Another anime review
27 Jan 2010 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
salineaDarker than Black (Kuro no keiyakusha)
In the near future and ten years before the story starts Something happened. The something involves several elements :
Our protagonist is a Contractor named Hei who works for a mysterious Syndicate in a team comprised of a grumpy old man who doesn't like Contractor much, a Gothic Lolita Doll and a cat. His work usually includes stuff like information retrieval, infiltration and assassination.
Asides from Hei, we also follow a variety of secondary characters, such as a team of cop charged with dealing with Contractors related stuff, led by Misaki Kirihara, a cool and determined female cop; a team from the MI6 composed of two Contractors and one Doll, and a (not very successful) private detective and his sassy, otaku secretary.
The anime is structured as a series of episodic cases, each made of two episodes and perfectly paced as such. The stories range in quality from okay but not original to awesome. In general, this is excellent noir storytelling: the morality of the situation is murky, the protagonists know little of the big scheme of things, no ending is perfectly happy, and a lot of people die. Each story is also great at exploring and developing one specific aspect of the setting or/and of the characters, adding a little thread to the overall intrigue as we go. Eventually the threads of the various stories culminate to the ending, which is quite decent and conclusive thought it doesn't reveal by far everything about the setting (SPOILER: and relies too much on the overly powerful conspiracy which is behind everything for my taste).
I fell in love with the character design upon watching for the few first minutes, and the animation is usually very good (there's some unevenness with some episodes having a noticeably less good animation compared to the well done one where it's stunning), and the urban landscapes beautiful. The soundtrack, by Yoko Kanno, is jazzy and awesome. They are a lot of action scenes which is one of the level on which the series shine, with great direction and relying on the protagonist being smart and using their surrounding rather than overpowering things with magic.
Characters are the other aspect on which the story really shines. Hei is pretty awesome - okay, I always love me a good anti-hero, but he's great beyond that, he's got some pretty subtle characterisation actually, because we see some very different facet of him. In action mode, wearing the mask of the "Black Reaper", he's a fearsome, ruthless fighter. Posing as the young exchange student Li Sheng Shun, his demeanour is friendly, unassuming, a bit awkward and really nice. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, with a good dose of trauma, occasional loss of control, cynicism and genuine caring for people. All the characters of the team have their moment of character exploration (Yin, the Doll, gets one of the most beautiful episode of the series) and are pretty interesting in themselves. Kirihara in the role of the hero antagonist, is also very awesome : obviously competent despite being saddled with failures too many time due to the nature of the storytelling; intelligent, cool-headed and dedicated but not so firm that she doesn't know how to have fun. I love that she dresses so sensibly in a suit with pants (this probably says more about action girls in genre fiction everywhere that it says about Kirihara, of course). The series also sometimes develops some fairly minor characters beautifully; while other semi-regular characters don't get much time to be developed yet still stand out vividly in their role in the plot.
Darker Than Black sometimes plays a little bit like a much more Noir and realistic X-Men. It spends a lot of time setting blocks about the setting; and then deconstructing them and questioning; with of course, at the centre, the question of the Contractors and Dolls' lack of emotions and morality - humanity - or the presence thereof. In itself it's pretty funny and unusual to have the scary superpowered monsters being characterised as overly rational rather than overly emotional and instinctual in a predatory way. While the premise isn't very original in itself, the take on it and the details of the setting make it feel very fresh and intriguing, with a lot of mysteries lurking. One of the theme and motif followed through is the importance of ties between people, and how regardless of the situation people do weave those ties, even when all common sense would say they wouldn't or aren't able to : most of the "sides" we see function as a team of several characters with "nakama" dynamics.
On the gender front... i would call Darker Than Black pretty even. It's got a lot of cool, competent female characters; but it's also got a fair share of fanservice. It kills a lot of female characters - but you know, it also kills a lot of male characters. It frequently passes the Bechdel test despite having a male protagonist so it does do a lot of things right. It's a little bit deconstructive at times, but in very subtle ways that may be just as much as being exploitative if you don't pay enough attention. I also like the fact there's a fairly multinational cast of character in general (with a Chinese lead! In an anime set in Japan!) though it's far from treating all its characters of colours very well.
