Kill la Kill is one of those shows where I think I would be hard pressed to find someone interested enough in Anime to seek and read reviews of shows who had not at least heard of Kill la Kill. This was the first work that really got Studio Trigger (who I have talked about several times before) on the map, and helped to set the expectation for what their shows would be like. It’s very important and more than a little crazy, so I’ll try to relate the summary as clearly as I can.
The show begins in a very bizarre high school, with a rather suspicious looking student in a class held by a lackadaisical teacher. In a moment the head of the disciplinary committee comes in, which is a challenge as he’s much larger than the door, seeming to expand to fill all available space on the screen. It turns out that the suspicious student has stolen a “goku uniform”, and dons it to gain super powers. The giant has a a much better version, though, and beats down the thief with great brutality before said student is left stripped and essentially crucified at the gate of the fortress-like school that sits atop a city in the style of a mountain. This is when our real main character, a tough tomboy delinquent type, saunters up to the school bearing half of a gigantic scissor and an interest in finding whoever killed her father.
This is the first couple of minutes of Kill la Kill, if that gives you any idea as to the pace of the madness that will be continuing for the next twenty-four episodes. In this scant time we’ve seen four or five ridiculous things, established one of our antagonists (Disciplinary Committee lead Ira Gamogori), established our setting, encountered an important side character (one of the classmates of the thief, a rather odd girl named Mako who seems to have difficulty comprehending situations), and met our lead, Ryuko Matoi. In the rest of the first episode, Ryuko is introduced to the school, befriends Mako, challenges the Student Council President and tyrannical dictator of the school (Satsuki Kiryuin) over the death of her father, visits the ruins of her family home, finds her own super-power-granting outfit, battles the head of the boxing club (with his special boxing-themed uniform) to save Mako, and is looking forward to making her way up to Satsuki.
Before we continue, let’s talk about that outfit that Ryuko finds, because it’s actually a fairly important character. In a hidden lab beneath her burned-down home, to which it seems like she was being led, she discovers a black sailor uniform that’s animated by drops of her blood. The uniform forces itself onto her, being an animate piece of clothing. It grants her massively improved fighting ability, but to transform into the state where it does so, it needs to drink Ryuko’s blood and when it’s in that state it goes from merely a sailor uniform with a midriff to a legendarily skimpy number that can be best described as a sling bikini with accessories (including overkill shoulder pads).
The outfit is also intelligent, and is given the name Senketsu. Senketsu doesn’t initially know a lot about what it is, but does provide Ryuko some feedback and, over the course of the show, a good deal of support, being perhaps the character she can talk to the most intelligently, seeing as Mako perpetually does not follow the plot. He’s mostly serious and somewhat reserved, a good contrast to Ryuko’s impetuous and intemperate nature.
One further thing to mention before I go on is that, if it hasn’t already gotten across, Kill la Kill is dense. This show wastes hardly any time, leaving most episodes jam-packed with twists and turns; I could probably spend a month worth of reviews picking Kill la Kill apart episode by episode if not scene by scene like I did for Darling in the Franxx, another Trigger production (if only partially). However, I think it would benefit more to look at the broader strokes of Kill la Kill and then talk about how it comes together, rather than trying to highlight every little detail.
So, broadly, the first arc involves Ryuko trying to get through Satsuki’s minions in order to earn a duel and/or answers from the girl herself. She takes out club leaders along the way, and also gets breadcrumbed onto a larger plot. That homeroom teacher who seemed so worn-out and slow, for instance, turns out to be a theatrically over-the-top lech of a guy who is actually infiltrating the school, on behalf of a secret resistance organization known as Nudist Beach. Another individual affiliated with that side also shows up to terrorize Ryuko, but that’s mostly a plant for later.
