Let’s get this out of the way: Blackfox
is a movie, not a series, and I’ll be analyzing it as its own thing.
The basic premise involves a girl (young woman? Coming-of-age
narratives can make that hard to place) who is the heir of a ninja
clan in the vaguely cyberpunk-lite techno future on a mission to
avenge the murder of her family with the help of a trio of
artificially intelligent animal robots her dad made. Opposing her
are a mad scientist who was her father’s rival and the mad
scientist’s daughter who has powerful psychokinetic abilities.
I’ll be honest, when I first heard the
basis of the plot, I was interested not because it necessarily
sounded like it would be good (though it didn’t sound bad), but
because in some ways it didn’t even sound real. If you asked someone
who had only a tangential understanding of anime – the sort gained
by pop-culture osmosis in geeky or speculative fiction circles and
not actual experience – to make up an anime plot synopsis, I think
there’s a good chance they’d come up with something pretty close to
the pitch for Blackfox: ninjas, psychic powers, robots, and revenge.
Blackfox, however, isn’t something just made up off the cuff; it’s
very much real. The question is, is it any good?
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