Gunslinger Girl, ep. 01-08

The anime is based on the manga, of which I've only read two volumes.

The little tagline above the silhouetted girl and her violin case reads: "The girl has a mechanical body. However, she is still an adolescent child." That basically sums up the series.

The Social Welfare Agency takes young girls who have been in some sort of traumatic accident, rehabilitates them with mechanical parts, and trains them to be assassins. The girls are all assigned a fratello, a partner who is always an adult man. It sounds like a set-up that could lead to many squicky scenarios, and yet, the anime is a very slow character study of all six of the girls and their relationships with their fratellos. Some, like Henrietta, are lucky and are basically treated like daughters or younger sisters. Others are treated as mere tools.

The animation isn't gorgeous, but it's not shoddy either, and the movement makes up for a certain blockiness in the character design and the manga panelling that made the manga more difficult to read. I also love that it's set in Italy and that it has completely gratuitous landscape shots of Florence and the Duomo and Rome and the Spanish Steps and etc.

There's not a real plotline so far. Each episode is very much a stand-alone, and while Henrietta gets most of the focus, the other five girls each have episodes dedicated to them as well, and their Tragic Backstories, along with the Tragic Backstories of their fratellos. (Tell me I'm not spoiling anything. This is anime! What did you expect?)

As a whole, the series seems to be playing off on the girls' innocence (most are pre-adolescent) and their bloody work. Strangely, though I could see this being fetishized, it really doesn't feel like it. We see that the girls are doing it for their fratellos, sometimes in a dysfunctional way, but that's more the fault of the Social Welfare Agency. What they do isn't presented as cool or glamorous; it's grunt work that they do because they have to.

Also, I love that the series can have lines like:

Triela (the only adolescent girl): Man, I hate cramps.
Henrietta (unemotionally): Oh, I never get them. They removed my uterus.

All spoken calmly over a nice cup of tea.

Dokey, Cameron - The Storyteller's Daughter

This is a retelling of Arabian Nights from the POV of Shahrazad. In this story, Shahrazad is the daughter of a famous storyteller and knows it's her destiny to change the course of the country via her stories.

I think the largest changes are that Shahrayar is actually under a curse, much like that in "Beauty and the Beast," in which he can't fall in love unless someone sees his heart and he sees theirs, or something of that sort. Shahrazar's stories are also not the ones in Arabian Nights; these stories are ones of Shahrazad and Shahrayar and their personal desires.

That ended up being my problem with the book -- the additional tales didn't feel like tales from Arabian Nights, they felt like Western fairy tales. And the plotline of the book, which revolves around a potential Big Misunderstanding, felt even more western to me, although I can't actually define what that means.

I think I was disappointed because it didn't feel like the Arabian Nights that I used to read as a kid, which had clever slave girls boiling thiefs in vats of oil, blue djinni, medicine balls filled with poison, marble horses with pins behind their ears, caliphs galore. It felt much more like a fairy tale rewrite, except Arabian Nights shouldn't end up feeling like a European fairy tale. I suppose the author did it to make Shahrayar more sympathetic, because in the end, the story is about Shahrazad and Shahrayar figuring out what they truly want. But in doing so, it took away the magic.

Links:
- coffeeandink's review

CLAMP - xxxHolic, vol. 02-07 (Eng. trans.)

Yay! We have some plot and character development!

Of course, I still have no clue as to what the overall plot should be.

But really, with art this gorgeous, I have very minimal requirements.

( Spoilers ahoy )