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.
Our story begins in the hellish future of 2021, where cities are perpetually on fire and the population lives huddled in terror. Funny, despite the whole Apocalypse Bingo gag, I don’t remember this part, nor the giant monsters known as Gastrea that appear to ravage everything utterly senselessly.
Ten years later, the kid who we saw in that Kaiju attack, Rentaro, is now a near-adult and an officer specialized in taking down subversive Gastrea infections in the otherwise peaceful Tokyo surrounded by weird monoliths that pretend to be a wall. Right out the gate, he runs into a weird guy in a top hat and smiley mask who has superhuman powers and claims he’s going to destroy the world. That’s some plot to throw right away!
We catch up with his partner, Enju, a spunky twintailed loli who Rentaro accidentally let fall off his bike on the way to the scene. She’s got an over-the-top thing for her handler, but more importantly is what’s called an Initiator, which at a glance seems to be “Superhuman little girl who can kill monsters”. She faces off against an “infected” person from the incident, who morphs into a giant spider monster with an abruptness that would embarrass even Cagaster of an Insect Cage. Rentaro arrives to engage, using his unobtanium bullets to deal damage, and Enju finishes it off. All in a day’s work.
He then reports to his boss, a girl his age called Kisara, who is just as broke and starving as he is and who he seems to have a thing with, and then a mad scientist lady who exposits at us.
The full explanation seems to be that Initiators are girls born when a pregnant woman is infected with the virus that turns people into Gastrea, giving them the powers of the monsters without becoming monsters. Thus, these ten-year-or-younger girls are mankind’s best hope of fighting back.
Kisara and Rentaro are called to a meeting with all the high-level problem solvers of Tokyo to be given orders to rub out a Gastrea and retrieve a box with unknown contents. There, we first meet a particularly gruff and mean compatriot and his own pet little girl, who he regards as a tool.
Smiley Mask crashes the meeting and introduces himself as Hiruko Kagetane, a cyborg with his augments being the same unobtanium as the monolith walls and Gastrea-killer bullets. He also introduces his initiator, who is supposedly his daughter, and throws his hat in the ring… as an enemy, of course. He even slaughters much of the assembled crowd for good measure by reflecting their own bullets.
The search is interrupted by a crisis with Enju. First, they come across a “cursed child” (Initiator material) acquaintance of hers, who is forced to live as a thief due to discrimination and who is beaten and shot (mostly) to death by dirty cops, with Rentaro unable to intervene. After he takes the girl, alive thanks to regeneration, to a clinic where she might pull through, he’s approached by Hiruko. Hiruko has a briefcase of money as a peace offering and wants Rentaro on his side, but Rentaro soundly refuses.
This leads, presumably through Hiruko and his daughter, to Enju being outed at school. She’s bullied all the way back to the slums, where Rentaro chases after her. It takes about an episode of character development, but he eventually catches up when she dares to return to school, and promises to take care of her. The dynamic in this show is actually a really nice one – Rentaro clearly cares very deeply about Enju, seeming to regard her as a little sister even when she at least claims her returning interests are romantic. Rentaro and Kisara have a more romantic partner style relationship, underscored by a history where Kisara’s grandfather, a rather cruel man and advisor to the powers that be, took in Rentaro after his parents died in the intro cutscene. Enju’s childish jealousy aside, the three of them actually make a kind of nice family.
In any case, with Enju reclaimed, the hunt for the Gastrea that started this mess and the box with it is engaged once more. They find and defeat the monster fairly easily after the skip, but wouldn’t you know it, Hiruko shows to claim the box. Rentaro opts to take him alone, insisting Enju run when it’s clear their foe is beyond them, and Hiruko does a pretty good job trying to kill Rentaro, getting him both stabbed and shot repeatedly before knocking him into a river.
However, it’s hinted as Rentaro is recovered, and later confirmed, that Renatao is himself a cyborg – he lost limbs and organs alike in the monster attack in the past, and our friendly mad scientist put him together with the same tech that went into Hiruko. Thus, he’s able to get back on his feet in time to join round two.