So, overall a pretty awesome series with a lot of qualities across the board and only flaw an occasional unevenness.
(There's also a sequel, a shorter series, which I already watched but am not sure whether to review right now, or after I might see the OAV that are only being released right now. As it stands, while the sequel wasn't bad, it had an ending that didn't make sense. Perhaps the ending will only make sense with those OVA. Or perhaps I'll keep wanting to bash my head against a wall. Who knows?)
In the near future and ten years before the story starts Something happened. The something involves several elements :
- The sky and what it held has been... changed. The night sky now contains no moon; and the stars were replaced by new, fake ones.
- Two very weird zones of weird stuff happening have appeared at diametrical location of the earth. One in Brazil, called Heaven's Gate, and one in Tokyo, called Hell's Gate. Those zones have been isolated and studied by a new branch of the UN called PANDORA; which has resulted in many breakthrough in technology, notably a lot of memory and personality manipulation stuff. Five years before the start of the story, the Gate in Brazil has disappeared, taking a huge chunk of South America along with it.
- People have started manifesting powers. There are two sorts : Contractors have one kind of superpower, and are compelled to pay a "price" right after using it (called by various names in different translations, but my favourite is "obeisance" for the bad French) which ranges from the weird compulsion to the horrific (there's one Contractor whose obeisance was drinking the blood of babies. Fun!). Contractors also appear to lose all sense of morality and most emotions and only act pragmatically for their own self-interest. Dolls have the ability to observe things through one medium (such as water or electricity), however Dolls, as their name indicates, appear to lose all personality and will of their own.
- The existence of Contractors and Dolls has been hidden to the public, by erasing their memories when they came into contact with them if necessary, but governments couldn't stop many rumours from spreading out, of course. The new fake stars are also somehow related to each Contractor, so they have put a surveillance system in place based on astronomy. A lot of spy agencies have business in Tokyo because of Hell's Gate and they are not usually shy about employing Contractors.
Our protagonist is a Contractor named Hei who works for a mysterious Syndicate in a team comprised of a grumpy old man who doesn't like Contractor much, a Gothic Lolita Doll and a cat. His work usually includes stuff like information retrieval, infiltration and assassination.
Asides from Hei, we also follow a variety of secondary characters, such as a team of cop charged with dealing with Contractors related stuff, led by Misaki Kirihara, a cool and determined female cop; a team from the MI6 composed of two Contractors and one Doll, and a (not very successful) private detective and his sassy, otaku secretary.
The anime is structured as a series of episodic cases, each made of two episodes and perfectly paced as such. The stories range in quality from okay but not original to awesome. In general, this is excellent noir storytelling: the morality of the situation is murky, the protagonists know little of the big scheme of things, no ending is perfectly happy, and a lot of people die. Each story is also great at exploring and developing one specific aspect of the setting or/and of the characters, adding a little thread to the overall intrigue as we go. Eventually the threads of the various stories culminate to the ending, which is quite decent and conclusive thought it doesn't reveal by far everything about the setting (SPOILER: and relies too much on the overly powerful conspiracy which is behind everything for my taste).
I fell in love with the character design upon watching for the few first minutes, and the animation is usually very good (there's some unevenness with some episodes having a noticeably less good animation compared to the well done one where it's stunning), and the urban landscapes beautiful. The soundtrack, by Yoko Kanno, is jazzy and awesome. They are a lot of action scenes which is one of the level on which the series shine, with great direction and relying on the protagonist being smart and using their surrounding rather than overpowering things with magic.
Characters are the other aspect on which the story really shines. Hei is pretty awesome - okay, I always love me a good anti-hero, but he's great beyond that, he's got some pretty subtle characterisation actually, because we see some very different facet of him. In action mode, wearing the mask of the "Black Reaper", he's a fearsome, ruthless fighter. Posing as the young exchange student Li Sheng Shun, his demeanour is friendly, unassuming, a bit awkward and really nice. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, with a good dose of trauma, occasional loss of control, cynicism and genuine caring for people. All the characters of the team have their moment of character exploration (Yin, the Doll, gets one of the most beautiful episode of the series) and are pretty interesting in themselves. Kirihara in the role of the hero antagonist, is also very awesome : obviously competent despite being saddled with failures too many time due to the nature of the storytelling; intelligent, cool-headed and dedicated but not so firm that she doesn't know how to have fun. I love that she dresses so sensibly in a suit with pants (this probably says more about action girls in genre fiction everywhere that it says about Kirihara, of course). The series also sometimes develops some fairly minor characters beautifully; while other semi-regular characters don't get much time to be developed yet still stand out vividly in their role in the plot.
