Witchblade Episode 1 - Beginning
OP - XTC (Psychic Lover) - ow, bad OP. Black screens with credits on interspersed with occasionally rather limited animation? Not good.
ED - Ashita no Te (Mamiko Noto) - I don’t get why so many people love this woman, I really don’t think she’s anything special. Okay song, exploding TV sets in animation.
In the near future, much of Tokyo is devastated by a massive earthquake, flooding huge parts of the city - Masane Amaha and her newborn daughter Rihoko are lucky to survive. Six years later, they are on the run from child services; Masane doesn’t have a steady job or a home and they feel she cannot care for Riko by herself, although Riko desperately wants to stay with her mother.
Masane and Rihoko are eventually tracked down despite fleeing on boats and Masane attempting to bust Rihoko out by crashing a police car into the child services agent; Masane is banged up in prison and Rihoko about to get taken away. However, Rihoko escapes and ends up hitching a ride prison-wards with a freelance photographer, Yusuke Tozawa, who’s investigating some weird deaths that the police appear to be trying to cover up; when they get there, however, one of the prisoners has turned into some kind of robot and tried to kill Masane because she smells good. However, Masane is No Ordinary Woman, and the funny itchy mark on her arm suddenly bursts into power and transforms her into Witchblade, a tentacular sword-wielding superheroine; she hacks up the robot easily before escaping, although Yusuke catches her briefly on camera. While mysterious organisations are keeping watch on Witchblade, Masane stumbles away in shock, searching for Rihoko.
You’ve seen one Gonzo show, you’ve seen them all. Witchblade is glossy, has decent action, a few moments of stylish-but-substanceless animation, a heroine with big boobs… it’s all perfectly good, relatively mindless fun, and I suppose that’s pretty much what you’d expect from the show, but Witchblade is amusingly predictable the whole way through; you’ve seen a million shows like this before, really.
It’s not bad, and there are worse ways to spend your time, but Witchblade is unlikely to set the world on fire; I actually quite enjoyed this episode, and wouldn’t really object if I had to watch more of it, but I’ve got no great compulsion to do so, basically.
Check out the show, see if you like it; Witchblade looks to be quite good fun, although I suspect Gonzo will screw up the animation or the ending like usual.
April 6th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Hi! I like your blog, a lot.
Just to point out that erm… Gonzo did do Gankutsuou and Last Exile, hmmm… and Vandread too. And if only for the excellent time me and others had watching those series (and Gankutsuou was quite different from anything else) Gonzo deserves all my respect. (You see I think the generalizations about studios: “this studio is like this and the other one like that” are maybe getting too common and misleading; it’s sad to see people missing on very good series just cause they have heard so much prejudice against one or another studio.) Heh, sorry for the somewhat sulky rant.
(Edo points to the first line he wrote and arigato’s the blog author deeply)
April 6th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
True true, Gonzo has so many series that are poor. Yet it does have the awesome ones too. It’s just like how Sunrise hits with Overman King Gainer and Maihime and misses with the Seed Destiny and Otome. Gonzo has its successes with those the above mentioned, as well as Gatekeepers, Basilisk etc. It also has Melty Lancer, Solty Rei etc generic sci-fi stuff. Why hate them?
April 6th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
In response to edoadoeloric:
GONZO are just not what they used to be. Their “success rate” is more ‘miss’ than ‘hit’ in terms of quality material. Just like Hollywood, they are pumping out an assembly line of products without any thought for creative content - just recycling the same stories/techniques. Those shows you mentioned are the exception, not the rule.
And so with Witchblade, we have just another project for them to showcase how finely tuned an “Animation” studio they are. Maybe they should invest some of that $$$ in hiring some good writers and storytellers for a change - giving their animators something “worth” making.
April 6th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Gonzo, for me, is quite a two-faced studio. On one hand, they’re fond of 3d CG which usually comes out quite bad, they’re prone to pandering to fans (be they fanboys or fangirls), and usually they can’t tell a good story to save their lives. On the other hand, they like to experiment (always a good thing in anime), and when they manage to put together a good creative team, they produce anime like Blue Sub 6, Gankutsuou, Yukikaze or Last Exile, which are not without faults but overall they’re very high quality anime.
Me, I don’t like most of their anime, but after the aformentioned shows I’m always on the lookout for their projects - I may not end up liking them, but there’s always a possibility of finding a gem.
April 6th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
No matter what Gonzo do they have one big flaw, story. Be it fmp, last exile or hellsing story is always as i would have wrote it, weakeast point of the show. Only expection for me is speed grapher.
April 6th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Just for the record, Gonzo wasn’t allowed anywhere near the story for Vandread. All they did was the animation… and it shows.