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?
The opening is extremely promising.
Blackfox throws viewers right in the action, showing a little girl
being chased through darkened hallways by some kind of ninja is a
snarling, black fox mask. After some time fleeing, though, the
little girl shows she knows her stuff and starts to turn the tables,
using blinding powder, flips, kicks, traps, and even bombs to fight
back against the masked assailant. For four whole minutes – which
may not sound like much written out but is actually an eternity in
film time, especially right at the very start of a production –
there is no dialogue of any kind, and the entire story is told
through the visuals and animation. It’s actually kind of beautiful;
you could probably cut after the first couple lines and have a good
short film. However, Blackfox continues.
The little girl is Rikka, who will grow up into our main character and who I will just call Rikka even though she uses a bunch of other names over the course of the show. We see that the long intro was a “game of hide and seek” (obvious ninja training) between her and her grandfather, the current head of the ninja clan and seemingly its only active member. Rikka then goes to visit her father in his private lab and is introduced to the animal drones: a dog, eagle, and flying squirrel who she’s to make friends with, a task made easier by the fact that they can talk as well as cloak themselves in the image of flesh and blood animals. Rikka’s basic conflict, to begin with, is that she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps as a scientist, while her grandfather expects her to take up the family’s ninja ways.
Cut immediately to years later. Rikka
is on her way home from taking entrance exams to go to the school her
father went to, and is also expecting a cool sixteenth birthday
party. Little does she know that there are some party crashers: a
vague former business associate of her father who wants to use the
animal drone technology for evil… and his private army of military
goons. By the time Rikka arrives the ninja dojo is smashed and
there’s plenty of blood everywhere. She goes down to meet up with
her father in his lab, but the enemy forces catch them there and a
clash occurs with both standard gun-toting goons and a mysterious
cloaked figure with psychokinetic powers, in which both Rikka’s
father and grandfather are brutally killed right in front of her.
The animal drones, at least, manage to get her the heck out of there
and take her to a little safehouse where she throws away her future
and name to take up grandpa’s fox mask and set off on a quest for
revenge
Cut immediately to six months later
(though you wouldn’t know quite how long at first) and Rikka is now
working as some kind of apprentice detective, using her ninja skills
and high-tech gadgets to find rich peoples’ cats while looking into
her own case on the side and rooming with a kind of odd little girl.
Luckily enough, it seems like she’s about to get a break in that
murdered-dad-and-grandpa case.
At this point, the astute reader may
have noticed something of a problem. It can be hard to really
understand Rikka’s emotions because we skip over what should be at
least a couple potent emotional transformations. We meet her as a
small child only to catch up with her as a late-teens character,
which is practically a different character entirely, and we have to
just sort of assume whether not she actually resolved that whole
finding her path deal. Then she suffers this hideous trauma and is
left broken with nothing but her animal robot friends and a burning
desire for revenge, only for us to catch up with her when she’s
already got a secret identity thing going with a daily life on one
side and a main quest on the other. Frankly, you get one of those;
both is a little grating.
I understand why they did it; Blackfox
would end up kind of bloated, as a film, if we had to actually see
Rikka growing up, and might even bloat if we had to see her establish
herself in the city and start investigating the problem, only to
realize she needs time and money both to actually crack the case and
go after the villains who did this to her. We do, however, still
lose something by not getting that material, especially the second
set of material. Since we come back to Rikka playing around with a
lost cat, it takes away some of the weight and gravitas from her
revenge motivation, and makes her harshness when she actually does
pursue it just a little bit harder to empathize with. It’s just
fortunate that the fast-forward storytelling stops once we have her
in this new phase, because it’s an issue that would compound with
every new instance. I’d be more forgiving, but I think there was fat
elsewhere in the story that could have been trimmed to get some of
Rikka’s transformation into her post-family-slaughtered identity.
After a fairly savage interrogation of
a corporate mook, Rikka ends up outside a facility that’s supposed to
be tied to the raid on her family – during the day, so she’s
pretending to be an upstanding citizen – and gets accosted by a
guard. While she’s failing to talk her way out of the situation,
help comes in the form of a young woman on the other side of the
fence, who gives her a plausible excuse and sends the guard off.
After that the two girls spend some time playing chess and Rikka kind
of feels like she’s made a friend, though the other girl, Mia, is
quick to warn her that hanging around the facility might not be a
great idea.
