Gunslinger Girl

Gunslinger Girl is a scifi series set in a near-future Italy, though it makes use of a lot of political issues that occurred in the country in the last decade (so really, it's more like a past-future Italy). It focuses on Section 2, the Social Welfare division, the real meat of which is composed of a group of cybernetic girls, their handlers, and a handful of support staff. Social Welfare ostensibly does what its name implies--and to a certain extent it does, to keep up appearances--but it's really a covert agency designed to take out terrorists and other people who oppose the government. The two anime series, Gunslinger Girl and GG: Il Teatrino, are adapted from the first five volumes of the manga; and there's a very big difference between the two.

Gunslinger Girl focuses primarily on a newcomer to Section 2, Henrietta, and her handler Jose, though the later episodes start to expand on the other girls in the group. The episodes in this series are more standalone than anything, aside from the last 5. It focuses heavily on the girls and their relationships (or lack thereof) with each other and their handlers; to be honest, the first season's pace has more of a slice-of-life feel to it than any other genre--and while I'm not opposed to that (given my fondness for K-On! and Hidamari Sketch), there were times while watching that I was thinking "For a series about cyborg assassins in Italy, this is really slow."

Il Teatrino does not suffer from this problem. While the first episode is something of a refresher on the world and the Social Welfare Division, from 2 onward there's an underlying plot arc to all the individual episodes. This was the season I was referring to when I mentioned the use of political issues earlier (they never actually name the Prime Minister, but it's pretty obviously Berlusconi. It's a little odd to see him in anime-style animation, honestly): the plot is driven by the political dissention between the northern, industrial half of Italy and the poorer, but more tourist-friendly, southern half. There's a lot going on in the background, but the main plot is on Section 2's efforts to thwart a northern faction-affiliated group of terrorists who've hired a pair of bombers to blow up a southern bridge in response to a northern separatist supporter going on trial for tax evasion.

Unlike Gunslinger Girl, Il Teatrino makes a serious effort to invest you in characters on all sides of the issue, both the northerners, southerners, and the government sections, while also showing the damage caused to them all by the cycle of revenge they're caught up in. Episode seven, especially, does this; and since this kind of nuanced, no-easy-answers storyline is why I'm so fond of anime in the first place, that's why I'm pretty much singing Il Teatrino's praises here. That it also fleshes out the other girls in Section 2, has improved writing to the point that there are some truly unsettling moments (almost the entirety of episode four has a Pulp Fiction feel to it, where a sense of completely bland normality wars with the fact that these two men who're talking about their family and girlfriend and lack of vacation time are doing so while acting as body removers for a northern gang, or that when a little girl who just got out of the hospital and is feeling kind of down about being slow asks for a favor from her friend, what she asks is "Will you let me kill one of the bad guys tomorrow?" That one in particular was a salkdfh;lsk moment for me. Unsettling!). And the fact that it also has (what I personally think, I admit) a much more appropriate opening song doesn't hurt!

The manga for Gunslinger Girl started in 2002 and is still going; it's being translated into English by Seven Seas Entertainment and, previously, ADV. The first of the anime series ran from 2003-2004, and the second in 2008. Both have been licensed for English by Funimation (they're everywhere), as has the 2 episode OVA. I haven't read the manga yet, so I don't know if the difference between the two is based on a change in the manga or the fact that a different animation studio and producer created the second one. The change in animation style does take a bit to get used to--and the OVA has a much more different style than either of the anime, which is really odd to adjust to, visually. We don't have the anime here, but both series are available just down the road in Plainfield!

Baccano!

Another post that exists due to talking with our teen librarian Rachel! She mentioned that she'd watched "This show that starts with a B, and it's got immortals," to which I replied ". . . Starts with B, immortals...and it's not Black Butler? Huh. I don't think I know omg do you mean Baccano?" "Yeah, that one." "See, if you'd said 'starts with a B and has a train, I'd've known exactly which you meant!" "Oh, yeah, I guess there's a train, too." "...So you're not very far in." "Well, no, the first episode was kind of weird...."

As you may have guessed, Baccano involves a train. And some people who are immortal. And the first episode is definitely weird! But there is a very good reason for this. Like some of the other series I've described, the Baccano anime is just a small part of a larger fictional universe; it began as a light novel series. The story that the anime covers was lifted from one part of the novels, so the first episode is more like a box frame (i.e. that old English trope, like in Wuthering Heights where the story of Heathcliff and Cathy is couched within the story of Nelly telling their story to Lockwood) that sets up the rest of the tale, and it gets pretty highfalutin with philosophical arguments to do so. I wouldn't say you could skip the first episode, because the non-philosophy parts introduce a lot of the characters and settings; but if you power through it, like the first couple eps of Princess Tutu, the payoff is tremendous.

So let's set the first episode aside and move into the rest of the series. Baccano is an action/fantasy comedy, with three primary storylines and therefore three main locations. The first is, perhaps not surprisingly, on a train. The second is in 1930s Manhattan, and the third is on a ship in 1711. I'm going to try and break this down as much as is humanly possible without spoilers, but the storylines are so interwoven that even the episodes will jump between them.

Let's start with the ship in 1711, because it's from there that the rest of this tale spins out. A group of alchemists aboard the ship are seeking the secret of immortality, as alchemists are wont to do, and clasp on to the brilliant plan to summon a demon to give it to them. What can I say? It was the 1700s. The secret is granted in the form of an elixir, but it comes with a downside; the only way to end their immortality is by being "devoured" by another immortal, a process enacted by placing a hand on the other's head and thinking I want to devour, which transfers all the touched person's memories and knowledge to the touchee, and kills them in the process. One of the alchemists goes power-mad, pulls an Orochimaru, and starts murdering the others for their knowledge; the survivors manage to stop him long enough for the boat to reach port, but once they've realized the danger to themselves, they scatter across the globe and rarely come into contact with each other. As Highlander has taught us, with great immortality comes great paranoia.

