Bee Train and Koichi Mashimo set the tone for their 00s output with this show. That tone? UTTER BOREDOM. I managed to make my way through one single episode of this at a Minami Con, and it’s an astounding piece of work in how it manages to animate scenes that should be exciting – like gunfights – in such a way as to drain all the excitement from it and replace it with a ponderous seriousness.
As we shall see, the few occasions when Bee Train and Mashimo drop that facade and smile, their animation livens up a lot, but this set the table for a decade of dullness for them.
Mind boggling this was quite popular in the US/UK (Japanese ratings tell a different story). There’s a niche of fans who like the girls with guns “genre”, but this is a pale descendant of the likes of Dirty Pair, BGC, Gunsmith Cats. The other factor is that it’s a show that’s not very “Japanese”. There’s a fair few of these shows made in this decade that were obviously made with an eye on the international market, and this is hardly the worst of them. It’s not obviously grasping and trying to be a “me too” show as some of those shows come across as being.
If I recall correctly, this was in the first wave of really popular digisubbed series. ADV did pretty well with it when it hit DVD, too. That said, its popularity really is inexplicable: I watched the whole thing back when it was the easiest show to get online, and it sucked all the way through. I think anime fans in the West just like to watch mopey, unsociable people be mopey and unsociable and sometimes kill other people. In retrospect, I sure wasted a lot of time with shitty shows during the early 00s.