BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER (TV)

DESCRIPTION

CAST

OVA ActionBlack★Rock Shooter (OVA)
MUSIC ActionBlack★Rock Shooter
MANGA ActionBlack★Rock Shooter: Innocent Soul

REVIEWS

• 

  planetJane

  87/100
  Filled with bare emotional intensity & some of the best CGI fights in the medium, "BRS" is an underrated gem.

  I think that the best anime (and perhaps just the best media, period), regardless of what they actually leave you with. Make you feel as though you've learned something profound--maybe even lifechanging--by watching them. The 2011 TV anime Black Rock Shooter is one such property. Combining an absurd amount of talent under one roof for its all-too-brief 8 episode run, BRS is a masterclass in welding theme to presentation.

  While the literal central point of the plot isn't introduced until a bit later, the actual focus of Black Rock Shooter is emotion, and not just any amount or kind of emotion, very raw, very exaggerated emotion, and a lot of it (more seasoned anime fans than myself would be able to guess this simply by seeing Mari Okada's name in the credits as the scriptwriter). Most anime that have serious narrative arcs deal with emotions in some way, shape, or form, and they're usually fairly stylized, so this in of itself is not abnormal. What kind of is though, is the sheer unrepentant melodrama that Black Rock Shooter presents, and the degree to which it intertwines that with its themes. This is simultaneously the series' hook and I must imagine, the thing that drives the most people away from it. If you're not able to get a handle on the show's very intense emotional barrages it can be hard to sit through it at all, much less enjoy it. So this is a double-edged sword, but make no mistake, Black Rock Shooter absolutely would not work without it.

  To put it plainly, a lot of shows have emotional torque, BRS has an emotional jackhammer. Negative emotions; sadness, despair, anguish, loneliness, are often conveyed through exaggerated, despairing facial expressions, pained--sometimes wrenched or even shrieked--voice acting, and a soundtrack that sometimes borders on the avant-garde, often forgoing simple ambience in favor of deliberately overwrought (or poundingly percussive) piano or string pieces or disorienting, hard-to-identify dissonance. There is also a lot of crying; lovingly-animated, beautiful crying. Chipper protagonist Mako, shy artistic Yomi, damaged, willfully hurtful Kagari, the enigmatic Yu, and "school counselor" Saya all let tears fall more than once. There are definitely shows sadder than Black Rock Shooter, but few shove their characters' emotional problems in your face with this much gusto. And all of this ties into an overarching theme of surrogate pain. The audience is subjected to this as much as the characters themselves are, and this is put front and center by the battles.

  About half of BRS takes place in a twisted, surreal gothic otherworld inhabited by alternate versions of the characters, who fight and die so that their human hosts don't have to suffer--though if they do die their hosts suffer amnesia, something that comes into play in the series' second half. The otherworld is beautifully designed, massive gears, chessboard patterns, colossal iron rubik's cubes, seas of lava, and metal skeletons give the place a look that rests somewhere on the same block as a heavy metal album cover, but feels fully lived-in despite how comparatively little information we're fed about it. The fight scenes, it must be said, are remarkable. CGI gets a bad reputation and it's often unfairly associated with budgetless schlock like the 2016 Berserk anime, but here it is used to incredible effect. The otherworld is done almost entirely in CGI and the combat here is well above par when compared to just about anything from the last decade. They're visceral too, the other selves' natures as literal stand-ins for emotional trauma seem all the more real when they're stabbing each other and technicolor blood goes spraying in four different directions. This is to say nothing of the surreal brutality of the weapon designs, which often evolve and twist in strange ways from scene to scene, sometimes changing shape entirely (such as when Strength's Dr. Octopus-esque bionic arms turn into a sort of railgun as she whales on Black Rock Shooter herself). And when they don't do that, they stretch the definition of "weapon" to its very limits, see Deadmaster's undead army, capped by a pair of gigantic, floating, glowing green skulls.

