Archive for the ‘Madlax’ Category
January 15, 2005 – 12:30 am
Funny how you can get attached to make believe anime characters… that’s what I thought during my run today, musing on how Madlax (the character, and not the anime) has continued to grow on me in the days since I finished the series. She’s so cool, a killer, unstoppable and brutally efficient, but who bears the sin of another and carries that person’s pain. For some reason I just can’t get that phrase out of my mind, “yasashii hitogoroshi” (”the gentle killer”).
I especially like the first part of the opening where she turns around slowly as a drop of water flies across the screen, then suddenly falls back as if shot just as the water touches her forehead and breaks into a spray around her. Awesome direction!
Okay, now that that’s out of my system, I can get back to Noir, the other Bee Train series. You know, these guys really have a thing for guns. The loving detail lavished on each firearm must be collectively worth half the art budget.
PS, you can find a great blog on Madlax at Cinnamon Ass, an anime blog that also looks really cool. I unashamedly took the color scheme and line designs, yes. My apologies to the original blogger, hope you’re not pissed, I was just too lazy to come up with my own at the time.
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January 11, 2005 – 2:12 pm
S P O I L E R S !
Okay, finally finished watching Madlax today. I really chewed through a ton of eps yesterday, like from eps 10 to 20 or so, before I regained sanity and realized that I didn’t have ep 26!! And the way the series was going, with layer upon layer of mystery piled on and promises of huge reversals and revelations to smack your already defragged mind at the end, I think I would have died if I had to be left hanging.
But anyway, I managed after much digging to snag that coveted last ep, and watched ep 24 and 25 this morning (separated by a nap).
Um, okay, how should I say this… First of all, I really liked this series, up until ep 20 perhaps. After a slow start and much headscratching, it began to make sense, in a convoluted sort of way. It was original, and I liked the surreal direction style, even if there were a few (okay, make that quite a few) over the top elements. For example, one only takes so much of Madlax twirling around and shooting 20 soldiers with her eyes closed. All in all, though, the overall feel was of a good serious anime where the director wasn’t pandering to cheesecake. I like that - just cool anime of cool female characters. So aesthetically this show appealed to me.
However! The last 5 eps dragged. Big time. I started to get impatient, and honestly I thought it would have been great as 21 eps instead of 26. I already guessed the Big Truth way beforehand (it’s not like they weren’t giving us a ton of clues, from Madlax’s faint memory of her father to the angle of the shooting) and it was painful waiting and waiting for it to unfurl. Too much filler at the end, as if they had a story that they couldn’t tell in 13 eps but had to fight hard to stuff 26 eps with. That’s really too bad, because I thought the pacing in the first 18 or so was excellent. Dammit! See what happens when you get locked into a format!
However, even if you take that away, the ending had some pretty significant flaws. First, too much senseless death; I felt that they killed off characters just because they didn’t want to be too conventional and happy. Sometimes a character’s death serves to generate enough angst to power up the “finally get a spine and do something!” factor in a reluctant hero or heroine, but in this case… I dunno. I thought it was too plot devicey. Couldn’t the writers have come up with a better way to work out the ending? I understand that the final confrontation has to be concentrated on Margaret and Madlax and Reticia finding the truth and somehow sticking a wrench into Evil Villain’s plans, but hey, after all the wonderfully built up sense of mystery and subtlety before, this was like taking a sledgehammer to whack off the last inches on a sculpture that had been, until now, painstakingly carved out with a delicate chisel.
So, dropped the ball there. Next pet peeve, really stupid annoying final baddy. I’m sorry, the Friday Monday insanity thing got really old. Too cliche, too shallow, and a blatant disregard to good storytelling by using “because he’s psychotic” as an excuse not to come up with any explanations of motivations or background. Not to mention the age old plot device of villain using brainwashed main character to his nefarious ends. Sorry, I’ve seen too much anime to be satisfied with that.
