostly someone wandering on her own or, in one of them, some sort of agent of a magical council. All three of them have a simple plot of Lina coming across someone with a problem and helping them to solve it, against magical or supernatural forces. Nothing too complex. However, they do have her doing so with the assistance of Naga, a frenemy with a ridiculously fan-service-y outfit, an inflated sense of self-importance, and an inflated... well, let's just say the breast-shaming jokes come back full force. As Lina's function varies from wanderer to agent, so does Naga's, in the latter case having them assigned as partners. Lina's a little bit more serious and well-grounded in these, and seemingly in better control of her magic. Art and music were the same, though they used a different VA for Lina.
Rating: decent, relevant genres: fantasy, drama, action, adventure, comedy.
Taking a pre-emptive strike at a long streak of lower-rated items down in this part of the alphabet...
Soul Eater (51 episodes)—Death has a training academy where he trains potential warriors. They are teamed up as people who can transform into powerful weapons and those who are capable of wielding them. When they defeat a witch or an evil human (though in at least one case, a witch is shown as not so evil, and they grudgingly tolerate her), they can consume the soul. Once they've accumulated 99 evil human souls and one witch soul, the weapon will become a high-powered death scythe and the wielder a proper agent. The series follows a small number of these teams as they attend the school and get sent out on missions, but they also get involved in the intrigue behind what the bad guys are doing and are forced to battle above their pay grade. That's a setup like many other properties out there in various genres, like Naruto and My Hero Academia, and the living weapons may be the angle here that gives it most of its interest. A few of the characters are compelling, though not especially so, and it didn't come to a strong conclusion. I thought I'd seen that there was a sequel, but I didn't care to track it down. Rating: decent, relevant genres: supernatural, action, drama.
Space Patrol Luluco (13 episodes)—these are short episodes, too. Luluco is the daughter of a Space Patrol officer, but when he gets frozen by aliens during an investigation, Luluco is pressed into service as an officer to work off the debt of reviving him, despite her only being a middle school student. She gets partnered up with a charismatic boy and, eventually, a snobby rich girl, and their suits enable them to transform into weapons. It's pretty much a random comedy/buddy cop piece, though there is some big bad guy they're working to take down. It's nothing major, just an excuse plot to keep the character interactions going, but it was a fun and funny little series. Rating: good, relevant genres: comedy, random, adventure.
Speed Grapher (24 episodes)—another one I saw on the now-defunct IFC Friday anime program, and another that I've literally never encountered anyone else who's seen it. This has a really weird premise, but it played out well. Saiga is a former war photographer, and currently he's working as an investigative journalist. He gets wind of a fetish club that may be exploiting a girl they refer to as "the goddess," so he goes to try exposing them. He'd seen enough atrocities in his former job that he's especially sensitive to them, so to his credit, he's more concerned about saving the girl than making the front page. He sneaks his way in, and sure enough, the rumors are true, but he gets discovered and captured. The members are willing to kill him to keep their secret safe, and he doesn't understand why, until he's unwittingly brought in on it. He's brought before the girl, Kagura, since in their eyes he's affronted her sanctum, but instead of authorizing his execution, she kisses him. It turns out that's what the whole club is about. A kiss from her grants the person a unique power, and in Saiga's case, it's the power to destroy anything he sees through his camera lens. That is, she gives him the means to escape and rescue her. They then go on the run, sometimes with the help of a policewoman Saiga knows, and the ultimate explanation for why Kagura has this power is on the tragic side. Where it starts to get ridiculous is that there's also an internal power struggle in this club, and it goes unbelievably high. Not just movers and shakers, but to the highest level of Japan's government, other countries are willing to go to war openly for it, and taking the club down will spell financial ruin for a significant chunk of the world. I liked it when it was a simple tale of rescuing this girl, but once it becomes international intrigue of the highest level, it was too over the top for me, which pulled back my enjoyment some. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, thriller, drama.
Summer Wars (movie)—I seem to like this less than most people do, but it was still good. High school student Kenji is invited to a large family reunion by classmate Natsuki, and when they get there, to his surprise, she announces him as her fiance. Just to get the endless parade of family members to stop bugging her about when she's going to start dating and get married, of course, though while that satisfies some of them, the rest will naturally be putting extra scrutiny on Kenji. While there, we get introduced to a massive virtual world that many people participate in, and Kenji's a fairly well-known member of that community. He unwittingly helps some hackers by solving a security hack that was posed as a code puzzle. He gets implicated in a hacking scheme that's gradually causing havoc around the world, but he eventually convinces them he's innocent and enlists the aid of a trope (gamer girl, young and precocious, often mistaken for a boy) to counter-hack, and the AI they're fighting, gone mad, is now trying to de-orbit a satellite and crash it into a nuclear power plant. And of course they'll win. I didn't find the plot that compelling, but the characters were well drawn, especially in the humor inherent in a massive family like this. And of course the faked romance at the beginning may become real after the shared peril... Still pretty good but not the top-tier thing for me that I see a lot of people rank it as. Rating: good, relevant genres: thriller, drama, sci-fi.