That night, Rikka heads out to raid the
facility properly, presumably having gathered all the intel she
needed about things like the camera system on her daytime visit (She
does, after all, have robot animal friends to scan things). As she
breaks in, we also see a mad scientist alluded to earlier, one with a
grudge against Rikka’s father, start to perform experiments on his
psychic-powered daughter. If you already guessed that’s both Mia and
the mysterious psychic who aided and abetted killing Rikka’s family,
you get no prize because it’s really, blindingly obvious from the
moment we see Mia in the first place. True, they did kind of hide
her face on the raid, but not well. Surprises are not exactly
Blackfox’s strong suit, but then on the other hand I’m not sure it’s
even really trying for most of those sorts of moments.
Rikka reaches the bowels of the
instillation and finds that evil applications of her father’s
technology are not in short supply, in the form of car-sized,
six-legged, wolf-like robots with frickin’ rotary cannons attached to
their heads. But before she can blow it all to hell, Mad Scientist
and Mia show up, and while Mia doesn’t want to fight after she
recognizes Rikka, dear dad has a mind-controlling shock collar on her
to give the action scene an explosive climax anyway – betraying her
clearly already tenuous trust in the process, but he doesn’t exactly
care about that. Overall, the fight was pretty well done, with lots
of dynamic motion and a good ebb and flow to the fighting, but I’d be
lying if I didn’t say there weren’t a couple of moments that felt
kind of paint-by-numbers. For instance, there’s a moment in the
fight where Rikka has an opportunity to kill Mia (after finally
noticing who that is) and of course she’s not allowed to actually do
it. Credit where it’s due, though, Rikka’s rage and grief are given
a more serious treatment than they would be in some other pieces
since she has to be stopped by her dog robot friend, rather than just
stopping herself. Though on the other hand, in the aftermath of the
fight, swept out of the collapsing building by flood water, she has
another chance to off Mia and actually resolves, for herself, to not
do it then.
Instead, Rikka takes Mia back to her
apartment to convalesce, and while Rikka’s demeanor is initially
frostier than Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell (… that’s pretty frigid.
Read a book.), some big eyes from her cute little roommate convince
both of them to stick around for a little bit.
The mad scientist dad also escaped the
disaster scenario, which is about when I realized for certain what
I’d already expected: Blackfox is never going to get to its real
villain. The corporate former co-worker of Rikka’s dad, who actually
led the raid on the lab and incited the murder and mayhem, briefly
alluded to the mad scientist having been driven mad by dad’s genius,
but set himself up even more, declaring he’d “changed” and giving
a positively demonic lop-sided grin before sending in the armed
forces. He’s clearly the real target for Rikka’s vengeance and the
‘true’ villain of Blackfox… but he’s never confronted in the movie,
much less defeated. More on that later.
Mia calls her dad and tries to convince
him to turn over a new leaf, saying they should turn themselves in
and try to make things right, to which dad agrees, asking where she
is so they can meet up. After a moment of hesitation, smoothed over
with promises to give up his research and not make her sad again, Mia
gives him the location.
If you immediately guessed that he’s
going to betray his daughter’s trust again, you also get no prize.
The mad scientist then uses a
jury-rigged apparatus to give himself psychokinetic powers, and what
shows up is one of those big mech wolves, which fairly effectively
shoots up the entire apartment complex in another decent action scene
before Rikka makes the surprisingly intelligent decision to lead the
incredibly dangerous death machine out specifically and emphatically
for her blood away from populated areas – namely to the expansive
set for our final conflict, Rikka’s old ruined home/ninja dojo on the
outskirts of town.
What follows is a shockingly long
series of action sequences. They are still good sequences, but
pretty much everything from the 1-hour mark of this hour and a half
(including credits) movie, when the big robot appears at the
apartment, almost to the end is battle after battle. Not totally
without pause, but without a good chance to catch your breath between
moments of violence and moments with the immediate threat of
violence, since it is all one big sequence. And that’s something I
am… so very torn on. On one hand, that is exactly what you want
out of the climax of an action film; lots of cool fighting,
explosions, super-powers, and so on. On the other hand, it can be a
bit much, and not every moment lands as well as it could because
there are so many in such quick succession.
The basic layout is this: After they
lead the mecha to the ruins, Rikka and Mia fairly quickly disable it.