And, we learn more about the magic clothes: the goku uniforms are woven with some degree of a substance known as Life Fibers, which is what gives them their power. One, two, and three star uniforms (representing elite students, club leaders, and Satsuki’s personal Elite Four, respectively) have ten, twenty, and thirty percent Life Fiber content, resulting in ever more impressive weird powers. It takes a special sort of person to successfully wear higher-ranked uniforms, though, which makes it impressive when we learn that there are such things as Kamui, garments made of 100% Life Fiber. Senketsu is one, and Satsuki gets her own, dubbed Junketsu, that had been set aside for her by her late father. Junketsu never talks and seems much more hostile than Senketsu, kept in check by the fact that Satsuki is just that badass, but they are essentially the same sort of being.
This arc culminates in the “Naturals Election”, where school is closed temporarily and the students are told to fight among themselves in that time to have their ranks reassigned. Ultimately, the top spots at the end of the event belong to Ryuko and Satsuki’s elites, leading to Ryuko having to fight each of the four in succession if she wants a chance at Satsuki. She takes on Gamogori for real, deals with the information-specialist Inumata, bests the band leader Nonon Jakuzure (whose “uniform” turns into a giant flying battlestation, to give you an idea how big we’re going), and then goes for round two against the only member she defeated previously, the sword-wielding Sanageyama, who has become a much tougher opponent.
That fight, however, is interrupted by the appearance of a new character called Nui Harime. Nui looks like a harmless goofball and usually acts like one as well (even if she’s as sadistic as she is bubbly), but she takes Sanageyama out in one move and then goes against Ryuko, revealing that she was, in fact, the one who killed Ryuko’s father. For proof, she has the other half or Ryuko’s scissor blade, which was taken from Ryuko’s father.
Now, Nui doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere – she works for Ragyo Kiryuin. Ragyo is Satsuki’s mother, the head of the world-spanning garment cartel known as REVOCS, and the possessor of one of the greatest leitmotifs you’re likely to have a chance to hear. Ragyo stays somewhat in the background through these early parts of the show, but it’s clear both that she’s a powerful and capable antagonist in her own way and that there’s a deep-seated tension between her and Satsuki even as Satsuki does her bidding.
Nui is also a good example of what I think is one of the more skillful elements of Kill la Kill – the presentation. Kill la Kill is clearly a show that didn’t have the budget to match its vision, but unlike a show like Neon Genesis Evangelion or the like, where the budget fell through at the end and it really shows in a painful and awkward way, the creators of Kill la Kill clearly knew from the start what they actually had the money for. Because of this, there are a lot of budget saving tricks throughout the show. A lot of the time, shots are in a deformed or sketchy style, with detailed focus or detailed motion only when those things are needed. A lot of the stills are gorgeous, and there are even a few shots that had astounding amounts of effort… but most of the show went for less, cutting every corner they could without cutting so deep that the show would suffer too badly for it. A lot of this is in clever usage of the lower quality assets, and that’s what I wanted to point out with Nui Harime.
Nui doesn’t move like an ordinary character. She either jump-cuts into place or slides like a paper doll, bouncing in this way that’s both unreal and that doesn’t mesh with the rest of the show, and in addition to being cheaper than “proper” animation. This ends up emphasizing just how strange Nui is in a way that hits you on both the conscious and subconscious level. Almost every time she’s on screen, you get a deep feeling that there’s something wrong about her, and it’s not always entirely obvious why, but you can recognize it It’s an object lesson in how to take a less than ideal situation and make the best of it.
The battle results in Ryuko going berserk, pushing past her limit with Senketsu and turning into a monster. Satsuki fights her, but is prevented from finishing her off by Mako, who manages to bring monster Ryuko back to her senses and her self.
As Ryuko recovers, the next arc begins, with Satsuki announcing the “Raid trip” to complete the conquests of the other schools in Japan that dare defy her, with the Elite Four and the students in now-improved Goku Uniforms leading the charge. Their forces are further bolstered when Nui (in a very good disguise) provokes a despairing Ryuko, defeats her, and cuts Senketsu to ribbons, delivering the pieces to Satsuki to use to power up her minions. Ryuko keeps a grasp of a single piece and pulls herself together to go after the raid trip in order to get back the other pieces and put her friend back together.