Tactics (25 episodes)—Kantaro works as what is essentially an exorcist, but instead of destroying the demons, he prefers to reason with them and convince them to move along. By naming a demon, you can bind it to your service, and he's gotten a few of them that way, though he treats them more like family. He has Haruka, a kind of black winged creature, and Yoko, a fox demon, but both can transform into human shape. There's also a rich girl from town who hangs around, and she bankrolls a lot of Kantaro's activities. As Haruka starts to recover memories about his past, it leads to conflict and potential danger within the group, and Kantaro may not be able to retain control over him. They all care about him, and the girl, Suzu, has a crush on him. The little exorcism missions they go on are interesting enough, but the series is more about the character dynamics. While that's a setup similar to many others, I thought it was done well here. It doesn't come to a strong conclusion, as the manga hadn't finished and the publisher soon went out of business, though apparently it's since spawned a large fan-made comic community who enjoy yaoi stories about Kantaro and Haruka. Rating: good, relevant genres: fantasy, drama.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 13 here
vol. 14 here
vol. 15 here
vol. 16 here
vol. 17 here
vol. 18 here
vol. 19 here
vol. 20 here
vol. 21 here
vol. 22 here
Oh, hey, I remember Gunslinger Girl! I rather liked it. That ending in particular was so odd to me, coming off as sad and yet satisfying in ways that I couldn't help but approve of.
I recall seeing the first two seasons of Slayers. It was okay, but didn't stick with me like it apparently did most people.
5617022 I'd tell you all about why Slayers is so great but it's a secret
And somehow I missed that you reviewed Summer Wars. I really liked that one, but I get why some people would find it meh.
Excalibuuuuuuur
5617026
Oh god the flashbacks. Slayers was one I binged in my early days of getting into anime and I still look back on it fondly. I was young and naive so the twists completely blindsided me ^^;
Space Patrol Luluco was really fun, I found it a good goofy series with more heart than I was expecting. (yay puns!)
I've heard of Speed Grapher but never watched it so add me to the list. It's not my kinda series to be fair.
5617028 Funny thing, at one point I was going to write a Kung Fu Panda/Summer Wars crossover.
5617061
I'm not even sure how that's supposed to work, but I would have been interested.
Watched GG back when we got DVDs from the library. IIRC, the first couple of EPS were repetitive. Reading the wiki for the manga just left me depressed. As for Summer Wars, watched and enjoyed long ago; would rewatch and reevaluate.
5617022
Did you watch just the first season or the second as well? What I'm getting at is: which ending did you find odd? Angelica finally having her mind give out and quietly dying in the hospital or Triela not finding any satisfaction in her revenge against the assassin Pinocchio? Then there's the entirely different matter of how the manga ends: Henrietta gets split from Jose while on a mission and inadvertently shoots him while attacking a bad guy. His wounds are obviously going to be fatal, and as was seen with Claes, once the handler is gone, the girl is useless for anything but research. Except Jose and Henrietta have a closer relationship than most, and she couldn't live that way, so Jose agrees to shoot her in the eye at the same time she puts another bullet in him.
5617026
And I just now got this joke. (It's a running gag Xellos pulls throughout Next.)
5617028
Most people I encounter call Summer Wars top tier, and while I wasn't quite so enthusiastic about it, I still thought it was fun and clever, and I would recommend it.
5617052
Oh, definitely stay away from Speed Grapher. I liked it, but that theme of exploitation is not safe for ferrets. On Slayers, I saw a few episodes from the middle of the first season when it was still new, but I didn't watch the whole season until a year or two ago. I was not surprised that Reza turned out to be the bad guy. Slayers Next did a good job of concealing the twists a little better, not that Xellos turned out to be somewhat in league with the bad guys, but the complexity of how it all worked and who else was involved.
5617072
Yes, episode 2 of Gunslinger Girl rehashes a fair amount of what was in episode 1, to the point when I rewatched it 5 or 6 years ago, I stopped episode 2 several times to make sure I had the correct one on. There's a lot of overlap, but I really liked the situation of how Henrietta had flown off the handle because she perceived a threat against Jose, so I didn't mind them lingering on it. It's worth at least moving on a little past that, as episode 3 is a really strong one. After that, the best ones would be 10-13, as they're good character pieces, and episode 8 is also pretty important context for those.
aw yeah, Slayers :D
I never did watch all of it, but what I saw was great.
5617090
I was unaware there was a second season, so... yeah. Angelica dying in the hospital.
5617102
If you never went on to the sequels, please do. Slayers Next is even better, and I've heard so is the following one, Slayers Try, which I'll get to sometime soon.
5617104
Yeah, given that the series wasn't supposed to end there but effectively did, I agree it felt strangely both appropriate as a stopping point (it brings a thematic closure) and not (it leaves the terrorism plot unresolved).
The thing about Space Patrol Luluco is that its entire existence is a vehicle for references to everything else Studio Trigger had worked on up until that point, from well-known properties like Little Witch Academia and Kill la Kill to the Inferno Cop ONA. And since you don't seem to love Trigger's work as much as others like myself, it makes sense that it would fall into the 'just good' camp for you.
5617120
I was just talking to someone about that studio's work the other day. I haven't seen much of it. I just thought Kill la Kill was okay. I liked BNA a lot but was underwhelmed by the ending. I had mixed feelings about SSSS.Gridman and won't review it until I've seen SSSS.Dynazenon (and any other sequels they add), but in general I liked it for the strong character work. I have Little Witch Academia and Star Wars: Visions on my watch list. And that's it for them. So yeah, my entire viewing experience with them so far is 3 1/2 series.
I don't mean to short-change Luluco either—a "good" rating is still a series I enjoyed enough to recommend it, but there are too many of those for me to want to do the longer reviews of them up top, so I lump them with the rest.
5617131
I liked SSSS.Dynazenon significantly more than Gridman. Enough to write a crossover nobody read, even. You're in for a treat.