  This is Black Rock Shooter's entire point, really. The violent ballet of fight scenes as code for human emotional struggle. The more Mato (and the other girls) avoid confronting their problems, the harder the other selves fight, and the more they risk losing their memories, and while the literal threat of induced amnesia is obviously not a real one, on a less concrete level, this applies very much to the real world too, it doesn't take a psych major to know that suppressing your emotions isn't very good for you. The theme is revisited repeatedly--most frequently through the in-universe children's book The Little Playful Bird--and through the abstraction rings crystal clear up until the finale. One of the very last scenes, where Mato just out and out squeezes Yomi and cries all over her, is emotionally cathartic in a way that a lot of media tries to be, but only rarely is the mark hit this well.

  So is BRS ultimately just a very longwinded metaphor for the power of honesty and a good cry? Well, yes and no. Simple, resonant themes are worthless if they don't resonate. But it's hard, especially in 2017, to not feel for Strength whimpering that the real world is "scary", and in a cultural environment where more than ever we are encouraged to put on fronts and appear to be people we're not in order to appease others (let it be said that millennials are masters of code-switching), it's surprisingly poignant. Combine that with fight scenes that foreshadowed what Kill la Kill would do just a few years later and some of the best CGI the medium's ever seen, and it's genuinely difficult to not recommend Black Rock Shooter to anyone who can process its emotional extremeness.

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• 

  AndoCommando

  10/100
  Imagine making a shit OVA that gives you resources to make an even worse TV show from it...

  Warning: The following is a rewrite of a deleted review from years ago, and contains blacks, rocks, shooters, criticism, profanity and a score below 5/10. Reader discretion is advised.

  Black Rock Shooter has had an interesting rise to prominence, beginning with a mere illustration that spawned into a music video by famous vocaloid persona Hatsune Miku, whose attire was inspired from these illustrations. An OVA was released in 2010 based on the music video, much to the pleasure of many vocaloid fans that caused a ridiculous amount of hype surrounding the project that naturally left a lot to be desired. From there the franchise created their own line of figurines and a video game before finally returning to anime two years later, putting small-time animation studios Ordet and SANZIGEN in charge of the project to expand the franchise further than ever before, culminating in a TV series composed of 8 episodes in early 2012. Rarely does an anime come to fruition from a tangled background like this, the majority of anime use manga or light novels as source material to base a show around. Because of such, questions are bound to arise about the narrative, characters, structure and other elements in regard to a show when it has such a vague and almost convoluted history like this. Black Rock Shooter is a prime example for why such questions and concern about similar circumstances are justified, by being one of the most peculiar anime I’ve seen, and not in a good way.

  The TV series of Black Rock Shooter focuses primarily on two characters and two worlds. One being the human world where two schoolgirls Mato Kuroi and Yomi Takanashi go about their normal lives and first befriend each other. The alternate world is more of a mystery, coming off as a stylized barren wasteland where the enigmatic fighter known as “Black Rock Shooter” wanders across the land, fighting for seemingly no other purpose than for her own survival. Unlike the OVA, this series does attempt to show that characters between both worlds are connected, with BRS and other fighters acting as the personas of characters in the real world, providing an intriguing, distinct expression into how characters honestly feel about each other. Unfortunately, the show was unable to capitalize on this at all with the 8 episodes they had from the very start. The first episode gives a couple lines of exposition on the relation between both worlds, which is an improvement from the OVA which had no focus on the topic whatsoever, but this is the only time when said link is ever touched upon. Looking back, it’s kind of pathetic how production didn’t bother to do anymore with this concept considering that Black Rock Shooter is a series that relies on relationships and links, but they did the bare minimum when it came to the most important relationship of all; with the self. Constantly characters are shown to have their own inner conflicts that are expressed through battles within the alternate world, yet there is an ongoing disconnect between these settings that has a damaging effect on these parallel stories as each on their own have nowhere near enough content and focus to stand on their own.