The battle is sure to be important as well, since Hiruko’s apocalyptic claims were evidently not bluster, and the box contained a catalyst to call in one of the unbeatable true Kaiju level Gastrea, which could then topple the monoliths and extinct everyone in the Tokyo safe area. On the way to Hiruko, Rentaro makes friends with the angry guy’s Initiator, who ends up agreeing to play rear guard for him and Enju. Angry guy, however, is dead by the time they get there (or close enough) meaning it’s a two on two between Hiruko and his daughter on one side and Rentaro and Enju on the other. The fight ends with Hiruko seemingly dead and his daughter helplessly mourning him, but it’s too late: the beast has emerged
This brings us to a last act where Rentaro and Enju have to man a decaying prototype railgun (building-sized) in order to shoot an unobtanium round at light speed into the kaiju, which should kill it. With no rounds in evidence, Rentaro sacrifices his mech arm as ammunition, and then since the computer systems are failing has to make the shot manually. With only one try and all humanity (in Tokyo, which is all the humanity we know of) at stake, of course he hits his mark, but it’s a pretty solid climax.
There is one last tragedy, however, as the Initiator from the angry guy, who Rentaro befriended, was badly injured taking the rear and has passed the threshold where she’ll turn into a monster. She and Rentaro have a good talk, ending as he has to put her down.
In the aftermath, we see more of the dynamic between our little trio. Rentaro confronts his adoptive dad/crush’s grandpa about having possibly manipulated the situation into existence in order to prevent a law giving human rights to the cursed children from being passed, but forgives the old man as thanks for saving his life in the past. Then, he talks to the young lady who’s currently boss of all Tokyo about a little topic: he saw the contents of the box, the summoning catalyst for the unstoppable monster, and it was nothing more than a broken tricycle. How does that summon a world-ending monster? Rentaro wants to know, and boss girl isn’t telling for now.
A final stinger puts some extra bitter on the sweet, as it’s seen that Enju herself is coming perilously close to the point of no return.
And if you’re thinking that sounds like a fine plot for a show – a contained story with action, drama, some mystery, and the obligatory cliffhanger ending… we are only at the end of episode 4.
From that you might guess that Black Bullet is based on a light novel, and you would be right. This is a sort of pattern we’ve seen before, where three or four novels, each written as a contained story, are adapted into a season of anime. It worked in Unbreakable Machine Doll and it works here, even if other times it can be a little touch-and-go.
The next arc centers around a job to act as bodyguard for the boss lady of Tokyo as she meets with the boss of Osaka, since evidently there is a much broader survivor base out there. This is important because she’s being targeted by an assassin, who initially unknown to Rentaro is Tina Sprout, a little girl (actually a super-powerful cursed child) he meets early in the arc and shows kindness to, and who is acting under the directive of a mysterious master called Rand.
After her first assassination attempt is foiled, Tina is sent to take out Kisara, which results in her and Rentaro meeting as enemies. Despite this, the fight between the girls results in a realization that Tina, as dangerous as she may be, doesn’t seem mentally or emotionally prepared to actually kill. This fact comes in handy when Enju tries to fight her and gets squashed.
In the mean time, we deal with the captain of the boss’s normal guard being a jerk and a bully, who Rentaro basically has to threaten into shape. He doesn’t seem to have any ties to the actual baddies, he’s just a terrible person.
With some help from the mad scientist and some heavy training, Rentaro gears up to take on Tina himself, knowing better how to actually fight against her. He manages to both beat and talk her down, since she only succumbs to a friendship speech after being drop-kicked through about five floors of building. You could say that having an epic fight against a ten-year-old little girl is a bit off, but the Initiators in general and Tina in specific are consistently recognized as extremely deadly combatants. The writing does some of the work, the choreography does some of the work, and it’s not often in this sequence that our foe’s size comes off as jarring.
In the aftermath, the jerk guards try to torture and off the defeated Tina, but boss arrives and gives Rentaro the authority to deal with them harshly, resulting in Tina being brought in and, after some time, hired on by Kisara to join the cast.
On the whole, this arc felt a bit smaller than the first one, but it’s still a solid one. Also of note is the introduction of another girl who was mentioned but unseen in the first arc: Miori Shiba. She’s the student council president of Rentaro’s school, his financial backer… and Kisara’s clearest rival, Enju’s hopeless little case aside. Her claim to fame is a filthy mouth that doesn’t rival Kotoko Iwanaga but that tries its best, and the fact that having her and Kisara in the same room is almost guaranteed to end in violence. Honestly, I don’t think she was needed for the dynamic, but she’s used well enough.
