Category: Gunslinger Girl – Il Teatrino

I really, really, really hope that the useless recap of the previous episode that took up nearly half of this episode was used to save some budget for the future episodes, and NOT a sign that the budget for this series has already ran out. Bad animation is one thing, but when the creators start recapping for no possible reason, it’s often not a good sign. Let’s hope that it’s just one thing that went wrong on the production-side, like with the infamous episode 13 of The Third.

Luckily, the second half of the episode totally made up for the first half, when it gives some Background-information on Marco. Something he really needed €after the first season, where we learned hardly anything about him. It seems that he once left his girlfriend for some unknown reason, and now one of the enemies (I didn’t pick up exactly where he fits in the big picture, though) has decided to use her against Marco. This fails with the help of Angelica, though.

This episode was also meant to show how Angelica has grown, and how she’s become much closer with Priscilla. I like series like these, where the main characters aren’t necessarily the ones with the most screen-time, and where everyone gets an equal amount of attention.

Really, this episode rocked! I’d much rather see badly animated, but well-coordinated fights than godly animated, but abysmally coordinated ones. Flashy graphics is one thing, but if all the characters do is hurl flashy beams towards each other until one goes down, then I’d pass. I’m really impressed at how the plot has developed up till now.

You can say a lot about this series, but for me, it remains really well-written. The creators make sure that lots of stuff happens in one episode, and I actually feel that Artland did this better than the first season by Madhouse. The current episode is a Marco/Angelica-episode. One thing I also noticed of the second season is also that even though the character-designs have been supposedly “moefied”, it’s not like the girls are the only ones who get attention. One of the problems with the first seasons was that the guys didn’t really get that much attention, though here it feels that they get about just as much attention as the girls. If the creators really wanted to use the cute girls to sell this series, they’d have included random moe-moments, of which I haven’t seen any thus far.

In this episode, it seems that one of the major subordinates of Christopher gets arrested. The episode starts with a bit of his family, and I like how he’s portrayed in a way that doesn’t care about any clichés. Interestingly enough, there was no sign of Pinocchio, nor Franco or Franca. This clearly was an episode to build up, but still I’ve found this to be the best episode of the second season yet. I really like how this series has been getting better and better with every episode.

Let me place up this warning: if you’re watching Gunslinger Girl because of the action, then drop this series now. Seriously, if you thought the fight in the first episode was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. Artland just doesn’t have the budget to animate nice fights, and in this episode, this shows.

In terms of storytelling, though, this episode rocked, and I really enjoyed it. Triela and Hirsher are assigned to the Pinocchio-case, and they quickly find his home. Before they were able to collect any information, the girl whom we saw with Pinocchio in the previous episode finds out about the things he’s been hiding from her, and she gets taken in by Franco and Franca, who manage to convince Pinocchio to not kill the girl. At that point, Hirsher decides to go and arrest them, even though there isn’t any kind of backup. So indeed, the mission fails, and Pinocchio, Franco and Franca escape, and both Triela and Hirsher end up with some wounds.

The aftermath was quite an interesting one, and it seems that Triela now knows who she’s up against, which has a lot of potential for the future episodes. I also liked the techniques that Franco and Franca used to get away. Sure, the fight was badly animated, but at least some thought was put behind it, compared to some other series which have characters just throwing fireballs at each other without any tactic whatsoever.

Interesting, an episode without nearly anything about the main cast. They only appear at the final minute or so. Instead, the antagonists get fleshed out. We see the two bomb-technicians (what where they again? My memory about the first season is too fuzzy) from first season back, and they team up with a newly introduced character named Pinocchio, who if I understood correctly, works directly under one of the five great families as an assassin.

What surprises me is the huge amount of hate-reactions this series has been getting, but I think that the huge expectations that everyone had about this series are partially to blame. The first season was of a really high quality, like expected from a studio like Madhouse. The second season just doesn’t have the same budget, and instead has had to sacrifice a lot in the graphical department. Artland just doesn’t have the experience nor the budget to make this the visual feast of the first season, and I can indeed imagine that if you had great expectations about this series, especially after waiting so incredibly long, the thing will disappoint. It’s for the same reason why I’m nearly certain that a lot of people will be disappointed by Haruhi II, even though I know hardly anything about the series.

In any case, there’s one thing that for me definitely improved in terms of the first season: the soundtrack. It fits the series much better, and it’s much more memorable than the soundtrack of the first season. There’s also nothing wrong with the storytelling. The first episode did a good job of refreshing my memory with a random fight-scene, and now the second episode starts building up for real, and it’s good to see so much attention to the villains this time.

So, long story short: the first and second season are, just like Solaris said, completely different series, and for now I have no reason to look down upon the second season yet. It knows how to build up and for now, that’s the most important for me.