  The story of Black Rock Shooter is nothing special; Mato Kuroi has just entered middle school and she is looking for friends, eventually befriending Yomi Takanashi, a shy, aloof girl initially through their shared interest in a picture book. Slowly Yomi becomes more open with Mato as the show goes on until, plot twist, Yomi has another best friend, and she isn’t happy with Yomi talking to other girls! Oh my god, what drama! Honestly, it’s just a silly middle school girl drama that takes itself way too seriously and has no real entertainment value that warrants much attention. At least if it stuck with only focusing on the two main characters, then maybe I wouldn’t have such a problem with the plot, but Black Rock Shooter does not care about being a disjointed mess. After the half-way point the show takes a turn off a cliff as more characters are introduced with little screen time, only to never get a mention again. More “plot-twists” and backstories are added to give the story more shock value that no one cares about at this point, and it all bundles together to form this perplexing piece of work that both insults your intelligence with how simplistic it can get, yet confuses one with so many plot points unanswered to the point where viewers are no longer watching for the plot and only for the action. Which brings us to the alternate world of Black Rock Shooter:

  This setting is a complete change in presentation, showing a vibrant yet desolate realm that is supposed to represent the mentality of middle-school girls; chaotic, turbulent, dangerous where peace among fellow wanderers is not an option. It’s kill or be killed here. All the focus here is action and it is easily the best part of the show. The directing, use of CGI and choreography were all impressive here and a keen eye for detail was present with every battle. Sadly, I would argue these scenes act as a double-edged sword for Black Rock Shooter. On one side, it’s certainly visually impressive and the only parts of the show I would ever recommend watching, but what these scenes do is take away precious time that should have been used to tell the actual story at hand. As far as I’m concerned, the action is second to the main plotline and if the narrative here is rendered to shit because the staff wanted to add more cool action scenes, I don’t see how that makes the show better. All it does is turn the series into one where you can only enjoy if you “turn your brain off” and what makes that any better than looking at a fucking brick wall? It doesn’t help that most of the action scenes are jumbled together with scenes from the human world and ends up clipping the actual story, with horrendous transitioning that makes it all feel worthless. Maybe if they actually put emphasis on how the two worlds correlate, then maybe people would care about what happens in these scenes, but that seems like an impossible scenario considering the staff couldn’t fucking do it right a second time with 3 hours to work with!

  Black Rock Shooter has a very poorly constructed storyline that feels like a case of a show trying to accomplish much more than what time given would allow, but taken to the extreme and doesn’t bother to focus on telling a coherent plot in the process. But as bad as the plot may be, the characters are arguably even worse. These young girls are both simple yet [redacted], let me explain. Both main characters are fairly generic, with Mato being an outgoing girl with a strong sense of loyalty and Yomi being an introvert wary of getting close to anyone due to a “tragic past”. The two easily contrast each other and are in no way memorable until they begin showing signs of stupidity that does not match their personalities. The way these two react to everything around them is unnatural; they exaggerate to any problem they face and never try and think about it rationally. Whether it be Mato constantly yelling at every minor problem in her relationship, or Yomi getting the crazy-eye expression one would compare with an anime character about to commit suicide, these two are atrocious when portraying appropriate feelings. This is why I call them [redacted]; even for teenage girls they come off as incompetent whenever the slightest bit of conflict occurs in either of their lives. The cheesy dialogue does these girls no favours and only further implies that they have mental issues. This is also seen with the underdeveloped characters that are shown for 2 minutes before disappearing from the show, but I found the main leads to be unbearable. For a show that relies on emotions, there was always a feeling of disconnect between what was happening onscreen and what was happening in subtext. And now, after bearing witness to all of their actions, I can easily say that these are two of the most overdramatized lesbian characters I have ever seen; so bad that even the LGBT+ community doesn’t acknowledge them.

  For the most part, Black Rock Shooter looks like one of the most bland and uninteresting anime in recent memory if you exclude the alternate world. The characters all look sloppy with a sketchy art-style with no identity of its own and some laughable attempts at highlights. The animation here just looks cheap, as if all of the budget when into the action, which barely took about 1/3rd of the series. The lighting was actually commendable when used in the more “traumatic” scenes, creating a believable aura of uncertainty that helped enhance these moments if only on a technical level, but otherwise it was forgettable and almost absent for the remainder of the show. However, the action scenes are on a whole other level, showcasing some of the best CGI implementation I have seen in an anime and homes some marvellous camerawork and fight composition that makes me wonder why the entire show wasn’t in CGI. When comparing the two diverse art-styles it makes what was hand-drawn look more and more like a piece of shit – one of the rare cases where an anime has crappy hand-drawn animation with stunning CGI animation. Sound-wise it was fine: voice-acting, soundtrack and audio effects were all passable, except for the opening. The opening was sung by supercell featuring everyone’s favourite vocaloid Hatsune Miku, and while some will definitely enjoy the opening, it’s one that feels out of place with this show, and one that I can easily say is “not for me.”