Third, surrealism and warping of reality taken too far. Too many people getting shot many many times and not dying. I don’t know if the storywriters and director actually had the “physics” of the whole thing in their heads and just neglected to explain it properly, or if they just bent it all to their convenience. Madlax, yeah I could see and pick up right away. Friday Monday, his headquarters, the alternate reality of Margaret wandering around, eh…? Whatever.
Last, the resolution. Actually I have to say that I liked how Margaret made Reticia her sister. Or rather, I did not expect Margaret to split herself again, and that was good because Madlax deserves to be her own self. I was afraid that Margaret was going to do a Reset on the world, because that would have been natural given all the deaths and the power of her wish, and for me that would have been a terribly disappointing cop-out. Luckily that did not happen. Yet, it was still dissatisfying. Not because things didn’t wind up hunky dory or because people died and didn’t come back… just that I enjoyed the rest of it too much to live with an ending with a sorry ass of a villain.
But, in the end, I didn’t feel that Madlax was a waste of time at all. There was enough that I liked about it - the character ofMadlax, the unfurling of mystery (although to be honest it wasn’t that intellectual or sophisticated, but then again not everything needs to be), the high level of art and animation, and the music - that I can simply sigh and say sometimes you gotta accept that few anime can truly be considered masterpieces from start to finish. I think Madlax just aimed a little high and stumbled on the final execution.
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January 10, 2005 – 5:02 pm
Madlax is a 26 episode series that just finished running this last fall in Japan. By the creators of Noir, at first it feels like a clone of that series. The opening features a young girl wielding a gun with practiced ease, military and civil war are the themes of the first episode. Madlax is an agent for hire (assassin, bodyguard, you-name-it) in a country gone to the dogs after 12 years of civil war. The other piece of the puzzle comes in the form of Margaret Burton, another strange young girl living a sheltered life in a far away country. The villain in all this seems to be a underground organization that moves the chess pieces of countries’ political landscapes.
However, just when you think it’s another show about a killing machine with a mysterious past meeting another girl with no memories, the show throws you a complete curve ball in the form of what appears to be magic or sorcery. Certainly there is nothing normal in chants that cause people to commit murder, books with mysterious writing covered in blood, and natives with supernatural powers.
Although I was going, “What the heck?!” after three episodes, I have to admit that the incredible weirdness and the unexplained mysterious really hooked me into watching more, just to find out what the deal was behind all that sorcery, and what the connections were between Madlax and Margaret and the other characters that show up. So far, I’m quite impressed at how they have pulled it off. A lesser director would have stumbled on the sheer complexity of the plot - it’s a feat to unravel all the strands and pull it together without revealing too much while at the same time not losing your audience. Although I do have the advantage that I am watching this all in rapid succession and stuff is still fresh in my mind.
At Ep 5 or so, I was starting to get a bit skeptical as the story didn’t quite seem to progress, just more and more layers being added, but I am glad that I stuck with it. I’m not so much fascinated with the characters as I am just hooked by the desire to know the story. However, the characters are not pushovers either. They are unique, but understated and restrained. There is no shoving it in your face as is so common in anime of yore. I guess you could say that Madlax is an example of anime direction which has finally grown up.
The music, by Kujiura Yuki (who also did Noir and My-HIme, a personal favourite) is a bit too European for my taste, except for one Eastern track with vocals that plays when something dramatic is about to happen. Good, but a bit repetitive.
The art in this show is excellent for a TV series. CG has really started to come into its own now, mainly by allowing studios to lower the cost of normal animation (and not, as some tried at the beginnng, by allowing funky animation effects previously unachievable by hand). That means consistently higher quality overall (anyone remember the travesty that was the Nadia island episodes? *shudder*). I think what I most appreciate, personally, is that characters now look far more consistent. So you don’t get that age old problem where a different storyboardist would result in one of those dreaded crap episodes where the faces are so distorted you almost wish they hadn’t made it at all.
So anyway, the designs are generic but pleasant. There is some impressive stuff going on, like this electrical fan that was rotating. I wouldn’t mind collecting some pics of Madlax, who does look kinda cool.
Dunno if I’ll be happy with the show in the end. It really depends how they pull it off. But in the meantime, I’ll keep watching.
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