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| From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ en/7/7a/Black_Rock_Shooter_cover.jpg |
Director: Shinobu Yoshioka
Screenplay: Mari Okada
Voice Cast: Kana Hanazawa (as Mato
Kuroi); Kana Asumi (as Yū Kōtari); Miyuki Sawashiro (as Yomi Takanashi); Eri
Kitamura (as Kagari Izuriha); Mamiko Noto (as Saya Irino); Manami Numakura (as
Arata Kohata)
Synopsis: At junior highschool, Mato Kuroi meets a quiet girl in
her class called Yomi Takanashi, a bond developed between them undercut by Yomi's
relationship with Kagari Izuriha, a housebound friend of Yomi's who has an
unhealthy attachment to her alongside control through emotional manipulation.
This problematic triangle opens out to include Yū Kōtari, Mato's best friend, Arata
Kohata, the tomboy head of the basketball team, and Saya Irino, the guidance councillor
for the students, all connected to another world where a mirror of Mato's
called Black Rock Shooter fights other girls like her with superhuman
abilities.
Black Rock Shooter is a difficult series to gauge, a work with
immense ambition but also one that can be argued tries to bite on too much in
terms of only having eight actual episodes being available at hand to tell a
story, especially one that melds genres for a very emotionally deep plot. There's
also the issue whether, based on a multi-media creation that went through
videogames and manga already before this series came out, this spin-off could
pull off something emotionally potent or is going to collapse into a
half-hearted attempt on its subject matter. The Sword of Damocles hangs over
this series and it's called Puella Magi
Madoka Magica (2011), both of them about the angst of young teenage girls
being filtered into fantastical figures with potentially fatal consequences for
those involved. Despite all the tie-ins and cute merchandising, Magica is an incredibly dark story
which takes the magical girl trope, girls able to transform into magic welding
heroines to fight monsters, and makes it a Faustian pact with real death and
razor lined plot twists that tear the heart out of a viewer's chest. Black Rock Shooter, in its first
episodes, is an odd two sided mirror.
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As the drama of Mato's life
unfolds, her emotional strife is shown through a heightened mix of videogame
action and Gothic surrealism where fantastical feminine figures fire hundreds
of clips of ammo at each other in apocalyptic fairytale wasteland, all of which
is coordinated by Kill La Kill
director Hiroyuki Imaishi. It's
closer, at first, to Zack Synder's
infamous live action film Sucker Punch (2011),
where the emotions of its lead at specific times suddenly surge into fantasy
action mini-sodes where pop culture tropes - school girl outfits, steampunk
zombies, dragons - are all thrown together. The difference is that with Black Rock Shooter, there's an even
more jarring change in that the real life scenes are played as melodrama set in
a high school and that the world with Black Rock Shooter filters through
imagery from that life, not only in the girls mirrored by doppelgangers,
(horns, black trench coats, giant robot fists etc.), but also details like doll
house imagery to macaroons being reinvented as giant explosive ammunition for a
one girl tank carrier.
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| From http://s2.narvii.com/image/lzygghq2wqegtsctovcyoumrexwe3ufe_hq.jpg |
[Spoiler Warning. Skip if you
don't want to know plot details]
As the series progresses, this
mirroring starts to connect more. The truth is that Saya, the guidance councillor,
starts to become sinister as she purposes pushes female students into becoming
more despondent and traumatised, the effect being their mirror selves become
more monstrous and powerful in the other world. This continues in that, in
reality, she is part of an unorthodox emotional treatment where when these
other versions are killed the traumas literally die in the girls in real life,
a form of amnesia surrounding anything that triggers the emotions for them but
able to cope without any emotional pain thereon. It's never explained how the
other world actually came to be, which is for the benefit of avoiding the show
tripping over itself in convoluted exposition it didn't need, but the
streamlined nature of the sole eight episodes means that this is definitely a
premise which could've easily stretched out to a more longer story. Whether
it'd actually work or not is up to debate, but at least with what's here there's
an interesting attempt at depicting how traumas work - jealously, the sense of
being unwanted like for Yomi, heartbreak like for Arata, Mato herself realising
she runs away from any personal pain of her own rather than for others etc. -
made more poignant with the common motif of a childhood book with a very sober
ending about a bird which collects the colours of emotion only to become
blackened by them and die. The decision to depict this through CG aided action scenes is an odd choice here as
the juxtaposition is one you have to suspend disbelief with even if its
expanded upon, a show like Magica
having more of a chance with thirteen episodes to weave these types of genre
combinations more snugly together.
