Early Reins

Early Reins in a groundbreaking word!

Story:
It is an innovative anime, westerns animes are rares, we're talking about Japanese anime that does not have the habit of speaking his stories in the West.
I'm not a fan of westerns but the story was well told, I liked it, the Japanese knew enjoy the theme.

Art:
The artistic part was excellent, have realistic scenarios and rich in detail at the epoch, especially the interior where the details are more visible and realistic.

Sound:
... Lost a little here,missed more involvement and choosing appropriate music, we have so many good artists, could have used better and more elaborate songs.

Character:
Highlighting the innovative history and the main characters composed entirely of women. Not every day we see it, the characters are well defined, has personality and behavior according to the epoch, its traits well delineated, i nothing to complain about.

Overall a very good anime, I again emphasize innovation by history and only have women as protagonists, worth checking out for sure!

Early Reins is an original OLM OVA from the early 2000s. That's right. This is from the Pokemon, Figure 17 & Gunsmith Cats studio. A lot of their works I've reviewed have been pretty middling so, let's hope this isn't the one that gets really bad.

Story:

The narrative is simple enough. It's America in ye olde Western times where everyone wore stupid hats and Sheriff Bart overcame racism to be the greatest, most charming Sheriff of all time. Our story sees a passenger train with union soldiers aboard get overrun by former confederate bandits. The group takes six women and a decorated union soldier ... hostage and tries to divert the train's cargo to their encampment. Unfortunately for them, their female hostages include a rookie Sheriff and a highly skilled gunslinger.

The story has one major narrative issue. Basically, at the end of the thing, we get a twist that hasn't been foreshadowed at all, doesn't make a lot of sense and comes across more as their way of de-escalating a conflict between two of the major characters than as something that was planned from the start.

With that being said, the OVA is pretty compelling from start to finish. The pacing is well done with the way OLM uses rising action and quieter moments to build up to the climax. There is also one twist that does work to kind of balance out the one that doesn't. Part of why the narrative works so well is that it has a lot of elements you would expect from a Western, like the train robbery, gun play betwixt bandits and western heroes and so on. but it also subverts the expectations for those tropes by giving you heroines instead of heroes. It also does have a good ending point where they could potentially do more with it but it still feels complete.

Characters:

The most interesting characters in the OVA are the young Sheriff, Margaret, and the one-eyed gunslinger, Lola. Aside from that, the characters are fine. They're a bit under-developed but considering that the OVA is only 45 minutes long and they have to fit in all that Western action, they couldn't have gone much beyond archetypes, realistically.

Art:

The artwork is a little dated. In the sense that there are older OVAs like 3x3 Eyes or Bubblegum Crisis that look better than this. The character designs are good. They look like they could be in the Wild Arms games. The action sequences are largely decent as well. They can be a little choppy at points but they still look good and suitably epic. The backgrounds aren't all that great. Mainly because the big backdrops are the train cars and a big expansive Desertscape with basically nothing in it.

Sound:

The actors are pretty skilled. Kawakami Tomoko, Yanagihara Aiko, Takeuchi Junko and the rest all give solid performances. The music is very much in keeping with the Western aesthetic. It's pretty good but not something I'd listen to outside of the anime.

Ho-yay:

There's the tiniest modicum of potential romantic tension between Lola and Margaret but it's really played more as them working together and gaining a mutual respect than anything else. Maybe if this got a proper full anime it would go further.

Areas of Improvement:

1. This OVA should definitely either be longer, thereby giving more time for character development or they should have had fewer major characters and developed the ones they had better.

2. You need some degree of foreshadowing for a big story twist. Something the viewer can look back at and say "oh, that makes sense now." A twist that comes out of nowhere just feels like an ass pull.

3. The animation could stand to be smoother. While the choppiness isn't bad, it is noticeable.

Final Thoughts:

Early Reign is pretty good. It has all the action you'd expect from a Western with a simple but compelling story and some decent characterisation. Overall, I'll give this one a solid 7/10. If you want to see an anime Western consider giving it a go.

