Il Teatrino is the sequel to last week’s review, Gunslinger Girl. Produced after five years, it has some significant discontinuity from the “first season” and thus today I’m giving Il Teatrino it’s own review. Does it hold up to the high bar set by its predecessor? Let’s take a look.
Your first glance at Il Teatrino is probably going to be unfavorable in one immediate way: the animation is both very different from Gunslinger Girl’s, to the point where some characters can be hard to recognize and others are known by their louder attributes at first. It’s actually really shocking, if you come right off the first season, how much worse Il Teatrino is. Backgrounds are much flatter and more generic, rather than being wonderfully rendered and sometimes even recognizable Italian scenes, characters have a much more standard look and feel and lack the precise nuance in their expression, and some of the motion is particularly tragic, going for still pans where you know the original would have produced a scene.
It actually baffles me how this came to be. How does a franchise have enough in it to revive after five years, but not enough to warrant at least the effort it got before? If not so much time had passed I could understand the downgrade, but five years? And it’s not even really that it went to a markedly worse or cheaper studio. Madhouse, which did the original, of course has a fairly impressive catalog including both Boogiepop series, Texhnolyze, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Record of Lodoss war… but it’s not like their catalog is 100% hits and Artland, the studio responsible for Il Teatrino, also has winners like Mushi-shi in its smaller catalog.
But, it would be disingenuous and unhelpful to judge a sequel entirely by its art, so I will say no more on that topic. What about the show itself?
The biggest difference between season 1 and Il Teatrino is that Il Teatrino has a main plot. Franco and Franca, who were barely in season 1 to give the homeopathic impression of recurring antagonists, are now significant forces, and along with them are other recurring faces in the Five Republics Faction who might get almost as much focus as the girls themselves. We get to learn their goals and motivations, both long term (separating Italy into multiple nations) and immediate and watch them have to face up to the realities of their lives, rather than just existing as generic baddies to shoot. Along with this comes the impetus to actually stop the FRF’s schemes, with some precise goals that we know about and are able to get invested in.
This ends up making the most core addition to the show a FRF assassin called Pinocchio. He’s a young man who, when a rather little child, was taken in by a gangster called Christiano, who is one of the authority figures in the FRF. As with the Fratello pairs in the Social Wellfare Agency, the relationship between them isn’t exactly parent and child nor is it precisely master and servant. Pinocchio is very good at what he does, and his present assignment involves covering Franco and Franca, who the Agency is on the trail of.
Those two also get a good deal of development where they’re made out more to be a student and teacher than anything else, though really a mass of “It’s complicated”. Both are assumed names, with Franco being a veteran artisanal bomb maker (in that he takes pride in precise workmanship rather than shoddy cell-phone triggered junk) who was washed up and semi-retired when he was approached by Franca, an angry young woman looking to avenge her family by joining up with forces inclined to take down Italy’s corrupt (in her mind. And maybe – little girl cyborg assassins after all) government.
The three of them play off each other decently well, with Franco and Franca particularly trying to teach Pinocchio how to be more human and in touch with his emotions, clearly hoping he’ll be able to live for himself and properly express his bond with Christiano.
The agency eventually raids their safehouse, which leads to Triela (the relative focal girl of the season, honestly even more than Henrietta was for Season 1) getting in a one-on-one match with Pinocchio and… actually losing. Pinocchio isn’t able to finish her off, and her struggles divest him of a pendant that meant a lot to him since it was a gift from Christiano, but on the other hand he was the one who walked away from the encounter under his own power. With the terrorists escaping, the remainder of the season has the hunt for them, and related affairs, as its major backbone.
There’s still a lot more than backbone, though: we get episodes that are centered around events without much direct relation to them, gobs of character building, and so on – about what you’d expect from Gunslinger Girl if you were here for season 1. Il Teatrino might be more shifted towards action and plot, but it’s still ultimately cut from the same deliberately paced and delicately complex cloth as the first outing.
