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.
We start off focused on one of the cyborgs, a girl known as Henrietta. Her handler, Giose, is the doting type, and takes care of her more like a real little sister. All the same, Henrietta is a super cyborg who was divested of everything, even her name, when she was reborn into the system, and thus her returning affection takes the form of gunning down terrorists (mostly associates of the “Republican Faction” which isn’t expounded on in this season, later known as Padania or the Five Republics Faction and said to be separatists) in a rampage when confronted with the very idea that her handler might get hurt.
From there, we begin to explore more of our messed-up cast. Rico is the next girl to get a focal episode, and we find that her handler is very strict, and as a result (or perhaps a result of how much and what kind of medical treatment she’s getting) she has a very subdued and servile personality. Still, like all these kids she’s a more-or-less normal girl at heart (that being one of the themes of the show), and befriends a boy who works at a location she’s been assigned to case. The episode focused on her, though, ends in tragedy when the boy responds to a floor where active assassination is taking place, and Rico, being as unemotional as she is, doesn’t hesitate to follow protocol and ensure there are no living witnesses.
Following that, we met Triela and her handler, Hilshire. Triela is probably the most well-adjusted and adult of the girls in terms of her mental state, and her relationship with Hilshire seems primarily professional – a fact that initially causes Triela some grief, as she’s not sure if she’s being seen as a person (like Henrietta) or a weapon (like Rico), and she does still desire something more in the line of a personal relationship. In the case that serves as the backdrop for these feelings getting worked out, the task of the day isn’t assassination as much as abduction into protective custody. Triela actually befriends the mark, a retired mob boss named Mario, and helps him connect with the daughter his self-imposed exile had hitherto kept him distant from, rather than doing things by the book and just bringing him in. She seems to get a pass because her way ends with better results, and Hilshire and Mario both have thanks to offer her.
We then learn the history of the cyborg Claes, who largely seems to hold down the fort. It turns out she was an earlier cyborg, heavily conditioned in a way that kept her cold (like Rico) despite her handler trying to be friendly. When her handler died, it was enough of a shock that she was re-conditioned to forget the details about him (though it’s clear some of his teaching still stuck) and still not assigned to another, being retained rather for medical research into the cyborg technology
After that, we get a pair of episodes that largely get us back to Henrietta and might make you think there’s going to be a main counter-terrorism plot, even introducing a pair of bomb-makers called Franco and Franca who seem set up to be recurring villains (and are). However, these episodes still aren’t fast-paced shooting affairs; they have plenty of time and more than the focus you would expect on the emotions of the girls, and while not devoid of gunplay, the shooting exchanges are typically realistically brief. We do get at least one good chase sequence, but that’s that.
We then have another look into the life of a cyborg. This one, Angelica, is one of the earliest of the lot… which means she has a few bugs, being in poor health and suffering from Altzheimers-like symptoms thanks to her conditioning. Her status brings a great deal of grief to her handler, Marco, who loved her like a daughter before she started slipping away. That’s the episode: a chronicle of their life together, held in place with the thread of a fairy tale about the “Prince of the Pasta Kingdom”, which Marco made up for Angelica at the start, the whole office got in on, and eventually the woman Marco was dating turned into a successful children’s book… and which Angelica can no longer recall, regarding the story that was made for the love of her with wonder at something new. On her side, since she doesn’t remember things properly, she doesn’t know why Marco keeps her at arm’s length, and this causes her some distress.
This episode also enforces the truth regarding a dark cloud that just sort of hangs over the show: none of these girls are well. That means both mentally, where even the least deranged is at least somewhat mentally damaged by the whole “conditioning” thing, and physically in that they have harshly limited lifespans, which will be shorter the more conditioning they have to endure. Other than Angelica’s condition this doesn’t really come up, but its a known fact for the girls as well as the audience and there’s not a lot of hope that medical research will actually do anything about that, at least for the cyborgs that have already been made, so it provides this note of melancholy that’s sort of always there.
From there, we begin the arc that will carry the back portion of the show when we meet a new cyborg, Elsa, and her downright abusive handler. Rico’s handler might be cold, but this guy really doesn’t listen to Elsa at all, causing her severe emotional distress when he calls her to stand down as useless on a difficult mission. Shortly after that, Elsa and her handler are found dead, the handler shot in the back of the head and Elsa through her eye, which is one of the few weak points the cyborgs still have.