Nowadays we tend to see a lot of anime series not get a proper ending after a one or two cour run. This can be mostly chalked up to anime being really expensive to make and it just not being worth the time and money spent on a full adaptation versus a shorter series that serves more as an appetizer for the manga or light novel or what-have-you. There might also be the, albeit rarer, case of anime original series that start and are never given a proper ending for various reasons.
Early Reins takes the best of both of these worlds and is a 2003 ... anime original OVA that serves as an appetizer to something bigger that doesn't exist and doesn't really get a proper ending. Lovely.

The anime stars a cast of six beautiful women on a train in the good old days of the wild, wild west. Sadly, the anime never really gets a chance to expand on the character of more than about two of these women, them being the eye-patched Lola and the sheriff-in-training Margaret. The other four get baseline personalities and never really do anything to stand out on their own. I'm pretty confused as to why the anime even chose to have such a large cast for such a short story in the first place. I guess having more good looking women on the cover would increase sales? That would be the only reason I can think of since besides Eyepatch and Margaret they don't really do much except shoot some guys in an admittedly pretty cool scene, but I'll get to that later.
Getting back on track, as far as the characters are concerned the anime is about Margaret's growth as a sheriff and her rising to the occasion of defending her train along with veteran cowboy Lola. Owing once more to the short runtime the growth is also handled rather haphazardly, but it's a genuinely good effort and I can't say I didn't get at least somewhat attached to Margaret by the end.

Well, I may have gotten even more attached if the dubs voice acting didn't sound so unintentionally funny and forced. Pretty much every actor in the show tries to pull a hard southern accent, some with more success than the others. Margaret and Eyepatch, the two characters with the most lines are fairly alright in that regard since their actors don't try way too hard, but oh dear god do some of the other characters sound ridiculous. I especially would like to point out Mona Marshall's portrayal of a rancher girl that sounds as if someone is constantly strangling her. Well, at the very least the dub's at least hilariously bad instead of being just bad or downright insulting to the ears.

And speaking of things that are not bad: the story is actually surprisingly fun. It's a pretty simple train robbery scenario that gets played out over the entire forty minute runtime, but it has enough bits and bobs here and there to at least be fun. If you expecting anything more thought provoking than some good old wild west shootin' then you're out of luck. Even though the anime tries to pull a plot twist near the end, it really doesn't come as any surprise and it's solved about as quickly as it comes up. And, speaking of the ending, it teases a future story that never came into fruition which actually makes me kind of disappointed because I would love to see what they could do with this setting if the got more time.
Where the real fun lies is in the creative ways in which the anime lets the girls shoot people. Ok, maybe creative is an overstatement, but it's still quite fun watching a group of horseback riders get mown down by a rich girl turning the crank on a gatling gun from a train. It's just about as fun as all the more controlled shoot-outs that happen throughout the anime that get solved in one well placed shot and possibly a Max Payne-style jump to the side. It's all great fun and it's really what makes the anime somewhat good. There's not a moment of boredom during the entire thing and the pacing is quite fast chugging along from action scene to action scene lest you get bored by the unimportant plot and occasionally nonsensical dialogue.

However, I will concede that the action is nothing outstanding and that it's only really fun the first time since there's not a whole lot of creativity put into it. Even the animation can be rather stiff at times and it generally never looks as good as it could be. There's even quite a bit of CG used to make birds-eye view shots of the train and some of the buildings in the beginning. The CG really doesn't look bad, it's just that it's clearly noticeable which shouldn't be the case. Compound that with the lackluster animation and the only thing that sticks out for this anime design-wise are the character designs which integrate your usual pretty anime girls into the western atmosphere quite well, and the western setting itself which not many anime have. It's too bad that the setting is wasted on such a short romp through it. I still pine for the day when I will see a truly great anime with a pure wild west setting.

To end it all off, Early Reins is a very okay attempt to make a short western anime. It's got fun shoot-outs, some fun characters and a forgettable story. It's held back by shaky production and some poor decision-making like trying to have way more characters than they knew what to do with. If you have forty minutes to spare and want something quick to hold your attention or you want to see what an anime with a wild west setting might look like then I recommend you give it a watch. Though the English dub isn't anything I would call good or even passable so I'd suggest watching it subtitled. Then again, the hilariously botched southern accents were kind of fun to listen to.
Thanks for reading and I'll see y'all around.