Almost immediately, the mad scientist catches up with them and
knocks Rikka out cold with a blast of psychokinetic power (leveling
most of a building in the process). Mia confronts her father about
his constant betrayals to protect Rikka, and is rather coldly told
off. They start to fight, ascending into the sky to have a powers
duel in the background while Rikka wakes up. Her animal drone
friends clue her in that the flashes in the sky mean she has to help
Mia, but before she can she stumbles on something in a lower level of
the ruins: A holographic recorded message from her dad and grandpa,
basically telling her that she has the brains and skills to inherit
both her father’s principled scientific endeavor and the mantle of
the ninja clan, and the two of them worked together on an especially
awesome birthday gift for that interrupted birthday. Why the plan
wasn’t to tell her that in person… I guess it’s the techno-future
equivalent of a card. Whatever. Watching the message the whole way
through also reveals the hidden gift: a sleek new ninja suit with all
the high-tech gadgets in the world and a very cool looking black fox
mask in a style that conveniently lets certain camera angles see her
face to convey more emotion than grandpa’s old full-face mask, while
still plausibly concealing her identity if necessary. Power-up
acquired, Rikka emerges to help take on Mia’s dad.
Rikka saves Mia from an oncoming loss
and then fights her mad scientist father, showing off her new suite
of abilities and generally being awesome to save the day, at the end
leaving him lying in that typical movie sort of critical condition
where the target is too badly hurt to move but you the viewer can’t
really tell if they’re about to get up or about to expire. Mia
approaches and she and her father have a heartfelt (if extremely
brief) little conversation where she admits he’s still her father
whatever he’s done (like trying to kill her just minutes earlier) and
he apologizes, seemingly ready to die in his daughter’s arms as Rikka
withdraws to stand atop the rubble that used to be her home… Only
to have mad scientist dad betray his daughter yet again, slap the
collar on her, and for a bonus lap spend whatever life he had left to
possess her body through that machine, sending her into a berserk
fury carrying out his last wish to destroy everything Rikka’s dad
made, especially Rikka.
Class act, mad scientist dad.
The final bout against Possessed Mia is
pretty quick as of course Rikka knows she needs to break the collar
and not hurt her friend, and it’s staged well, jamming in even more
cool action cliches that hadn’t gotten used yet like running up
falling rocks, Rikka giving a shouted monologue about what she’s
fighting for, that kind of stuff… but it still feels like just a
little much. The betrayal moment is the third time in the movie (or
even more depending on how you count a couple scenes) and the fight
is the fourth one to cover the 20-minute span of rolling action.
Rikka already got her new ultimate power and took it to the main
antagonist (of this movie, if not her arc) – without outright
killing him or needing to be reminded to not outright kill him no
less. I feel like the writers could have just made the last couple
hits of that bout feel a little more epic, maybe with Rikka actually
responding to his lunatic babble about her father, and it would have
been a satisfying climax. He didn’t need to come back for one extra
hit. It’s the film equivalent of that jerk video game boss where you
deplete its health bar and maybe even the victory fanfare starts
playing (or at least the boss music cuts out) except, gotcha, you
still need to give the blasted thing one more little bit of drubbing.
It’s a minor quibble, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.
And then we’re into maybe the most
fascinating part of Blackfox: The denouement. I know how weird that
sounds, but it really is curious: Rikka and her roommate get a new
place to stay from her detective boss who was barely in this, the
evil corporation holds a press conference where the real villian
appears, is revealed to be both the president of the company and the
mayor of the city, and shows off being the ever-problematic villain
with good PR while showing the audience his demon smile again in case
you forgot. We see him look at footage from where the roommate
briefly intruded on the final battle only to declare he finally found
AMD00 (when Rikka’s animal drone friends were 01-03.) True, when
Rikka was in the safehouse the camera lingered on a #00 container and
the roommate came out of nowhere post-time skip, but it’s still a
very curious reveal to drop in your last couple of minutes. He gives
some vague menacing talk about Rikka, only for us to cut to Rikka in
her ninja getup and Mia and the robot friend roommate in fancy
costumes of their own, revealing that Rikka has taken up the name
“Black Fox” for herself, vaulting into the night and the end
credits with unnclear immediate goals but an obvious interest in
taking down the real evil as hard as that might be. It’s a lot of
stuff for probably less than five minutes of screen time! And yes,
that is where the movie ends.
