Month: August 2014

Flashback: “Noir”, an atmospheric anime

Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 2.13.41 AMBack in the early 2000’s, I was just getting into anime watching heavily, and one of my favorite shows from that time was “Noir”, a mystery about two young women who work as assassins for hire. Their assignments mostly involved killing people who deserved to die, at least as determined by the ones hiring them, but there was also they recurring mystery of how they became killers, and what secrets of their relationship to each other and to their employers would be revealed. One of the girls was amnesiac, who woke up in a room in Japan with no memory, but with a school uniform and ID, and an innate knowledge of how to field-strip, clean and reassemble almost any gun. The other young woman initially worked alone using the code name “Noir”, but she encountered the other girl when both of them tried to kill the same set of gangsters. The younger girl ended up working with the older, and they ended up on various assignments throughout Europe and the Middle East, all the while learning more and more about who hired them and why, and what tied them together from many years earlier.

What most added to the show for me was the atmospheric music of Kajiura Yuki, who wrote music that spanned several genres, but mostly faux-Medieval European music, such as the song in this video clip, “Salva Nos”. Also, there was a recurring theme, where the amnesiac girl had a musical watch which played a theme song that the other girl remembered from childhood. Ms. Kajiura played many variations on that theme throughout the show’s episodes, and it added a haunting current to the scenes of both violence and stillness.

This was one of the first anime in the “girls with guns” genre, which led to two follow-on anime by the same production company, Bee Train, called “Madlax” and “El Cazador de la Bruja”, but with different characters and no relation plot-wise. Other anime in this genre include “Gunslinger Girls” and even parodies such as the currently running “Sabagebu”.

This video clip is a music video of “Salva Nos”, with many action scenes from various episodes of “Noir.” Enjoy!

“Gisoku no Moses”, a delightful anime short inspired by Gene Kelly

Screen Shot 2014-08-25 at 9.22.14 PMLeave it to Japan to combine a catchy Gene Kelly tap-dance number from “Singing in the Rain” with a cute anime ghost girl, to create one of the sweetest, cutest anime shorts I’ve seen to date. A lot of the world seems to agree, since the YouTube video is now over 300,000 views, and the comments section is filled with all kinds of languages from fans.

Screen Shot 2014-08-25 at 9.27.01 PMThe anime short starts off with a lonely, sad ghost girl, who happens to hear two haunted tap shoes singing and dancing to “Moses Supposes” from “Singing in the Rain.”

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She’s hesitant at first, but soon she starts trying to dance with them, and as the song goes on she breaks into a tap-dance routine just like Gene Kelly’s. It’s kind of bittersweet, as the shoes lose their movement, but in the closing we see a shopkeeper (Named Mose!) watching the ghost girl looking at a sign in his window for “Singing in the Rain”, and the last scene shows them in a theater where she’s enjoying “Singing in the Rain” with the shopkeeper!