  Black Rock Shooter was ultimately another attempt for people to try and make a quick buck off a rising trend, and now that the fad has quietly calmed down I hope that people can see what a pile of utter shit this series it. A successor to a shitty OVA that slightly improves on the material in some ways, only to make the plot even more confusing, characters even more infuriating and an impression on similar works where I expect such to be a complete waste of time. There’s a lot of things I fucking hate about this show, but what really pushes me to the edge is part of the fanbase that find it “d33p” and that if you didn’t like it then you obviously didn’t get it... To anyone who belongs to this group: Trust me, we all got what it was aiming to be, but what actually happened is a different story. We don’t get it? Maybe you don’t get that a show which tries to be an internal character study can also completely fail at it. And with that said, I leave you all with the final verdict.

  “♫♫♫ Black Rock Shooter, where have you gone? ♫♫♫”

  TO THE HALL OF PAIN BITCH!!! REST….. IN…… PISS!!!!

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• 

  Vic5

  67/100
  An anime that had potential, but lacked the time to do so. BRS is not ground breaking, but a bit underappreciated.

  (Note: This is my first time writing a review in a while, so go easy on me please.)

  SPOILER FREE REVIEW

  

  To be frank, I went into this anime with very low expectations, seeing some of the reviews are 10/10 and some of them are 1/10, I decided to watch this 8 episode anime and see what it was about, and to my surprise, it wasn't as bad as I thought.

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  Plot

  The premise of the anime is pretty unique. The main cast of girls go through shit irl, while their other selves in another world, their embodiment of their thoughts, fight and when their other version dies, their main cause of that anxiety vanishes. Interesting premise and unique concept, but when you only have 8 eps to work with, you can't but rush a bit, and that was the biggest issue of this anime. They rushed it hard and in turn messed the whole thing up. Plenty of plot holes and rushed character development killed the anime.

  

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  Animation
  Even though the rushed they fuck out of this anime, the other world fights was made using CGI, and this might be one of the best. CGI action anime I have watched. Using the smoothness CGI provides to the fullest advantage, it delivered some fast paced, epic fights. I really do wish they fights were a bit longer, some of the fights felt a bit short. But, considering the fact that most anime tend to kill themselves with their awful use of CGI, this anime showed me a ray of light that if CGI is used properly, it can deliver more and more amazing fights like what this anime had.

  

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  Characters
  The characters, well, uhhh.... were meh. For real though, they had to potential to be a really good cast of characters, but rushed development made me confused as fuck. The way they shove scenarios into every character, made it seem like a joke to be seen seriously. They undergo too much too fast. And that is the major issue with the characters.

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  OST

  OST wise its got a solid one. Its OP and ED were actually pretty good, seeing vocaloid being used in an anime op for the first time, i was really happy. The soundtracks during the fights weren't very memorable but it was very good nonetheless.

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  Art Work
  The character designs for the other world characters were so fucking cool, it really looked badass and rad. Their irl versions reminded me of characters from Madoka Magica. Also the other world for each character, looked really unique and amazing as well. I wish they'd have taken the time and explore the other world more, but sadly that didnt happen.

  

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  Verdict
  This anime had potential to be at least Madoka Magica level stuff, the interesting premise and the unique concept was killed by rushed development and plot holes. But the amazing and proper use of CGI, banging OST and really good character designs makes me not to put it in the trash can. Its fine, neither a masterpiece nor trash.

  Scores
  Plot: 5/10
  Characters: 5/10
  Animation: 9.5/10
  OST: 8/10
  Art: 8.5/10

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