So the Astro Toy column that went up yesterday also contains a miniature review of the Black Rock Shooter anime, and I thought I would talk about the anime in a little more depth than I did. Before you read this, read that.
I called the short a failure, but at the same time I praised Ordet for not making what I expected to see: some half-ass, licensed property bullshit. The show they made was dull, mind, but at least it's well-directed and insistent on being quality animation. I actually think they were trying, here. Ordet has some dignity about slumming it. (Of course, it is a debut work for them, but...)
I've been thinking about what could have led to this show since I wrote the article, and I think it's yet another case of adaptation hell.
You've got this character who's so popular that her anime debut was inevitable: the only problem is that she's a non-character. She's a character design. There's nothing else there, and any studio that took her up would have to figure out the story too. This is actually a really tough proposition.
What if a large portion of the fan base for the character decides that the Black Rock Shooter you came up with doesn't match up with the one that they've been imagining? That backlash could end up reflecting back onto the character, and maybe the whole franchise-in-the-making could crumble on account of some ambitious anime staff.
(As a related aside, did you guys see how Idolmaster self-destructed? They added boy idols to their game, and the fans revolted. From the moment the first trailer (the game is not yet released) showed this, sales for that franchise have plummeted. Ko told me!)
So Ordet solved this problem by making an hour-long anime that actually leaves the character of Black Rock Shooter completely empty: the only thing she says in the entire anime is that she is, in fact, Black Rock Shooter. Keep vague relation Hatsune Miku in mind, too: remember that she is so popular specifically because she is blank: ready and willing to be projected upon.
The business with the parallel universes is where it starts to go wrong. Black Rock Shooter's identity is just attached to this new character, and it's now Ordet's mission to make you care about her. And they figured that a generic schoolgirl in a generic schoolgirl drama would resonate most with their audience. There really isn't a trace of originality in this thing at all, just naked demographic-courting: the script is by the author of Haruhi, the character designs immediately evoke K-On, the three girls are pure, flat archetypes. Such a drama is obviously far, far removed from this character, though, whose sole characteristics are her straight face and her big gun. It's a terrible idea, but it's calculated, and they think it's what you people want.
Of course, now we rightly start to feel that hey, wait, this cartoon is about somebody else entirely! Why am I, the theoretical BRS fan, even here? We're already on really shaky ground, and Shooter has to be involved in some capacity or we don't have a show at all. So there are these gorgeous fight scenes in a crumbling, post-apocalyptic world-- really the only thing that the audience for this character ever asked for-- abruptly forced into the schoolgirl story at times that don't really benefit it. As I said in the review, it's more like they said "it's been five minutes, cut to girls with weapons" rather than this story symbolizing or punctuating the other, which if I recall was kind of intended to be the premise of the whole damned thing.
Ultimately, the show winds up a jumbled mess that's somehow both created-by-committee and way too ambitious for its own good. If Ordet had trusted their audience, they might have been able to make this concept work, but they didn't. They want to both tell a real story (again, an utterly bland story) and hedge their bets by pandering to the fans every five minutes, and that's not how it works. In retrospect, only the production values are actually any good.
If I'd been one of the guys in charge of this project, I would have had them put together 15 minutes worth of fight scenes without any context and called it a day. This wasn't a project to be ambitious about, frankly.
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