Noir

Last time I said I would get to Noir soon, and now I come through!

Noir is an action/thriller set (mainly) in France (the title is French for “black”). It focuses mainly on Mireille, a Corsican-born assassin, and Kirika, a Japanese girl with amnesia. When Mireille meets Kirika, she discovers that the girl has also been trained as an assassin (despite the amnesia, the training shows through), and they team up to form Noir. Kirika is looking to discover her past; Mireille is seeking the people who murdered her family.

Although Mireille names their team on a whim—“Noir” is the only thing that Kirika remembers, beyond her assassin skills—the decision quickly plunges her and Kirika into the world of a secret society called the Soldats and the power struggles going on within it. They also soon find themselves being tailed by Chloe, another young assassin who was raised and trained by Altena, a high-ranking Soldat who believes the group has lost its way and is orchestrating a takeover to return it to its mythological roots—a takeover that hinges on the return of Kirika to the fold, and a series of increasingly deadly tasks to test whether Mireille is worthy to carry the mantle of “Noir.”

Noir is an older title; it ran in 2001, and was published by Bee Train before being licensed by Madmen and Funimation. Like El Cazador de la Bruja, Noir is an example of high quality dubbing; the action ranges over a sizeable chunk of Europe, and characters’ accents reflect where they are from or located. There is no manga or light novel version of Noir; it is an anime only.