Today's review is about a Japanese comic with a German name (That's where the oddness starts). The title is Elfen Lied, i.e. "Elf's Song" or something like that, if my memory serves me right.
General opinion: interesting at first and most of the way through, but a heavy dose of weirdness and a humongous disappointment. As those of you who already know me already should know, I dislike tragedies, and this being one of them I don't really like it. However, I am doing a review anyway so you guys will at least know about it and can take a look at it so the poor author doesn't end up being poor and getting killed by Excel. (I'll review her anime later.)
Synopsis: In what was at the time the present (I'm guessing the 80s or something like that), a childhood condition started popping up all over Japan in which girls would be born with horns that resembled cat ears. Symptoms included having extra invisible arms and being prone to extreme violence. The arms, known as "vectors," could move faster than bullets and slice right through human flesh, so these people turned out to be pretty dangerous. Anyway, the story starts with one such girl escaping from the research facility where some government people are doing experiments on her. Of course they're really bad shots and fail to kill her, although she does suffer a major concussion and washes up on shore with the only word in her vocabulary being "nyu" (apparently she's a cat now). She is fortunate that a stereotypical Japanese teenage boy finds her and "temporarily" takes her in. Soon the researchers dispatch a team to look for her, since of course they think she is still very dangerous, and action ensues. It turns out that the human brain has a remarkable ability to heal itself and she occasionally reverts to her previous personality and rampages about. Basically a cool sci-fi/fantasy theme here.
However, after several chapters of intense anime blood and gore, the manga heads off straight into the Uncanny Valley, with giant deformed fetuses, limbs being ripped off, Bandit Keith (again, will cover later) showing up in the role of the overly passionate killer guy who seems to not care about America so much anymore (whew!), and finally something involving entropy and lots of explosions. Not to give away the ending, but basically all the cool main characters either die horrible deaths or are scarred for life by the other characters dying horrible deaths, and all the mediocre minor villain characters end up living happily-ish ever after as normal people.
And so ends my surprisingly crappy review. At least someone posted something.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
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Thank you for expanding my view of what this anime is about. I still don't plan on watching it, for the reason listed below.
ReplyDelete"However, after several chapters of intense anime blood and gore..."
This should really be expanded into "Almost every chapter is full of more blood and gore than you can find in almost any other anime, including Hellsing..." and that's saying a lot.