[Spoiler End]
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| From https://dataportdoll.files.wordpress.com/2014 /11/black-rock-shooter-tv-07-cap02.jpg |
What's odd about the action
related scenes is that, while tied up in a perfect bow at the end in terms of
its plot, it's a chamber piece with only six characters of importance, five of
them including the protagonist Mato young teenage girls, Saya the sole adult
and also female. Even though it has other characters, and one sub-plot about unrequited
love for a boy, it's a fascinating story to examine as its literally a
character piece about five girls having to adjust to their own emotions as they
become more adult. These types of subjects are common in anime and manga,
blended into other genres, but this type of drama is not always this
melodramatic as well. It's also interesting that a lot of these types of plot -
about frayed friendships, traumas, running away from personal anxieties - are
usually surrounding female characters only, one of the only distinct examples
of a male going through such severe emotional currents being Shinji through the
Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise. This
is important here as, with a female screenwriter in Mari Okada able to bring
more sincere depth to this type of drama about teenage girls, there is an
unfortunate danger of cliché thick through Black
Rock Shooter which under serves the great concept of such an internal drama
having such a bombastic and frankly absurd outer coating. Sadly the show by its
end used emotional shorthand for its last episode, which mars what good it
builds up beforehand, when it could've taken more risks with its premise, like Magica or a series like Kunihiko Ikuhara's Mawaru Penguindrum (2011), in using its more "out-there"
imagery and genre blending for depicting the emotions of its characters.
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This show does take its emotional
current further into the hyper-emotion which differs it from the clichés,
helping it a lot more - such as Kagari turning into a character from What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)
when she threatens to Yomi to throw herself down a flight of stairs - but
particularly with the ending, where only eight episodes to work with causes it
to have to work hard to tie up the conclusion, there's moments where it falls a
little bit below expectations because of the aforementioned emotional
shorthand, ideas of believing in oneself and others that is something you
really expect Western animation to fall foul of when Japan anime tends to have
a more layered attitude to such a concept even for a happy ending. It makes
sense in anime and manga to deal with issues of adolescent angst, clear there's
a reason why its constantly depicted in terms of reflecting real life emotions
the creators likely had but maximalised to a greater level, but Black Rock Shooter does balance precariously
between the serious and the hollow in its drama because of its ending, spoiling
it a little. For everything that works, such as Saya's kind hearted adult who
offers cups of coffee to everyone turning more creepy as she keeps appearing, its
ending feels like a cop out when it was working up to something more rewarding.
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| From https://dataportdoll.files.wordpress.com/2014/ 11/vlcsnap-2014-11-12-11h03m00s130.png |
Artistically this is an
exceptional show, which helps soften the clichés further with some imagination
behind how the drama is depicted. The other world is suitably freakish but in a
beautiful, part Gothic Lolita but with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic aesthetics
mixed in the best sort of way, anime and manga having a great knack for their
own hybrids of aesthetic and pop culture style to make evocative imagery. From
giant red irises eyes occasionally opening in the sky like a god looking down
on the land to the near monochrome environment of rock chasms and mountains
with mixes of bold colour in-between, the use of metaphors for the real world
while obvious in their depictions helps add a greater weight to the content. By
being so blatantly metaphorical, the disconnect between the mirroring plots is
less out-of-place but entices the viewer to watch on to see how they work
together. Musically, while its J-pop, the score is appropriate melancholic, and
in a great little detail that shows how more taken care of the show is, the
show occasionally plays establishing vocals and notes in the pre-credit
openings that immediately jumps into the song for the opening credits like a
prelude, adding a sense of grandeur to the procedures.
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Whether this all culminates into
a great TV series however is up to debate, taking in a lot of clichés alongside
great aspects to get to its finale. The ending
is a large part of why the show does feel flawed, and if it had more time to be
more detailed, or an alternative ending was written, a lot of the problems in
the show would've been covered up. I still find a great deal to love in Black Rock Shooter, its masala mix of
horned, trench coat or black metal armoured Goth Lolita costumes fighting each
other and high school drama a brave attempt at something original. It doesn't
take as many risks as it should and the problems are clearly visible but it's a
an admirable attempt regardless.
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