The investigation into this pair of deaths takes some time, and features some conflicting interests. One government group kind of wants to be rid of the whole “Cyborg assassin little girls” deal and thus is inclined to try to turn up dirt. The agency is somewhat aware of this, and is thus under pressure to provide a well-supported analysis that concludes Elsa and her handler were killed by terrorists. However, even after his becomes the official line, some agency members keep looking into the situation (from both sides) in order to piece together what otherwise might have happened.
Henrietta, in the end, gives her take on the matter: without so much as saying it is what did happen, she declares that knowing what Elsa must have felt, if she were in the same position – realizing that the person she loved would never love her back – she would kill that person and then herself. This, we essentially become aware of as probably the truth of the matter, a murder-suicide on the part of Elsa and a reminder that we’re raising Yandere cyborg assassin girls, not mentally sound ones.
After this, we get one episode that’s primarily action, as all the cyborgs (even Angelica and Claes) are called in for a large-scale raid operation. It does have some good emotional play for all the girls, especially the two that don’t usually go on field missions (with Angelica ending up hospitalized after this), but by in large it’s just the big action sequence you’d hope for with a capstone.
It is not, however, the last episode of the season. The last episode is an entirely downtime episode where the girls work out getting together to see a meteor shower, involving interactions between the girls and their peers, as well as their handlers, touching on poor forgetful Angelica and Marco coming around on taking care of her properly even as she fades (you’d honestly think she passes away this episode but no, she’s back next season). They play us out with Triela and the others singing Beethoven as the meteor shower goes on and they just… enjoy what lives they have, taking a peaceful moment of solace in an existence defined by conflict. It’s quiet, deliberate, grounded, and charming and is a much more fitting ending for Gunslinger Girl, ironically given the title, than a major sequence of action and gunplay would have been.
Thus, the curtain falls on Gunslinger Girl. The perceptive among you may have noticed I mentioned another season. That would be Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino, produced five years later with some fairly drastic differences that in my mind warrant giving Il Teatrino its own separate review, which will come next week.
For Gunslinger Girl itself? It’s important that this show doesn’t fail entirely at being an action-thriller sort of affair. As much as I minimized them in summarizing the plot, they are there. The action, in particular, tries to be a matter of fairly gritty realism, and it’s because of that that we don’t tend to get too many long engagements. It is, however, still good, and while the longer sequences don’t feature your typical constant gunfire without effect they do have play to them, mostly in the car chase band.
The visual style, overall, speaks strongly to its era. Gunslinger Girl came out in 2003, and it looks and feels like an older anime in its character designs, use of music, color pallet, and so on. I feel like the pacing is partly emblematic of this, but also that it’s just what works for the material. This isn’t like other slow early 2000’s fare that’s just sort of big on long shots for atmosphere to just to save money because it was in vogue, Gunslinger Girl does use its time like a modern anime, just not for what you might have expected it to use its time for.
At the end, I consider Gunslinger Girl to be worth an A. Everything it does, it executes with skill, and its vision is one that’s certainly uncompromising in nature, creating a real world and real life for these girls and the people around them. The characters and their conflicts feel very organic, despite some of it being grounded in literal brainwashing, and while you can’t always get into their heads that might be a good thing seeing how their heads aren’t exactly normal places. The handlers, while not the characters I largely focused on, are also important and rounded. Other than the Elsa Fratello, where both characters are more thinly sketched due to being so short lived, we really understand the inner conflicts of the men involved as well, between the importance of their duty, their natural empathy, and the ultimate position of the cyborgs as disposable things, and we understand that they’re coping in different ways. Honestly, you kind of know as a viewer that there’s nobody who gets out of this story alive and without some serious PTSD. Despite that, the show isn’t traumatizing to view, it’s actually rather relaxed, because it’s about engaging with a difficult, complex world and not just being thrown into a morass of darkness.
What keeps Gunslinger Girl from being an A+ in my mind is really a small thing: it almost but not quite entirely lacks direction. If it either had a stronger main plot, or dispensed with the hints of continual forward progression entirely, I think it would sit a little better. This is quite possibly an artifact of Gunslinger Girl only adapting the first few volumes of its source manga (logical seeing how that didn’t wrap up until 2012), meaning that we’re still in the setup phase. Unlike Elfen Lied it doesn’t feel like just a prologue… but neither does it feel entirely like either a story or an episodic experience. The closest show I’ve reviewed is probably Boogiepop Phantom, but that web ultimately did come together, however insanely. Gunslinger Girl just kind of… stops.
At least, for about five years…