Gunslinger Girl : Review
After
glancing at the DVD box art and perusing its written synopsis, Gunslinger Girl
sounded like an exploitation film where a clandestine government organization
with a deceptive cover story trains a gang of innocent schoolgirls to use high
caliber weaponry for poking holes into terrorist-shaped blood bags. While the
basic plot matches that guess and nothing seems new on the surface, digging
further into Gunslinger Girl reveals a more dramatic look into the life of
children assassins - albeit children with a few sci-fi augmentations.
Set
in contemporary Italy, the Social Welfare Agency is publicly reputed as a
charitable institution that rehabilitates victims of severe physical injury
using state of the art science. In truth, the Agency is a government
organization that modifies dying young girls into assassins with cybernetic
enhancements. Adult male handlers oversee their development and together each
pair is known as fratello - the Italian term for brother. Throughout the series
the Agency dispatches fratello pairs for wet work missions against terrorist
threats.
Gunslinger
Girl is great from a production standpoint. Italy is beautifully rendered with
picturesque sites looking like something out of the Travel Channel complete
with art and architecture. The music is delightful from the English opening
theme to the operatic ending theme with a variety of scores to match the
atmosphere of the given scene. The English dub thankfully decides not to give
every character an Italian accent and the script tends to match the English
subtitles of the Japanese soundtrack. Probably the main complaint is that most
of the handlers sound alike in the English dub.
As
the title Gunslinger Girl implies, the missions involve the girls getting into
blazing gunfights. The anime shows off a more realistic portrayal of combat
instead of the stylized yet realistically impractical gun-fu shootouts seen in
most action films and anime. The girls' tactics that makes the best of their
limited resources and weapons are as intricate as they are beautifully
animated. Training missions emphasize how tiny details like spent casings
littering the floor can mean death during the real deal. Aside from the
cybernetic little girls engaged in combat, the effort at realism is very
refreshing.
Between
missions, the drama unfolds as the girls shed their cold combat demeanors and
adjust to their enhanced bodies, new living conditions, and relationships with
fellow girls and their handlers. In the first half of the series, each girl
gets at least one episode to shine as details of her life and upbringing play
out in vignettes. Their upbringings come into play during the later half of the
series as they compare their lives to the life of one of their fallen comrades
and during one climatic mission requiring every available fratello pair. The
storytelling in Gunslinger Girl is slower with occasional cuts of action, but
it allows viewers to become more familiar with the characters outside of
knowing what guns they prefer to use. The final episode is quite emotional and
open-ended.
The
fratello relationships between girl and handler is the best aspect of
Gunslinger Girl. Five main fratello pairs yield five dynamics such as master
& servant, siblings, disappointed teacher & struggling student,
coworkers, and even nonexistent. When they are not performing in tandem during
missions, the episodes show the bond each handler shares with his charge. No
two fratello pairings are alike. The handler's teaching determines each girl's
weapons and combat style while a brainwashing process known as
"conditioning" reprograms them into the perfect obedient assassin.
Handlers determine how much conditioning to use, which in turn determines the
personality of the girls and their working partnerships. It is potentially
creepy for a handler to treat her girl as his personal doll, but fortunately
the series never went that route.
Using
children for war has always been an unnerving issue. In Gunslinger Girl, the
Italian government finds nothing wrong with plucking a sick prepubescent girl
off her hospital bed, erasing valuable memories, conditioning her, and
condemning her to a short life as the conditioning shortens lifespan. Compared
to that, the antagonists that the Agency combats do not seem so bad. At least
their henchmen enlisted. Whether due to the time invested training their girl
or actual empathy, most of the handlers are at odds with the Agency and hope
their hard work is not so easily disposable as a used tissue. At least the
girls remain innocently gleeful and happy to be alive-unless that is the
conditioning speaking.
The
dramatic aspects taking precedence over the action will prevent Gunslinger Girl
from being everyone's cup of tea. But it is worth a look before deciding.
Bottom
Line: Gunslinger Girl is a slice of life anime depicting the lives of average
schoolgirls living in a dormitory who gain vocational skills through their
adult tutors while learning about life between field trips. And the girls
happen to be cybernetic assassins working for the Italian government.
Recommendation:
The limited number of action scenes and slower pacing will deter some viewers,
but the interactions and development of the characters make Gunslinger Girl
something different in the "girls with guns" category.