The fighting is properly absurd, with each of the Elite Four going against another school just as crazy as they are. Satsuki joins the fray against a particular Osaka school whose things are money and crabs. Nudist Beach makes an appearance to fight Satsuki, but that turns out to be just to her interest, as she wanted to flush out the Nudist Beach resistance. Satsuki does a lot of damage to them, but Ryuko comes in, recovering Senketsu’s pieces and once again facing her rival, this time fighting to what’s essentially a standstill, which ends when Satsuki withdraws, her strike on the Nudist Beach complete.
After this, we get the real story of Kill la Kill. Yeah, it’s taken a while, but when Nudist Beach takes in Ryuko, we start to get reveal after reveal. It turns out Life Fibers are an alien life-form that came to earth in prehistoric times, guided humanity to wear clothes, and went dormant waiting to one day cover the world and eliminate Earth to spread through the cosmos. This is possibly the most insane explanation that has ever been put to a show outside of parodies, but Kill la Kill is crazy enough that you can mostly roll with it, even getting it when the hour is late. Ragyo, it turns out, seems to be somehow related to the Original Life Fiber, and is taking over the fashion world to eventually take over and/or destroy the entire world. She plans to kick off her evil clothes domination plan at her visit to the School Culture Festival.
There, Satsuki literally backstabs her mother, revealing that she was planning her resistance against this evil scheme the whole time. It doesn’t work as well as it could, though, because Ragyo’s entire body is permeated with Life Fibers, meaning that little things like impaling and decapitation are little more than nuisances to her. During the fight, with Ryuko also shows up to join in on, Ragyo rips out Ryuko’s heart, revealing that Ryuko is also a Life Fiber Hybrid.
In fact, the full story of the family is that Ryuko and Satsuki are actually sisters. Their father faked his and Ryuko’s deaths to raise Ryuko and resist Ragyo’s evil schemes. Thanks to Ragyo’s insane resilience and preparations, Satsuki’s attempted revolt ends with her captured, most of the student body taken over by animate Life Fiber outfits called Covers, and the few escapees joining up with the remnants of Nudist Beach to form an ineffectual resistance against the spread of the Covers throughout Japan, if not the world.
After a time skip, this is still the state of affairs, with Ryuko still out of commission due not to her insides being her outsides (she’s a life fiber hybrid, she got better.), but rather due being comatose from the shock of the revelation. She re-awakens more furious than ever, but also hostile to Senketsu (a hybrid the other way around, coded with Ryuko’s human DNA). True, she’s still able to rescue people from being Covers food (something that Nudist Beach took a long time to work out, with the first rescue being Mako), and she seems to really hate herself more than anything, but that still presents quite the issue.
Without Senketsu, Ryuko charges off into an obvious trap set by Ragyo at the school. Nudist Beach prepares to be the cavalry, but they’ll take some time to get there. As the fighting results in quite the commotion, Satsuki manages her escape, joining up with Nudist Beach and the Elite Four. Ryuko, however, remains fairly easily goaded into acting rashly, and is captured by Ragyo, who sews a modified Junketsu onto her to control her.
Controlled Ryuko attacks the Nudist Beach forces on their ship, and has a drag out fight with Satsuki (who partners up with Senketsu to try to break through to her). Nui shows up and makes trouble, but the fight to bring Ryuko back to her senses is ultimately won by Mako, aided by Senketsu jumping to her, diving into Ryuko’s mindscape to bring her back. She tears away the remnants of Junketsu, reunites with Senketsu, slices off Nui’s arms (which sticks as an injury despite Nui being a Hybrid herself, thanks to using the completed Scissor Blade), and is then ready for the last showdown with Ragyo and the Original Life Fiber, the latter now a giant flying battlestation for Ragyo to ride into battle.
The sisters make their peace and coordinate a fairly impressive strike on their evil mother, but while they manage to gut the Original Life Fiber, Ragyo escapes to her next master plan, a super-Kamui called Shinra-Koketsu, being prepared back, where else, on the school grounds.
