My understanding of arms dealers came after watching the excellent film "Lord of War". Nicolas Cage plays a Ukrainian-American arms dealer who sells guns like AK-47s, M-16s and a M-60 Machine gun to warlords and rebel groups. The movie is great as it portrays a balanced view of the arms dealer, and how inane our world is.
Arms dealing is rampant in this current age. With the Drug War across Latin America along with Middle Eastern revolutions and a Taliban insurgency in West Asia, the need for arms dealers is higher than ever, and these wars gave rise to people like Viktor Bout who sells AK-47s to dictators like Charles Taylor and Muammar Gaddafi. It is evil, manipulative and horrifying and his recent arrest became a morality tale about the nature of war and how people like Viktor Bout are making the world a worse place to live.
Jormungand came a few months after Lord of War, but it's also excellent. And the anime adaptation aired the same month Viktor Bout received 25 years of prison in the United States. So it's pretty co-incidental that both the manga and anime came at a time when stories of arms dealers reached the news.
The story is about a group of arms dealers led by a Genki girl named Koko Hekmatyar (Shizuka Itou). Her ragtag crew is like the A-Team of arms dealers, and their ways of running the business is as carefree as the Googleplex, but with more explosions.
The series begins with Koko bringing a new member of the team: A former child soldier named Jonathan. He's about 10, hates guns but joins an arms dealing group to find the dealers who killed his parents. Koko, along with Jonah and her crew of badasses go around the world selling guns and partying. It's k-On! meets Lord of War and Micmacs, and that's the best summary of the story.
Animation wise, the animation's nice. Pretty sunny, but since it's by White Fox then the lens flare is expected. The character designs are done by by the key animator from Steins;Gate and it shows.
The direction is pretty good, especially when it's directed by the director of Katanagatari and School Days. Yeah, about that: Keitaru Motonaga should stick to directing for White Fox since all his other works are pretty bad. His career reminds me of Martin Campbell's career: a hit or two in a resume of crap.
The music's nice. The OP sounds like something from a Prodigy/Pendulum concert, and the ED is done by the excellent Nagi Yanagi. The entire score is done by Taku Iwasaki who remains great at what he does. His attention to surrounding and action makes him great, which is why he's the best action anime composer ever, since he does stuff like Gurren Lagann, Yakitate Japan and Ben-to.
The one flaw about this story is character development. So far, Koko, Jonathan and Koko's colleague Valmer (voiced by Sayaka Ohara) has given us a glimpse of what they are and recently we get to see Jonathan's backstory and Koko's brother. And that's about it. There is a backstory about the most recent villain group in the series, but that was not as exciting as it should be. I wanna see more of that Lehm guy (voiced by Unsho Ishizuka) and more of William Nelson (voiced by Kenji Nomura). The series could have been better if each episode revolves around two characters hanging out with each other, like Community. But we get to see more of others later in the series which helps improve character relationship. We also get to see interactions with people outside the arms bubble, like the "Medicines Sans Frontieres" guys later in the episode.
Overall, Jormungand is a decent anime about arms dealer. It's not as great as Lord of War, but it's good for lots of action and a great staff which makes the series much more enjoyable.
