Category: Ultraviolet: Code 044

Short Synopsis: 044 betrays her organization.
Highlights: Fixes the movie’s mistakes.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I tried watching the movie Ultraviolet, to get an understanding of why everyone seemed to hate it. Well, I lasted 30 minutes until the pain made me stop watching. That was exactly what I feared that this anime-series would turn out to be, and let me say that the Ultraviolet anime fixes a lot of the mistakes of the movie.

The movie was a horrible mish-mash of random fights and cheesy dialogues. The little story that was there was a combination of the original setting of the comic books and a plot that made no sense, where 044 rescued a child that could have been the doom of her entire kind… just so that she could be saved… or something like that. It’s at that point where I just gave up and stopped watching the movie.

The biggest mistake in the movie was the fights, though. Enemies dress in the most ridiculous outfits, you never know who they are, they’re just… there and supposedly security-staff and they die within 5 seconds. Instead of trying to protect their lives, they go for overly cheesy poses (one particularly bad scene featured them as they surrounded 044, stood around her in a perfect circle and… all shot at her. Combined with 044’s amazing talent to evade bullets (in the movie, at least), what where they thinking?

And here comes Osamu Dezaki, and he managed to successfully put some focus away from the action, and focused much more on the personal aspect of the characters. There’s still action, but the goons that 044 has to defeat are given an identity: you know what they’re doing there. 044 also doesn’t have the ability to dodge bullets anymore, and not all people that stand in front of her have to be slaughtered. This episode shows that she just gives that treatment to the goons from her organization.

Both the movie and the anime feature 044 as she betrays her organization. In the anime, she does so because she suddenly fell in love, and saved one of her supposed enemies, and she’d do more for him that for her organization, which I suspect she never liked anyway. In the movie, I guess she falls in love too… with a 10 year old boy who never says anything and who turns out to be the son of some of the major enemies. I guess, that’s the only explanation I can think off to make her actions there seem at least a bit plausible.

But boy, this surely turned out to be the dark horse of the summer-season. Three episodes and still no subs? I guess that this can be blamed to the bad reputation of the original movie. I can really say that I like this series now, though. My biggest fears, of this turning into Devil May Cry II with a bunch of boring fights were avoided completely. So far, there hasn’t been any trace of filler at all, and with the current storyline, I’d be surprised if the creators would manage to stuff one in.

Short Synopsis: 044 continues her hunt for the mob boss.
Highlights: The subtle characterizations.
Overall Enjoyment Value:8/10
While I’m waiting for Mission-E to appear (seriously, what the heck happened to it?) I might as well watch this one. Since the past Spring season featured a lot of good 13-episode series, and relatively few good 26-episode series, I can blog lots of series this season. If I end up dropping Soul Eater (which seems pretty likely at this point) and Kaiba doesn’t go into yet another hiatus, I’ll be able to blog seven new series. There are lots of promising series this season, and one of them is Ultraviolet.

When I watched the first episode, the character-designs looked familiar somehow, and one look at the staff-list made me understand why: they’re done by the same guy who did the character-designs for Osamu Tezuka’s adaptations, such as Hi no Tori and Black Jack, but he also seems to be Osamu Dezaki’s standard character-designer. The result is pretty interesting, as it brings some of Tezuka’s innocence to such a dark and gritty setting.

I must say that Osamu Dezaki knows how to spice up his fights a bit, even when his budget isn’t unlimited. The screen, split in three is indeed something you’ll either love or hate, but I personally quite like it. It’s got an interesting effect.

In any case, the reason why I’m going to blog this series is that it’s definitely something different, as it tries to look into the mind of a killing machine. Much like Elfen Lied, in a way, but without the gore and the naked children. The thing I was waiting for in this episode is some more development for 044, and not just another action-scene, and that’s exactly what I got. We still don’t know what that strange voice is, but in this episode, it makes 044 save one of her original victims who fell in the ocean.

On a side-note, this series is quite a bitch to try and understand. Tuesday really seems to be the day of complex dialogue: Real Drive, Himitsu and Ultraviolet all have very complex dialogue that really takes a while to understand. In this episode, I’m still not sure what the Mob boss’ story about the vampires was all about.

This series does have its flaws, 044 could have been more subtle in trying to hide her own presence, but I suppose that as an almighty killing machine, she might not have any worries to hide. This indeed doesn’t seem to be a series about a main character, trying to complete her mission, but instead it’s much more about 044 herself.

Obviously, this series isn’t for everybody, and it sure has gotten a lot of bad reviews since it aired. I like it, though. It seems like another solid series from Madhouse, and I’m willing to stay with it for 10 more episodes.