Creepy show about turning little girls into hitmen. The idea is a sound one, and while it should be creepy, it is creepy more due to the mishandling of the concept than something they are going for deliberately. Notable, at least for me, for having a theme tune by Scottish Indie Overlords, The Delgados.
8 thoughts on “HATE FUN 2003! Gunslinger Girl”
Comments are closed.
See, I’ve always thought the creepiness WAS deliberate. The show goes to too many dark places for it to be coincidence. The scenes of the girls getting beaten by their handlers are hard to watch – but then I’ve always assumed that was the point. One of my fav shows as a result.
I remember feeling the same about the first episode, but by the second episode I was done with it. Can’t remember now exactly what put me off it, only that it felt like a missed opportunity. Nowadays, I probably wouldn’t even give the first episode a look.
Episode3 – ironically that’s where I was finally hooked. Try it, just on it’s own. One of the most devastating endings in anime history.
Watched. Had actually seen this far before and I’m even less impressed now. If I’d gone back and watched it before writing that post I’d have been even meaner to it.
Has a lot of the same problems I have with the Higurashi shows, the combination of terrible moe characters (I don’t think it’s just the god-awful design. There’s an element of what Welcome to the NHK satirised in it’s creating the most broken little girls so adult male viewers will want to care for them), the grotty animation and self-important SERIOUS-ness means it’s got far too many things I don’t want from my cartoons.
Funny, I’ve always read it as a critique rather than a celebration of moe. Ah well.
Funny, I’ve always read it as a critique rather than a celebration of moe. Ah well.
Exhibit A: You can buy these
And apparently there’s an album with all the characters getting a song to sing each! Now of course, if Golgo 13 wanted to put out a covers album I’d be all over it, but when he gets a model made of him, he’s standing in his underpants, smoking a cigar, not curled up in a foetal position clutching a pistol.
I can’t say I really take any notice of merchandise. We all know how Japan works, and to think merch – whether it’s pedo figures or homoerotic man-dolls – has any reflection on a show’s content is pretty naive.
Exhibit B for the defence: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/gunslinger-girl/dvd-1
“One of the most conceptually repugnant anime series out there” and “Despite the favorable ratings, though, I cannot recommend the series.” Any show that gets a reaction like that out of an ANN reviewer must be doing *something* right.
Seriously though: that’s a review written by an anime fan that was expecting to be pandered to as usual, and that every show would end with the girls eating strawberry topped cakes and holding hands in the rain. Instead he was made to feel uncomfortable by being shown a ‘naked lunch’ moment of what the implications of moe really are. Mission accomplished.