That’s rectified in the next arc, which has a massive scope and scale, taking up the whole second half of the show. It begins when an aberrant Gastrea attack corrodes one of the monoliths that forms the defensive line for Tokyo. The monolith will fall in a matter of days. A new one is in production, but there will be a gap, and in that time if nothing is done everyone in Tokyo will die.
Thus, Rentaro is called upon to gather allies and join what won’t be police action, but rather a bloody war against unappeasable Gastrea incoming.
While he does this, we also follow up on the whole “Enju needs a new school” thing, as a school environment is prepared in the wastelands with Enju joining a whole class worth of cursed children she hung out with when she was in low spirits and on the run, which Kisara and Rentaro will be part-time teachers for, getting to meet and really bond with the lot of them, bratty questions and all.
We go between setting up the defensive line as the monolith bleaches in color and prepares to collapse, and time spent in town, which has a both that dark cloud hanging over it and the dark cloud of the fear of the populace inflaming hate against the infected Cursed Children.
Rentaro recruits two more Civil Officer teams, Kisara takes on Tina as her own Initiator and joins the fight, we get some really good scenes between Rentaro and Kisara, we get the silliness of Enju and Tina both having eyes for Rentaro, there are chances to breathe when we’re interacting with the school kids… and then that goes to hell with a massive gut punch when some terroristic jerk sets off a bomb on the kids while the adults are away and kills the entire class. Enju has to deal with all her new friends being dead. Rentaro has to identify the corpses of his students, little girls he just a day before had write their dreams for the future that he largely hoped they’d achieve… all because of some banal, mundane hatred. This isn’t the action of a grand villain. There’s little indication that the perpetrator will be found, much less punished given the indifference of the cops when the victims are cursed children with no families. All’s miserable that ends miserable.
And while Rentaro is at his lowest, the unpredictability of the wind brings the ailing monolith crashing down a day ahead of schedule. In the midst of the first wave of battle to follow, Rentaro gets wind of an incoming flank and moves – against orders – to intercept it. This probably saves as much as can be saved, but the unit he left behind is basically wiped out. Powerful figures use this as an excuse to send Rentaro on a suicide mission to take down one of the two ultra-powerful Gastrea in the area.
Rentaro, being Renaro, takes on this mission entirely alone, leaving behind Enju and, after a desperate talk with her, Kisara as well. Naturally his foray into enemy territory doesn’t go so well at first, but unexpected help arrives in the form of a surprisingly not dead Hiruko. His daughter with him.
I am completely okay with this because Hiruko is a delightful ham. He leads Rentaro to his target and even helps take it down. When Rentaro returns, he finds two surprises: one is that the commander who sent him off has died in battle, leaving Rentaro the highest-ranked individual left to assume command, and the other is that Hiruko has arrived to help out in his own special way.
Rentaro whips the forces into shape, initially willing to rule through fear because he’s in a broken state, and gets the technobabble weapon that will, if used correctly, beat the boss of the hour. However, the wormy guy who used to be one of the Tokyo boss’s bodyguards before getting in a tiff with Rentaro sabotages the effort in order to screw Rentaro over.
Satomi fights hard to plant the super-bomb inside the giant enemy, but thanks to the sabotage there’s no gastrea-shattering kaboom. Rentaro says a tearful goodbye to Enju and then knocks her out as he prepares to sacrifice himself to detonate the bomb manually. However, he doesn’t do so well, as his cyborg limbs get wrecked by the same goop that ruined the monolith. One of his friends, a rather cool dude named Shoma who Rentaro has basically regarded as his big brother, takes up the mission.
The boss is killed and all the little Gastrea are no problem without it coordinating them, but all that’s left of Shoma is the same crater. There’s also not a lot left of the defenders of Tokyo, making this a critical yet Pyrrhic victory.
In the aftermath, they confront Kisara’s elder brother (now an important minister), who was responsible for the construction of the Monolith that got destroyed in the first place. Evidently, he adulterated the unobtanium alloy and embezzled the money saved, essentially causing this whole disaster. Kisara outright challenges her brother to a duel to the death. She takes his leg in a bloody display and then with him defeated and at her mercy extracts details on the human conspiracy behind the Gastrea attack that killed their parents. Evidently it was manufactured by all the brothers and grandpa, over dad wanting to go public with all the family’s dirty laundry. But that’s a plot hook for the non-existent second season. It seems like she spares him, but it turns out there was just a long delay on a bisection. Credit where it’s due, I kind of like that Kisara is capable of being ruthlessly scary. I just wish there was time to do something with it, and the rift it puts between Kisara and Rentaro. But I guess all shows must end when often novel series just go on and on.
