Seeing as I had no confidence in the summer season, I decided to invent a backlog of shows to watch from one of three different areas. The fourth show on this list was Noir a show that aired in the spring of 2001 and which I had never started or even had an inkling to watch before. I marathoned it, and these are my thoughts on the series.
As I was watching the conclusion of Noir, there were quite a few thoughts that came to mind. Why did this have to be the 800th anime I completed according to MAL? Had watching procedurally-generated anime the night before raised my expectations as far as writing is concerned? Finally, wasn’t the whole evil villain having a pit of lava as a trap cliche to the point of parody by 2001?
Unlike the previous posts in this series, I don’t have a personal history with this show going in. I can, however, talk about this particular period in the context of my watching anime. I think back when this show aired I was under 10 completed anime. It was just the nature of anime availability for a high school student who couldn’t get a job beyond punching a touchscreen as people ordered terrible fast food. As far as anime production was concerned at this point, almost nothing from this period has aged well. It was a money pit that few people would throw money at to get a series produced, unlike now where many people throw money into the pit and don’t realize that lottery tickets are a better investment.
It’s that theme that I’m going to focus on for most of the rest of this post. The first few episodes aren’t terrible looking visually, but the dialogue sounded like it was recorded in someone’s bathroom. This seemed a bit of an oversight as the director Mashimo Koichi was also the sound director on the project. That was simple enough to adjust to, since the music was done by Kajiura Yuki in the show that brought her attention. The problem with that is that it feels like she was only paid enough to make as much as she could in just a couple of days so within 3 episodes you’ve heard 90% of the whole soundtrack.
So, the sound isn’t exactly the strong point of Noir, but what about the visuals? The version I was watching looked rather faded in quality, but that was a common issue with shows from that period. A decent amount of effort was spent in trying to recreate the exotic locales where the events of the series take place. However, since this is classic “girls with guns”, the action scenes are important and that is probably the biggest shortcoming I had with it in an entertainment sense. The animation is low budget to the point where very little looks fluid. Also, it goes without saying that the body count of the show is in triple-figures, but there’s more blood in a single action scene in Crime Edge than there is in the entire 26 episode run.
Alright, so what about the story? To give a brief summary, two assassins Mireille Bouquet and Kirika Yumura team up as Noir to try to find clues about the latter’s past. They then end up involved with a secret society called the Soldats who have been playing a long game with their entire lives and put them through a series of ever stronger trials.
The character development is a weak point when it comes to Noir. Mireille starts out as the strong assassin who knows how to do her job smoothly and efficiently while Kirika is just a killing machine. That changes when a character that Mireille met exactly once in her past reappears in her life and she becomes crippled by fear at the prospect of facing a mafia boss. Meanwhile, Kirika develops into a more complete person for a while; even taking up art for a filler episode, but that changes when a Czech/Slovakian (it’s never made clear which one) ex-Foreign Legion officer is offed for the sake of plot. She then goes down the path of indiscriminate killing machine again. Admittedly, it does add a bit of drama when Mireille is no longer 100% confident of situations, but then she has Kirika and another girl Chloe to bail her out. It’s just a bit of a shame that the end sort of turns into jealousy over who Kirika’s friend is, though it’s a bit more complicated by that.
There are a couple of other things I wanted to talk about with this show before I wrap this up. As the show kicks into gear early on and the main pair travel from place to place, they go to different places around the world. The shame of it is that it feels like there was little research into what those places are like, and they feel like some outsider imagining what a place is like. So in Paris, everyone goes to the cafe and Mireille gets on her moped to buy baguettes from the bakery. They go to a New York which is being run over by Mexican gangs and find a building that has a 13th floor. Italy is portrayed with Roman ruins all over the place. It’s like the writer just looked at a travel guide and watched a few 80s movies to determine what each place was like.
There are also absurd moments that are completely out of place which is how I’m going to wrap this up. There’s a moment in the middle of the series where Chloe opens her closet and it pans through her selection of frilly dresses until it gets to the assassin shroud at the end. It would have worked brilliantly in a comedy, but this was definitely not. Finally, there was a confirmation that this was a show for the children:
Favorite Tweet About Noir From My Followers:
@emperorj Take one every time someone gets shot with no external signs of injury. Try not to die.—
(@lvlln) July 19, 2014
Next Time: A scrawny middle school boy transforms into all-powerful youkai by night. Gets all the women.