Fast forward to Manhattan, circa Prohibition era. Because the formula of the immortality elixir was only given to one person, the one who summoned the demon (who was not the one that went on the murderous rampage), the latter alchemist has spent the last 300+ years trying to create it. Good Lord, this is starting to sound like a logic problem. I should probably be using names up in here, but I wanted to avoid that because 1) spoilers!, and 2) for serious, the Japanglish on this show is some of the most astounding I've ever seen. You'll have perfectly normally named people like Eve and Dallas and Isaac running alongside people with names like Jacuzzi or Czeslaw or Szilard. I had to rely on Wikipedia to spell those last ones. Anyway, in 1930 he finally recreates the elixir--but then it promptly gets stolen by one of his minions, and then moved across the city in a series of comedic errors and turf war battles involving two startlingly bad thieves and some warring mafia families. I'm not going to say who drinks the elixir in the end (that would require names), but I will say that the alchemist never gets it back.

A year after this, another turf war has escalated to the point that one of the families involved summons home their most infamous assassin. Here's where the train comes in. The transcontinental line he takes to travel from California to New York is also boarded by an original immortal (one from the 1711 ship), some more immortals, a reporter, a gang, the aforementioned terrible thieves, and a group of hijackers, who proceed to do what their name implies. There then follows an extensive battle between the hijackers and several of the above mentioned people; and then, like it wasn't bloody enough, the mythic "Rail Tracer"--a monster who reportedly eats railroad passengers--joins in. It's around this point that you think the old woman at the start of the series who pronounced that the train was cursed was definitely understating.

Writing all this out, I'm seeing where Rachel was coming from. If any of that sounds ridiculously complex, just think, this is me breaking down the storylines into their separate parts. In the anime, they're all smooshed together, and not necessarily in order timeline-wise, either. And I just discussed the plot! This completely leaves out all the amazing characters and their interactions and complicated relationships.

The tl;dr version of this post is that Baccano! is hilarious and awesome, but you might need a flowchart while you're watching. Or you could just rewatch it a few times! I did mention it's hilarious, right?

I touched a little on the series' expansive universe above, so I'll just do a drive-by description: in addition to the original light novel series (16 volumes since 2003 and still going) and the anime, there's an untranslated 2-volume manga, a couple drama CDs and a DS game which, alas, is also not translated. Basically the anime is the only part of the series available over here, unless you know Japanese (since, unlike DVD players, the DS is region-free, meaning you could play the Baccano game if you bought a copy from Japan). It comprises 16 episodes that ran in 2007, the last 3 of which are separate from the prior 13 and are more similar to an OVA, and was licensed for English by Funimation. The English voice acting is really good!

We don't have Baccano! here at the library, and it's not available in Evergreen Indiana, either (it can get pretty bloody, after all), but Hulu has all 16 episodes in the subtitled version, and Funimation has both the subtitled and the dubbed ones on its website!

Strike Witches

Strike Witches is a very...unique anime, not so much in its story as in the fact that it's so over-the-top moe that I was never quite sure if it was parody or serious. Whichever of the two, it's definitely an anime produced to cater to guys; but it was an enjoyable show, so into the blog it goes! (Plus, everyone needs to know about the awesomeness that is Major Sakamoto.)

Strike Witches is a military series, set on the coast of England in the WWII era, with one distinction--in this universe, just before the war began in earnest, an alien invasion arrived. The alien Neuroi reacted with hostility when the first exploration/attack was launched on them, and humanity banded together in response as the two sides began a long-running, if patternized, war: the Neuroi always attacked at certain intervals, like clockwork, though (of course) when we join the story everything's starting to change. So, military scifi, basically. Oh, and in the fight against the Neuroi, the military has begun using witches--and does so by creating individual flying units similar to boots that the girls can power with their magic.

I'm not going to lie, I watched this solely because it was recommended by a friend whose taste I consider good. I don't think anything else would have overcome my skepticism of the--well, everything I just listed above.

The main character is Miyafuji, a witch with healing powers whose father created the Striker units (the aforementioned boots), and who joined the 501st Joint Fighter Wing (the Strike Witches) despite her pretty ferocious initial pacifism in order to try and find him. She remains with the unit even after learning he was killed in a raid, though she never really lets go of the pacifism.

It's this pacifism that enables Miyafuji to interact with a lone Neuroi when it doesn't attack on sight. Her efforts to communicate with an enemy combatant, when discovered, predictably have negative consequences in a system consumed with a warfare mindset--especially because there've been efforts within the military to eliminate the strike witches and replace them with a more traditional fighter unit, and Miyafuji's actions gave them the 'legitimate' argument to do so. But the consequences don't stop there, and the last few episodes are really tense as the disbanded 501st races to protect Europe from the fallout of the military's mecha (Japan's go-to term for a mechanized robot) that was supposed to replace the witches and, well, spoilers. But you can make a guess how that played out.

The Strike Witches series is one of those expansive ones with a huge universe spanning several mediums, like Baccano! (another series I haven't covered yet! unbelievable) or Higurashi. There's the original light novel series that's still ongoing and then another that wrapped up in 2009, multiple manga series, and an OVA in addition to the two anime series and the film! Only the anime have been translated, though; both are 12 episodes long and were licensed for English by Funimation. The series I described was the first one, which is available on Netflix and on Hulu Plus (though some episodes can be watched on the free, regular Hulu).