Thus, we just sort of stop with that note and Rentaro’s mental breakdown at all the death and horror he’s had to face, with Enju now as the last remaining lynchpin of sanity. And since we know she’s not the most stable of touchstones, well, that is what it is: a sword of Damocles still hanging over Rentaro’s head.
So, being at the end of Black Bullet, how does it hold up?
I think there are two topics that need to be addressed when talking about Black Bullet – little girls and abject misery.
On the little girls track, I think this show is fairly comparable to, surprising no one, Gunslinger Girl. That is, there was clearly an aesthetic choice to make the super soldiers little girls, but given how the show as a whole is written I think it was more for the pathos than anything else. I’ve heard this series referred to as “a lolicon’s paradise” but frankly I don’t agree with that assessment. Enju and later Tina are affectionate, and there are a couple implications at Rentaro’s expense (always for humor)… but it comes off as only slightly more sane and stable than Henrietta or Triela’s unresolved feelings for their handlers, and given the overall tone of this show I think we’d be more likely to see an Elsa di Sica incident than any actual motion since when it comes to any sort of romance Kisara is the clear option front and center (even with her last minute teaser of a psycho arc).
And that has to do with the abject misery. Dark material is dangerous stuff. You want to shock and horrify, and want the blows you deal to be felt. On the other hand, if you go to far it becomes parody, unwatchable, or both. And, when you bust out your darkest darks, you need to blend your tones with grace or end up with a schizophrenic patchwork that pleases no one. At the same point it’s a fuzzy line, because each potential viewer has their own tolerances. A scene that traumatizes one person can make another laugh out loud because the second thought it went way too over-the-top, so there’s a range to consider between when the most and least sensitive flip over to no longer finding the darkness connectable in the way it’s supposed to be.
Black Bullet certainly gets very dark. The first arc sees a ten-year-old girl on the receiving end of a headshot so she can die a human rather than a monster, and the follow ups indulge in petty bullying, fantastic racism, getting friends and loved ones dead, and of course blowing up an entire class full of bright-eyed and cheerful little girls we actually spent time getting to know.
I think because most of the violence is directed against, again, girls that norm about ten years old, it hits a little harder than it would if these were adults, and as such it pushes into that shadowy region. Personally, I thought the show did pretty well at managing its expectations so the dark moments landed: we got time with the kids in a way that didn’t make them look like kills waiting to happen, especially since the body count up until then was rather sparing.
Black Bullet doesn’t start out looking as dismal as it ends up being. Sure, it’s a “Humanity on the brink” setup, but there have been loads of those that… never really address the implicit horror of their world, where we spend our time in a civilization that’s pretty much bright and mostly happy and where people are basically good. Black Bullet is not that show. It’s more like Schwarzmarken where war is hell, bugs are bad, and humans may be even worse. Where we’re fighting to save the world but also have to face up to the fact that maybe the world isn’t worth saving for some of the people called upon to do it.
And, like Schwarzmarken, I think it overall sticks the landing.
For those wondering about a continuation, I did a little looking up: the light novels are actually available in English. There are seven volumes, of which the show supposedly covers the first four… but with my research came dire warnings against reading number 7, not because it’s somehow bad, but because it’s the first half of a two-part arc that’s been on hiatus for about a decade now. Having not pursued the series myself yet I don’t know if it’s better to stick to the anime, follow that advice, or just charge forward, but I thought it would be worthwhile to convey.
For a final grade, I’ll give Black Bullet an A-. I was surprised how engaging it was, really and honestly shocked and pleased. It wove together some nice action, some mystery, and characters that came off as being more than generic puppets. It wasn’t the dark tone that sold me on the show, but in managing its darkness well rather than turning into a misery pit like Magical Girl Site it did manage to stand out from its usually-harem competition. It’s not a perfect show – it’s usually pretty predictable which stings a little when it’s doing intrigue and sometimes awkward when it has to shift to and from its lighter, more comedic moments, welcome though those are as relief. The sniper arc, introducing Tina, is probably the weak point overall, a second outing that kind of drops the ball next to what came before and what comes next. But on the whole, it’s a markedly good show, and one that I would highly recommend.