I’ve heard that Blackfox was originally
intended to be a full TV anime but that the ambition was scaled back
to a movie, possibly out of concerns regarding its market viability –
it’s an original property, after all. And you know what? I believe
it. Blackfox is a contained and well-structured story as a movie,
but it’s also very clearly intended to be part of something bigger.
Rikka’s story is clearly not done, and what’s left should be much
bigger and harder for her (even with her new friends) than what came
before. It feels like where we’d be about four episodes into a
twelve episode show. And, at the same time, there are elements I
feel might be artifacts of a story originally intended to be told in
a different form. The second time skip, for instance, would have
been much more tolerable if it were an episode break, because you
allow more discontinuity between episodes of a show than between
scenes of a single movie. The fact that Blackfox repeats certain
story beats, like Mia’s father betraying her trust so many times or
Rikka taking so many new names, would also be more forgivable if the
repeated beats happened in units of story that were meant to be
viewed in separate sittings. And the overloaded denouement, rather
than coming out in the space of less than five minutes, would
probably come out over the course of an entire episode after the
battle with the mad scientist marked the end of one, giving the
reveals and changes of status quo time to leave impacts, where here
they have to be crammed into the small space because they serve to
drum up interest for the next installment rather than making the one
they’re in better on its own.
Further, there’s a mechanical
regularity to how Blackfox is laid out. The battle in the
underground lab starts at exactly 45 minutes, not a second early or
late, and while the final sequence isn’t quite at one hour on the
nose, it’s damn close. The beats of both the action and the story
are incredibly by the book and while there are some very creative
ideas in the background of Blackfox and a clear interest in
expressing a style and environment, it doesn’t go too far with
anything that could be seen as a creative risk. The robot roommate
and the implications of the true villain are glossed over or hidden,
while the film is instead predicated on Rikka’s basic (if very
understandable) revenge motivation and a mad scientist who’s
motivation is a fairly single-noted “destroy target”. Blackfox’s
biggest sin, honestly, is that it plays everything totally safe. It
can’t quite grasp greatness because it doesn’t take any creative
risks that we can see… but if you were a creator who knew your baby
would never get to see the light of day in its full glory if this
tester outing didn’t do well, wouldn’t you play it safe?
Speaking of that next installment or
full glory outing… I really want to see it. I enjoyed what
Blackfox had to offer. The characters were simple and not incredibly
deep, but they were also charming and I can’t say they didn’t have
any dimensionality. The action could be laid on a bit heavy, but the
fighting was done well pretty much all the time. The plot had a very
basic motivation from our hero, but could get a lot more dynamic with
the actions of a powerful and engaging villain. I want Blackfox,
with its basic strengths, to have the breathing room to take some
creative risks and show us something really great. The main villain,
the one we didn’t fight, strikes me as some sort of hybrid of slimy
corporate charm, political scope and influence, and clearly something
else for whatever the hell the metahuman power he so kindly hinted at
actually is. The human robot is huge; while there was some talk
about the animal drones being intended as friends rather than
servants (some of it decent) they did ultimately fit into the plot
largely as Rikka’s tools of the trade, while the roommate character
was, even if not dwelled on, built up more as an independent
character with her own interests and aspirations unlike the other
animal drones who mostly want to help Rikka. Mia has a lot to deal
with, too, I want a legit chance to see her come to terms with her
father’s death and his abuse of her that lead up to it. In a lot of
ways, I’m reminded of Little Witch Academia, a franchise that started
with a couple ‘proof of concept’ features (though I don’t rightly
know if they were intended as such) and ultimately bloomed into a
full show that I should spend some time talking about some day.
I really hope Blackfox does well,
because right now it’s B+ material: it does a lot of things in an
incredibly standard way, but it executes its standard elements well.
It gives us what we want to see, but it doesn’t really challenge us.
It’s a good action movie for a younger crowd (yes, I do say younger;
there may be quite a bit of blood everywhere when Rikka’s family is
murdered, but not everyone everywhere has the MPAA’s tendency to
faint dead away if somebody spills ketchup), but it’s too constrained
to be something more.
But what would happen if you took the
shackles off the creator and the training wheels off the production?
I can’t guarantee that there’s be a a marked upgrade, that it would
try new things and launch itself into true A or A+ material, rather
than retreating to the comfort and safety of the formulaic or
stumbling over itself, but I think there’s a good chance it would
actually rise to the challenge, and as a viewer I’d certainly look
forward to anything new that comes out of Blackfox in the future.