We get a sequence where Henrietta and Rico quarrel after the latter quite accidentally damages a gift she received from Giose, the repair of which (it was an antique kaleidoscope, and Rico accidentally snapped one of the little adjuster wheels) has some almost comedic near misses since Pinocchio is involved with the repair shop and neither side knows the other. There’s a nice downtime focal episode for Claes, an episode where we follow up with Mario from season 1 and actually meet that daughter of his with Triela getting to talk with an actually normal girl her age, and a backstory episode for the agency that ends with the audience learning where Triela came from: rescued by her handler, Hilshire, when he worked for Europol, from being nearly used up in a kiddie porn/snuff production.
It really is remarkable how well-adjusted she is in her new life.
The latter parts of the season are based around this setup: The agency, in their operations so far, has done enough plan-foiling and member-erasing to put the FRF in a bad place. Internally, the FRF is now looking for a fall guy as they reorganize themselves, and the other authorities seem to have settled, tentatively, on burning Christiano as the scapegoat for their failures and an offering to reduce their overall heat. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with Pinocchio, and so he, Franco, and Franca hatch a plan to save Christiano’s reputation by completing an operation that would be a massive feather in the FRF’s cap in Christiano’s name. This plan is to destroy a major bridge that’s under construction, and Franco, Franca, and Pinocchio gear up to carry it out.
So, that’s the final sequence right? Well, not quite. We do get a struggle where team terrorist tries to blow up the bridge while the agency’s finest protect it, and it’s a pretty good fight. This ends with the bridge emphatically not destroyed, but the terrorist trio getting away. They face up to their next move: Christiano seems resigned to his fate, but Pinocchio still wants to help, and Franco and Franca seem moved to try to support the kid.
Thus we have the set piece for the real final conflict of the season (and this time its proper final movement, unlike the big fight in season 1 that was in the penultimate position). Christiano is at his manor, basically waiting for whatever forces are going to take him. The Agency wants to bring him in, and has all their cyborgs gear up for what they expect to be a hard fight. Pinocchio, however, heads off to the manor to try to convince his father figure to flee the country instead, and Franco and Franca follow behind to provide what help they can. Christiano, meanwhile, is advised by a kindly old butler, who also reminds him that he has a getaway car if he comes around to wanting to use it.
The raid begins, but Pinocchio gets in. He has a heart to heart with Christiano who, realizing that this boy he thought would have every right to hate him instead loves him as a father, decides that it might be nice to live free a little longer, for Pinocchio’s sake if nothing else. He heads to the car as the fighting starts in earnest, but there finds Rico, having already killed the butler and prepared to take the real mark into custody. Alive is preferred, but uninjured is far from necessary. Pinocchio, meanwhile, ends up in a grudge match with Triela, each wanting vengeance for how things went the last time. But while Pinocchio has been becoming human, Triela has been training hard, and has a much better close quarters technique than she once did.
Outside, Franco and Franca arrive in time to rescue Christiano from Rico, but their attempt to run the blockade and get him off the mountain doesn’t go so well: the car is shot up, and a bullet gets Franca, in the driver’s seat, good. As the speeding getaway car faces a sharp turn, the pain and blood loss catch up to her, and she, Franco, and Christiano go over the edge to their presumed deaths. In the manor, the Triela-Pinocchio battle goes to the bitter end. Both are torn up, and left lying in pools of their own blood. Triela, however, is alive, and Pinocchio is not, making her the winner of the rematch.
Thus ends Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino.
So, on the surface, Il Teatrino fixes the issue I had with the first season: it has a clear arc with a good flow to it, giving direction to the piece rather than leaving it as almost but not quite an anthology sort of show. However, that direction has come with costs – quite a lot of them in fact. The animation downgrade is one. I don’t tend to rate a show being bog standard rather than “rather pretty” particularly highly. Animation is certainly important in the art of animated cinema and storytelling but only the extremes really merit heavy weight in a final grade. Still, it’s certainly noteworthy when there is that first season to compare with.
