An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: January 2024

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there are Little Girls – Black Bullet Spoiler Review

Well, if an idea isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Instead, remix it! Here we have a very classic and functional idea, a world where humanity is on the brink of ruin because of some unforeseeable mythical disaster or alien invasion. We also have the scenario where little girls are the badass fighters of the hour, beholden to their adult handlers, which seems to be my theme for the time being.

But again, when something works, it works. There’s no reason these elements shouldn’t go together like peanut butter and jelly, with supernatural powers to excuse the fighting girls and gribbly enemies to provide fearsome foes. It still takes care and skill to execute that sort of vision, but going in from frame 1 it’s certainly possible.

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Once More With Schoolgirl Assassins – Lycoris Recoil Spoiler Review

Almost two whole decades after the original Gunslinger Girl, along came a show that took the anime-viewing world by storm with basically the same pitch: In the ambiguously near future, a world government secretly maintains order in society by using specially trained minor girls to do their wetwork.

It’s hard to talk about Lycoris Recoil without addressing the kind of hype this show had. Frankly, around the peak of its popularity, it was the kind of reception that no actual show is going to quite live up to, not even an extremely good one. How far short of that unreachable mark such a show falls… is another story entirely.

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Slice of Death – Gunslinger Girl Spoiler Review

Gunslinger girl is a unique show. The pitch is this: in the ambiguous near future, the government of Italy Social Welfare Agency is a front that picks up little girls who are unwanted and/or damaged beyond conventional recall and gives them (brief, probably) new lives as unassuming cyborg assassins, trained and conditioned to fight alongside their handlers and kill as the government demands in bands known as Fratello.

But while that sounds like a high action, high drama, probably angsty sort of affair what we get instead is a slow-burn methodical character study of these damaged girls and the men who care for them, only occasionally punctuated by bouts of violence. It has more in common with Haibane Renmei than it does with your average action show. Then again, if you know how I regard Haibane Renmei, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

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