Darker Than Black sometimes plays a little bit like a much more Noir and realistic X-Men. It spends a lot of time setting blocks about the setting; and then deconstructing them and questioning; with of course, at the centre, the question of the Contractors and Dolls' lack of emotions and morality - humanity - or the presence thereof. In itself it's pretty funny and unusual to have the scary superpowered monsters being characterised as overly rational rather than overly emotional and instinctual in a predatory way. While the premise isn't very original in itself, the take on it and the details of the setting make it feel very fresh and intriguing, with a lot of mysteries lurking. One of the theme and motif followed through is the importance of ties between people, and how regardless of the situation people do weave those ties, even when all common sense would say they wouldn't or aren't able to : most of the "sides" we see function as a team of several characters with "nakama" dynamics.
On the gender front... i would call Darker Than Black pretty even. It's got a lot of cool, competent female characters; but it's also got a fair share of fanservice. It kills a lot of female characters - but you know, it also kills a lot of male characters. It frequently passes the Bechdel test despite having a male protagonist so it does do a lot of things right. It's a little bit deconstructive at times, but in very subtle ways that may be just as much as being exploitative if you don't pay enough attention. I also like the fact there's a fairly multinational cast of character in general (with a Chinese lead! In an anime set in Japan!) though it's far from treating all its characters of colours very well.
So, overall a pretty awesome series with a lot of qualities across the board and only flaw an occasional unevenness.
(There's also a sequel, a shorter series, which I already watched but am not sure whether to review right now, or after I might see the OAV that are only being released right now. As it stands, while the sequel wasn't bad, it had an ending that didn't make sense. Perhaps the ending will only make sense with those OVA. Or perhaps I'll keep wanting to bash my head against a wall. Who knows?)
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no subject
Date: 27 January 2010 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 27 January 2010 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 27 January 2010 07:09 am (UTC)Par contre, c'est dommage, pour la seconde saison. Oh, je la verrai quand même un jour, mais j'espère vraiment que les OAV amèneront une conclusion correcte... parce que j'avais vraiment beaucoup aimé la fin de la saison 1.
[Edit] Oh, et je suis contente que tu aies vu un lien avec X-men... j'y ai pensé aussi, mais je pensais que c'était, bah, juste parce que j'étais à fond dans le fandom X-men quand je regardais. Je ne me rappelle plus à quel moment, vers la fin, Amber parle et j'avais l'impression d'entendre un discours de Magneto (ce qui n'est pas un reproche, j'aime beaucoup Magneto ; et puis ses méthodes sont beaucoup plus subtiles, plus proche de celles de Mystique s'il faut trouver un équivalent)
no subject
Date: 27 January 2010 02:07 pm (UTC)ouais c'est vraiment agacant quand ya une fin comme ça Je pense que je le conseillerais qd meme parceque jusqu'à la fin ça se passe bien... mais comme pour le coup c'est pas épisodique du tout, c'est partciulièrement frustrant. Grrr.
Je pense que les parallelismes avec X-Men sont intentionnels en fait (TV Tropes fait deux trois remarques intéressantes sur le sujet). En fait la série fonctionne vraiment comme un histoire de superheros, en terme de gestion des pouvoirs au combat, SPOILER:et de l'antagonisme entre les Contractors, le Syndicat & l'orga d'Amber rappelle vraiment les thématiques de X-Men... sauf qu'elle ne se présente pas comme telle du tout (Hei est le seul à avoir un costume ;) et moralement tout est bcp plus gris.
La deuxieme saison joue avec d'autres tropes de présentation de superpouvoir, notamment avec un perso qui a une transformation de Magical Girl qui ressemble de manière troublante à celle de Princess Tutu!.... sauf que dans le contexte c'est profondément déplacé. C'est assez fort ^^
no subject
Date: 27 January 2010 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 27 January 2010 01:59 pm (UTC)