The other downgrade is how it puts the girls of the agency and their struggle out of focus. It’s a topic on which I’m quite torn. I like Franco, Franca, and Pinocchio. I enjoy their arc, I think they were made into compelling characters, and I recognize that their setup and ultimate fall is very good writing, where I cared about them the whole way. The problem is that in the format of an anime season, rather than a manga, the loss of screen time and focus for the cyborgs, particularly the ones other than Triela, meant that we were doing this work with their terrorist foes at the exclusion of the people we were supposed to be rooting for as well as caring about.
A good example of this is Angelica. After what appeared to potentially be a peaceful death at the end of the final season 1 episode based on its framing, she’s revealed to be not only alive but rehabilitated enough to take part in missions again partway through Il Teatrino. And… nothing much is done with her. We don’t follow up on her arc with her handler, or explore what it means for her to be back in the action. There are hints, but it’s a much more shallow experience. Henrietta as well is a little painfully out of focus. She was our primary touchstone in season 1, but I’m not sure how well I could say I understood her any longer by the end of Il Teatrino. She had her fight with Rico, but again its very surface, and unlike Triela who got time devoted to her inner world, I don’t really know what I should be invested in when Henrietta fights Pinocchio and the others at the defense of the bridge. She sort of becomes one of a pair with Rico: If Triela is fully human, those two are desirable cyborgs – effective, obedient, and minimally warped. Yeah, Rico doesn’t come off as quite as off-kilter as she did in Season 1 either, and I’m not sure if she grew as a person, had her Conditioning stepped down, or if it’s just inconsistent writing.
It also hurts that we don’t really hear the government line on the Five Republics Faction. We spend all this time with members of the FRF, learning their inner worlds, that we have a pretty clear picture of what the FRF wants, what their reverences are, why they feel pushed to this extremism, and what victory would mean for them. Because we don’t spend as much time with the handlers at the agency (leaving the girls aside because they almost literally don’t have motivations, especially not ones in the high-brow political spectrum) we get very little about the evils that the FRF does, or why we as the audience should oppose what they represent.
I don’t think we’re meant to root for the FRF. Sympathize with individuals, sure, but support their goals? Nah. Yet you kind of do. You think about the bridge plot – they’re going to blow up a bridge, but it’s one that isn’t finished yet so no one is on it and no one’s life or livelihood would seem to particularly rely on it, and they’re doing it at night so it’s not like there are going to be a lot of innocent bystanders endangered. We know what its destruction would mean to Christiano, Pinocchio, and the bomb-makers as well as their allies, why this would be a moral victory for them as well as a practical one and how it would help these characters we care about. We don’t know what its destruction would mean for modern, united Italy or what Italy means to the characters on that side that we care about other than it being their current mission. Sure, a massive act of vandalism and destruction of state property is criminal, but in fiction we’re kind of used to rooting for some degree of criminal behavior.
But you do, at least coming off of season 1, care about the girls and their handlers and don’t want to see them lose. But that’s it. We get one episode where some of the government-aligned types, pursuing Franca, fall prey to vicious traps left by her and imply that the conflict has done ruinous damage in the past, but at the same time that’s the only place where we start to see the FRF’s dark side and it’s paired with seeing the dark side of the government forces as well when Franca is captured (temporarily) and tortured. It implies not particular fault, but a cycle of vengeance the perpetuation of which is the problem.
Long story short, while the material with our baddies is really good material, I think it needed a little more balance.
To that end, I actually find myself considering Il Teatrino an overall downgrade, rather than an upgrade. It’s not season 1 with a slightly stronger spine, it’s its own thing that doesn’t quite reach the highs that made its first version so nice. That said, it’s still quite good. In my mind, Il Teatrino is worth an A-. If you watched the first season and wanted more, especially if you wanted a little more gunslinging in your Gunslinger Girl, I’d strongly recommend going ahead and continuing the ride.