Gunslinger Girl #1:
Little Girls, Big Guns

100 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 05/17/2005
Reviewed: 07/26/2005

I've mentioned before that I tend to use fan enthusiasm as a barometer for how excited I should be about something. While in the past this has saved me from horror stories like Najica, I feel I might be slipping. Recently I've been watching all too much of Paranoia Agent and its ilk. You know, honest to goodness good shows that somehow manage to be reknown amongst a fandom that prefers its female characters dressed exclusively in things that could double for BDSM costumes. This is not to say that I find these shows distasteful because they're popular, but it worries me that my defenses are weakening. There was a time where nothing in the anime public's limelight could cross my delicate, refined taste buds without a retch of disgust. I've been getting nervous that I've been losing my touch.

Then something like Gunslinger Girl traipses its way into view like a lame elk waiting for slaughter. A show like this is just so easy to berate and debase that I hardly feel right treating it like work. In fact, if I were getting paid for this I would almost certainly spit out something hackneyed like "I can't believe I'm getting paid for this!" As it is, I am not. But that's okay because it's not compromising my enjoyment of the situation. Stuff like this almost feels too easy, like there's a secret spy waiting in the shadows to reveal that Gunslinger Girl was created entirely by a single autistic, hunger-starved Malaysian girl who has only a week left to live.

What we have here is a predictably trite story about a group of prepubescent ladies rescued from various life threatening situations, rebuilt with cybernetics and trained to be excellent assassins under the payroll of the Italian government. One of them almost perished in a fire, one was paralyzed. The "Social Welfare Organization", as it's called, has given them another chance at life in exchange for the total dissolution of their childhood innocence. Plus, they kind of lose the ability to grow up, which is a damned shame. Each of the girls is paired up with a handler, an older man who acts kind of like their mentor. They're trained at the handler's discretion, with very little involvement from the "head office", or whatever.

If it wasn't made by Japanese people, who sort of have a history of messing these sorts of things up, it'd actually appear pretty promising. And, for a show about little girls with guns, it's surprisingly not all that exploitative. There's certainly as much lolita as you'd expect from something like this, but it's not significantly worse than the awkward non-sex scene in Léon, the already lolita-esque movie starring Jean Reno and Natalie Portman. To their credit, there's nary a panty shot to be found.

Gunslinger Girl starts to falter because it just doesn't try. The characters all speak like they've all been doped upon excessive amounts of valium -- sort of a demented slam-dance of Witch Hunter Robin and Noir -- and it's not like they're spouting out Shakespeare. The writing wasn't all that interesting to begin with! Every girl comes off as remarkably the same, even when the show goes out of its way to make one girl seem different because she's somehow going through puberty, which is total nonsense when confronted by the show's self-imposed set of rules.

More problems arise when you start to notice this singular fact, that all the girls are essentially the same and they're all going through situations that we've seen before. Once the shock and awe of a little girl firing a machine gun has passed everything else comes off as remarkable rote, by the numbers stuff. The creators try to get fancy by giving each girl her own segment in the opening acts, but it leaves the viewer with a bad taste in their mouth with the realization that they're just rehashing the same story. Each of the girl's handler is just slightly meaner than the last, just enough to make him superficially different than the one in the episode before, but not enough to make him his own unique character. This is, of course, disregarding the fact that "mean superior officer" was a stereotyped character before this show was even in its planning stages.

For the moment I'm willing to assume that the whole of Gunslinger Girl wasn't created in an attempt to make me look like an ass to the general public. And, considering about 5,999,998,000 people in this world don't even know who I am** I'm probably gonna be pretty safe from ridicule in the foreseeable future, even if I do manage to commit a faux pas like insulting the life's work of a six year old Asian girl with cancer. Gunslinger Girl doesn't offend anything but my sense of what good entertainment should be.

But that doesn't mean it's worth diddly either. It's predictable, it's melodramatic and, above all, it's boring. It brings nothing new to the table and it acts like rehashing the same tired plot over and over again it's going to win it with me. Thankfully the show is able to toe the line enough to not directly offend me, I don't need that kind of stress, but it never really bothers trying to be good either. Watching Gunslinger Girl was like two hours of boredom induced agony, but now that it's over and done with I'm certainly glad that I'm again able to assume the mantle of haughty superiority over other, lesser anime fans.