The final final battle moves there, and goes through its movements until Ragyo blasts off into space in order to deliver the “World is covered in fibers” signal and Ryuko uses all the power of the remaining Goku Uniforms of her assorted friends to launch herself into space for a last confrontation. She beats Ragyo, sends a command to all Life Fibers on earth to release their humans and go permanently dormant, and extends an olive branch to her defeated evil mother. Ragyo refuses, rips out her own heart, crushes it, and dissolves into threads. Ryuko then returns to earth, but re-entry is a harsh thing, and Senketsu sacrifices himself to burn up as a heat shield. Ultimately, the falling Ryuko is caught by Satsuki (and the entire school and Nudist beach behind her to soften the blow) and the living are implied to live something approaching happily ever after.
So, before a verdict, there are a few things I need to highlight that I didn’t get a chance to make a big deal of in the summary.
First of all, the action. As I said when talking about the budgetary issues, Kill la Kill largely knew where it had to spend its limited resources, and that tends to show in the fighting. Even when the combat scenes are limited in execution if not in vision, though, the one thing I can say about them is that the choreography is top notch.
Part of why I sped through the summary of the show is that so many of the major plot reveals are paced out through combat scenes. The characters fight, the upper hand swapping back and forth rapidly, giving everyone a chance to shine, and often some new revelation about the story is what drives the next action beat. From a pure animation perspective, Kill la Kill can be and has been beaten in its action. But from a writing perspective, it might be the best there is. The combat is marvelously engaging, perfectly paced, and deeply tied in to telling the story. There’s never really a point where you think “Oh, it’s a pointless fight.” There’s always a reason, and something coming through in the action moments. There’s never a point where, even if you know the heroes can’t lose all the way, it feels like the outcome is pre-decided. Ryuko is put on the back foot constantly, and the heroes can lose battles even if you know it’s a story and they have to ultimately win the war. Everything is milked for the drama it’s able to have, which is a good thing.
Because of the deep integration, the show also doesn’t feel like it’s got much wasted screen time. I can point to maybe one episode that’s kind of filler; the rest, even when it’s been one big fight for four episodes in a row, are all germane and useful. This made it challenging to go through the show without giving a blow-by-blow of each and every battle, which is not the level of detail I’m typically in the business of providing, and it should serve as a model of how you want to write the action in an action show: It should be dramatic, because there are emotional and literal stakes. It should be integrated, part of a greater whole rather than taking a time out of the story to fight. It should be tense, because the flow of the battle serves to help the audience suspend disbelief regarding the outcome. It should be dynamic, with an ebb and flow rather than everything just going one way. Good action should be like Kill la Kill’s action. This is what sets Kill la Kill apart from, say, Star Driver that had a seemingly infinite budget to look really pretty but that didn’t understand why combat is interesting or fun to watch and therefore was ultimately terrible in the action department.
On the other hand, let’s talk about fanservice. The costumes in Kill la Kill are absurd. I think a screen-accurate cosplayer would generally be booked for indecent exposure, as the combat forms of the Kamui and later Goku Uniforms (the ones the Elite Four have) push the boundary of any kind of decency. This is even acknowledged in character in the first arc, when Ryuko is initially mortified at what she’s wearing. Even outside of those costuming choices, characters get stripped down pretty often, often with only a conveniently placed object keeping the show clean on a technicality.
All the same… it’s not exactly traditional fanservice. Outside of the transformation scenes, the cinematography doesn’t partake of a lot of shots that really emphasize it. More often the characters are beaten, bloodied, and screaming in a way that emphasizes their role as powerful fighters more than the fact that they’re wearing two scraps and thigh-highs. I mean, the latter fact is obviously still there, but it’s remarkably passive.
