New Review: Noir
A new review up... finally. Well, it's not even a new review, I had an old review of Noir but it was based on only 6 episodes. I gave it a worthy, because it seemed to have a really cool start rich with promise, but as I watched I realised how shallow and dull much of the content is. It was really quite a struggle finishing the damn thing. But it was a title I'd never share with Anarch-kitty, so it was good to get it done.

Hm, I guess the review won't be going up immediately... the ftp server isn't talking to me. My bad for ignoring it for so long?

Also saw this anime music video which impressed me rather a lot,
Tra~la~la. Not only does the total over-the-top dramatics of Utena translate well into this format the cutting is brilliant and the sense of humor is rich.

I also got an e-mail from JDM4RSH giving me a good piece of his mind for dissing
Transformers: The Movie. What I really wanted to get across is that you first have to accept the core premise, which is obviously and transparently derived from their toy merchandising, before you can actually appreciate the anime at all. I think quite a few anime fans won't make that leap, being turned off by the very concept of it, so it was worth mentioning. I didn't actually mind the movie (junk planet aside) and I think that was expressed in the closer of the review.

I have some other anime related posts I've ignored for too long. I'll get to those soon, it also gives me more grist so at least my journal isn't as inactive as my page.

I often wondered why I'd started Noir so often but never actually finished it so I
could write a review. Thanks to three weeks stuck in Adelaide with not that much
else to do in the evenings I now know why. By way of color I'll also mention that
this review is written some number of thousand feet in the air... in a seat carefully
calculated to be just too small to be comfortable.

Synopsis

Imagine coming back to consciousness in a high school room, and having almost total
amnesia... absolutely no idea of who you truly are. Kirika, a young school girl is
having just this experience. In fact she's not entirely sure she's even really
Kirika, she has a school ID in her pocket with that name on it, but she also recognizes
immediately that it's fake. It seems that while her memories are lost her skills are
intact, and most of them seem to revolve around how to efficiently kill people, which
don't seem like the skills a high school girl should have gained. She also has the
memory of a contact, Mireille Bouquet... although a deadly and secretive assassin is
perhaps not the ideal person to be asking for help.

Indeed Mireille's idea of mercy is to not kill her until Kirika can regain
her memory. It quickly becomes apparent that the two are somehow linked. Kirika
carries a antique watch which Mireille recognises from a tragedy in her own past.
Meanwhile both realise the strange engraved image, of two women wielding swords,
has some deeper meaning. They're right, but they're going to have to work out what
that meaning is, and how they fit into it, in a hurry. The reason being that all of
a sudden there's a lot of shadowy figures packing guns and not even remotely
interested in talking things over. It seems they've stumbled onto some frightening
and huge conspiracy, and all they know is it wants them dead.

Review

In simple terms the driving energy of this title is not even remotely difficult to
determine. Two girls, one young and one more mature, combine innocent appearance,
feminine nature and intensely skilled cold-blooded killers in a single package. This
is what I call "Girls with guns" and the driving essence of such titles is generally
the juxtaposition between cute young girls and extreme violence. It sounds silly, but
it generally manages to catch the male audience pretty reliably, after all they like
looking at girls and action... why not combine the two?

It's a pretty hard formula to fail with, after all depicting sexy and cool females is
one of the foundations of anime. It's rather impressive therefore that this title fails
so resoundingly at it. Kirika is, when all is said and done, sort of plain and boring.
She starts at a disadvantage of course, Amnesia is great as a plot device but it puts
rather a damper on character development. She's very passive and has to wait on the story
to give her a purpose, and the story can't really do that without giving away the
"secret" that underpins it. Her lack of motivation combines with her plain character design
and lifeless voice to make her feel undeveloped and dull.

This leaves Mireille carrying much of the dramatic weight... but sadly she's only
marginally deeper. We get to see, far too many times, one tragic event from her past
but that's not nearly enough to build a character on. She is clearly intended to be
an extremely experienced investigator and assassin, after all she still has her memories,
but there's little sign of it. She types at a computer to sometimes pick up a clue
needed to push the story forward, but there's no real feeling of her having much of
a goal, or doing much investigation or planning to better their chances.
Indeed this is true of both of them, their idea of planning an assault is to just walk
in the front door and kill everything that moves. Against superior numbers they depend
mostly on luck, and secondly on their firearms skills, rather than actually thinking things
through. Once again, there's no particular feeling of character or personality coming
through in her depiction... and of course there's not much in the way of dialogue
between the two of them.

Okay, so the character work is sort of dull. That would be okay if the action is hot.
All they really have to do is be cool and deadly in some exciting action sequences.
Once again the creators push new boundaries in just how completely they fail in this
regard. I've already pointed out that they don't plan, use varied equipment, or even
particularly work as a team which reduces much of the complexity from the action.
Meanwhile the gun-play has all the raw excitement of a cheap carnival shooting gallery.
faceless extras pop out of windows and doorways just in time to catch a single bullet
from the character who "sensed" they were coming. On the rare occasions the enemy get
to shoot back the lead characters seem absolutely unconcerned, certain in the fact
that they are not going to get hit. There's no sense of threat, of tension.... it's
insanely boring. I don't think I've ever seen such a competently produced anime that
manages to suck any excitement out of every scene. Now I understand why it took so long
to actually finish this title.

Even so, I held onto some hope that it would all be worth it in the end, hopeless
optimist that I am. I sat through the dull and repetitive action. I became bored
with the characters and moderately amused at the creators trying to bring forth some
psychological drama with them. This largely seemed to involve one or the other
character going into shock or moody silence, neither of which were terribly
interesting. I was also impressed that so many of their targets were ultimately
accepting of their imminent assassination. "okay, you can kill me now" is really
not what I expected, and drained the scenes of any intensity. Come to think of it
all the deaths where instant, bloodless and painless. In any case I waited,
reasonably patiently, for the secret behind it all to be revealed, the legend known
as Noir that lies at the heart of the secret society called the Soldats. I won't
spoil it, because I largely couldn't be bothered typing it up, but my suspicions
were confirmed.... it wasn't even remotely worth the wait. I guess I can spoil the
ultimate reward for this secret and shadowy ritual, which was a nice cup of tea.

It really is an unusual title, though primarily only to anime reviewers and those with
masochistic tastes. How they took one of the simplest foundations, were gifted with
perfectly decent production resources, and managed to make such a insipid and soul-less
waste of time is an interesting question. Although Anarch-kitty informed me the same
production team did Madlax where, from what I remember, they managed to duplicate the
feat. In any case I Hope my summary is clear enough, this is a title to be actively
avoided... there's much much better stuff out there.

Production

I've already touched on most elements of the production. It's quite decent, clearly
somewhat budget restrained as environments and action tend to go easy on movement.
I've seen good stories told with less though, and I daresay it makes for some quite
decent looking stills on the box cover. Pretty much everything else is average though.
Character art, technical design, environments and action are all unremarkable and
uninspiring. They do get some points for novelty with the show being set in the
Mediterranean. I assume the voices are decent, but with such average dialogue it's
hard to tell. The music is notable in bucking the trend and being rich and varied.
The Ali project provide a catchy opening song and a lot of solid ambient music which
draws from the background environment while helping to set the immediate scene. I can
certainly recommend watching the opening titles, but that's about as far as I'd go.