Gungrave: Is Addictive

Gungrave's Brandon Heat and Harry MacDowell

The story editors for Gungrave manipulated the whole series masterfully from the beginning right to the end.  I'm quite impressed.  For me the most unique part of this series was that the story points weren't driven by revenge - they were driven by forgiveness that resulted in irreparable damage to the merciful.  Idealistic individuals would continually commit to ideals that their humanity and their familial bonds would rarely let them live up to.

Here's a list of betrayed ideals because of family/friendship bonds:

• Cid's son messes up and instead of killing his son, Cid helps him escape and as a result Cid is assassinated by the family to save the Millennien Organization face.

• Bear Walkin is unable to assassinate Cid, who is like a brother to him, so Brandon steps in to save Bear from betraying the family by not carrying out the order.

• When Harry breaks the Millennion's code of iron, by planning to assassinate Big Daddy, Brandon is unable to bring himself to kill Harry, because Harry has been his closest form of family since they met at the orphanage.  As a result Harry, who is afraid of Brandon's code of honour, murders Brandon immediately after.

• Big Daddy betrays what's best for the Millennien Organization, by approving Harry's role as the organization's boss, to protect Maria and her unborn child.  Eventually, Big Daddy's ideals force him to confront Harry and demand that Harry live up to Big Daddy's ideals at which point Harry shoots Big Daddy and puts a hit out on Maria and her unborn child.

• Bear Walkin sides with Harry even though he knows Harry has betrayed the organization, because Harry is married to Bear's daughter, Sherry, and hurting Harry will hurt her.  Bear then finds himself pitted against Brandon to protect Harry and it ends up to be in vain as Sherry is shot during an assassination attempt on Harry.

All of these story points escalate the conflict and bring the story equilibrium further and further out of harmony until the final showdown between Harry and Brandon.

Harry's pattern of forgiveness in the face of betrayals & danger is consistent up until he murders Brandon while they are ascending the elevator.  Before that Harry always acted benevolent in similar situations - consider how Harry dealt with Balladbird Lee who betrayed him to help his brother Cannon Vulcan.  Because Harry's killing of Brandon, his oldest friend, would be so out of character the story editors took great care in crafting  the entire episode to build up to it and make it believable.  That episode alone makes watching the entire series worth watching.

Maybe this is one moral to this story.  No matter how strong an organizations hold is over people, no matter how they attempt to replace your family, real family bonds always take precedence over procedural doctrine.  The only way this does not apply is when a person has no close friends or family.

First Look: Adventure Time and Gungrave

I've taken a look at two more shows this past weekend.  "Adventure Time" and "Gungrave".

Adventure Time is good.  I'm about five episodes in at this point.  It's a madcap rubber hose animation set in a post-apocalyptic world.  The character design is very simple and to give the characters more expression, but only when needed, the animators will add more expressive eyes or additional facial features.  The show doesn't really hold my attention for long enough, but then again I'm not one in favour of madcap comedies with random plots and Deus ex machina thrown in all over the place.

I'm eleven episodes into Gungrave and it's more my style.  You can watch the first four episodes for free at Funimation.com to see if you like it and if you do then I recommend purchasing the series.  It's worth it.  I've added an reasonably priced Amazon link to the left.  It's around $37 for the whole series - crazy amazing deal for the quality of the animation.

Gungrave is focused around death. The plot revolves around death and undeath. It's interesting to see how death is handled in each of the episodes.  For good characters there is usually a fade to another scene and then we hear the gunshot(s). In those instances it's really the musical score that takes centre stage to set the emotion.

At this point, the story isn't particularly unique.  It revolves around a mob family fighting for dominance in an ever complicated world.  The one interesting twist is that the creators have added the undead to the mix with scientific wizardry.  I am, however, hooked into the story by the relationship between the two protagonists who are best friends.  The stage is set for an ultimate showdown between the two and I'm ready to see it unfold.  So even though it's not a unique premise the character development has enfolded in such a way as to totally hook me into watching it right to the end.

In terms of character design the really interesting thing is that Harry, the main character who turns evil, has really large pupils - a trait that is usually reserved for good/cute characters - so I'm intrigued to see if his pupils will grow smaller as his power hungry nature deprives him of his humanity.

P.S. Gungrave was produced by Madhouse Studios, who as far as I can tell, are the current cutting edge creators of Japanese anime.  They produced Redline, which I saw at WFAC last November, and the animation in it blew me away.  It was stunning.  Gunther Heinrich gives a very apt review of the film on his blog.

The story for Redline was admittedly weak, generally that would be the end of me liking any film, but in this case it's almost irrelevant due to the artistry used to execute the film.  The word on the street is that Anchor Bay may be the one to release the Blu-Ray for Redline in Canada and if they do I'm buying it the second it's out. It's gorgeous and I'd probably watch it once a day for a week after I got it.  There were about half a dozen films in the WFAC lineup last year that were each reason enough to attend the festival and Redline was one of those films.