The show also manages to own up to the stupid outfits. A big part of that first arc is Ryuko getting over her embarrassment while Satsuki doesn’t have any because she’s comfortable in her own skin and sees no reason to be ashamed in herself attaining great power through a Kamui, whatever it looks like. Ryuko accepting both Senketsu and herself lets her exceed her limits, and it’s spun in a way that I think is supposed to be more empowering than titillating. Where it lands on the spectrum between those is going to depend a great deal on the individual viewer, but just the fact that other reads exists puts Kill la Kill in a different class than shows that have more straightforwardly exploitative fanservice (whether good shows like Trinity Seven or terrible ones like Omamori Himari).
Actually, while Kill la Kill would look at first glance like the most stereotypically male-targeted show there is, I don’t think that the heavily female-centric cast is the way it is for that appeal. This isn’t Trinity Seven or Azur Lane or the Queen’s Blade franchise, it’s a good deal more balanced than that. Ideological reviews and analysis aren’t really my scene, but I’m fairly confident that how Ryuko, Satsuki, and Mako (and Ragyo, for that matter, as the villain) regard themselves and each others and interact with each other as people could provide a positive feminist reading. At the very least, this is a show that rather trivially passes the infamous Bechdel Test even if restricted to well-rounded characters with meaningful arcs.
Now, there is a degree to which Kill la Kill, like any show, is going to give back more or less what you bring into it. If you go into the show looking to be offended and want to pick out everything that’s somehow wrong or objectionable, I have no doubt that you could come up with a pretty good tract. The difference between a good show and a bad one, especially when it comes to a show with material that could be found to be sensitive, is whether or not you can get into it if you enter with a neutral to generous stance. Very few if any shows are good in a way and on a scale where you can’t think badly of them if you prepare yourself to hate them, but bad shows will actively prevent you from enjoying them even if you’d prefer to.
Kill la Kill is enjoyable. Perhaps it’s not the sort of show that would be enjoyable for literally anyone, but it is certainly a show that can be enjoyed and even appreciated for where it shows its intelligence and technique.
All that said, Kill la Kill does have its problems. I’ve talked about the budgetary issues and while Kill la Kill wears its budget remarkably well, it does still technically have some serious problems with fraying on the edges. There’s only so far you can stretch concept sketches and bold bloody red text before the novelty wears off. The lightning pace usually works to the show’s favor, to the point where you sort of accept the point where the show pulls a meta-joke by threatening a recap episode and then getting it all out before the opening credits, a lampshade hung on the whole matter. At the same time, the show doesn’t always have total control of its pace. It’s not that it feels like it’s totally off the rails, but it’s constantly threatening to go that way. This shows more aggressively in the final episodes, where themes are skipped between at high speed and logical discontinuities, rare in the earlier sections, become matters of fact.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that everyone and everything in Kill la Kill is totally insane. At times there’s an almost comedic aspect to it, an almost Python-esque humor of the absurd and unpredictable, except there’s no straight man there to really make it work from a comedic perspective. You just have to accept that while Kill la Kill’s setting is technically supposed to be Earth and may resemble it in some superficial ways, no mortal logic actually applies. The fiction is internally consistent, which is why this isn’t a bigger problem (and, in fact, why it makes a good example as to why consistency is more important than realism), but it can still be a big ask for the uninitiated to just hop in.
This also has a lampshade hung on it when Ryuko tells Ragyo, in one of the final confrontations that “Not making sense is kind of our thing” but lampshading an issue doesn’t make the issue go away, it just makes it clear that we’re looking at something that’s a feature rather than a bug.
In general, most of Kill la Kill’s problems sort out a lot like the budgetary issues: they’re still there, and they do still detract, but the creators knew they were there and how to roll with and mitigate them. The show makes a lot of nice saves, but from a technical perspective it’s probably better to not be in trouble in the first place than to get out of it
As such, the final grade I have for Kill la Kill is A-. There are some elements of the show, particularly the action writing, that are astounding, probably among the best you’ll find. But there are also elements that are broken to the point of being grotesque if picked out and analyzed in isolation. The show’s skill at mitigation keeps it from going lower, at least in my estimation, but both the good and bad have to be acknowledged to make a fair judgment.