Black Cat Episode 1 - Lonely Cat
OP - Daia no Hana (Yoriko) - once more, generic Jpop, but I quite like it, and the OP is pretty damn stylish - you can tell straight away that GadGuard’s storyboard artist is working on this show, it’s got a very similar visual style that’s quite hard to explain - lots of quick cuts and shadowed faces, basically. I like it quite a lot - plus it’s nice to see an action show with an action-packed OP, something you don’t see that often any more unfortunately.
ED - Namidaboshi (Pappy Pet) - dude, this is like Cat Soup on speed (as opposed to on Prozac, like Cat Soup should be…)! While the song is a bit annoying, the animation made me laugh, so it can’t be that bad.
Train Hartnett is an “Eraser” for an evil organisation called Chronos - he’s basically an incredibly skilled assassin using only a pistol to carry out his jobs. With the number thirteen etched into his chest in Roman numerals, he has an incredibly angsty backstory involving dead parents and severe repression. However, he’s not actually in the episode very much - we mostly follow the story from the viewpoint of a broke “sweeper” (basically a “good” version of Train) called Sven Volfied, whose current job is to try and arrest a mob boss who’s just been made governer of a town. Sven’s right eye is called a Vision Eye, and it enables him to predict five minutes into the future, and he sees that the mob boss, Lib, will be assassinated - despite his best attempts to foil this, Train gets away with it anyway because he is The Man, basically.
I’ve never read the original manga which ran until recently in Shounen Jump, and I understand that all this episode was mostly made up, in typical Gonzo-manga-butchery manner. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest, however, as the first episode of Black Cat was pretty interesting in its own right. It IS mostly a case of style over substance; this is never going to be anything except Getbackers with less gay in, to be frank, but Getbackers is a lot of fun and I think Black Cat could be too.
It’s almost an episode of two halves, though - we’ve got a lot of standard comedy interspersed with the darker/action parts of the episode, but the serious stuff is surprisingly directed; as with a lot of series recently, it’s Akiyuki Shinbo-style coloured shadows and odd angles all the way. I’m guessing this is mostly due to budget constraints - compared to other shows this season like Blood+ or Noein it’s nowhere near as well animated, but the style works, and that’s what counts in my opinion (I’m a real sucker for this kind of artwork anyway).
So we’ve got bishounen superpowered fighters, interesting cinematography, stereotypical Taku Iwasaki music (I like his stuff, but the score could have been a third soundtrack to Witch Hunter Robin, and it brought a smile to my face every time the ethereal chorus chanted “Miserere” in a piece of music…) and a plot-by-numbers that should still be fun to watch (obviously Train will end up fighting against Chronos in a long series of battles, but hey, it could be cool). While Black Cat might get boring in the long run, it has a promising start for a show as generic as it is, and I’ll be interested to see where it goes.
October 10th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
If only Speed Grapher got this treatment. Well, in terms of style at least.
October 11th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
well the eps. was not exactly made up… it’s just that this part of the manga was in a flashback, later in the story. So like someone said somewhere else, it seems that Gonzo is going chronologically, instead of doing many flashbacks later on.
good review tho :) and I really like your site
October 18th, 2005 at 3:06 am
Well, the actual events of the episode were made up, but they do fit into the overall story. As a fan of the manga I quite like it, as it gives us something more than just the manga scenes in animated form (which is why I can’t be bothered watching Bleach).