Dogs: Bullets & Carnage

This short, four-episode OAV corresponds to the DOGS prelude, Stray dogs howling in the dark (I have no idea why MAL has it labeled as BULLETS&CARNAGE, because that's not what this is), but while it captures the sequence of events well enough, it fails to communicate the oddly charming harshness and raw energy of the manga.

STORY - The story for the first volume of DOGS has always been a little loose and haphazard; each of the four sections focuses on a different character, and the lot of them are strung together almost forcibly as their individual stories don’t necessarily mesh meaningfully with the others around ... them. The manga’s presentation did manage to find some kind of connecting thread between the four though, and each story also worked well enough as a standalone chapter. Unfortunately, while the OAV preserves the presentation order of the characters, each episode felt incredibly disjointed from the rest — actually, they felt disjointed in and of themselves as well, though I’m not exactly sure why that is.

Strangely enough, even at fifteen minutes a piece, the pacing in each episode isn’t noticeably rushed. It feels pretty scene-for-scene for the most part, but in the end, you really feel like you’re missing something. Was the story really so short and inconsequential? So… uninteresting? There is a lot of action — gunfights, swordfights, wild chases — and the action is highly entertaining and fun to watch, but the story beyond the action is sorely lacking.

Mihai is a retired assassin called back to his past, but the episode skips along too quickly for you to endear yourself to the character and the events that unfold are less emotional as a result. Badou collects information to sell and finds himself tangled up in a mob boss’s unfortunate business. As his section was always the most comedic of the bunch because of its sheer absurdity, the OAV counterpart didn’t suffer as much, but the humor did seem cheaper somehow in animated form. Naoto was raised with only hatred and revenge on her mind, but her narration in the anime flattened the story and I found it more difficult to sympathize. Lastly, Heine saves a genetically modified girl and confronts the haunting fringes of his own past in the process. Though his section is the one that explains the least, it’s also the one that’s most relevant to the on-going series. But Heine’s episode was surely the choppiest, and instead of exciting the viewer towards a continuing story, it seems to end on a note re-emphasizing its own precariousness.

Sure, DOGS’s strength never really lay in its amazingly thoughtful or unique story; indeed, the prelude does little more than introduce some characters’ pasts and other characters’ current lives, laying the groundwork for something bigger. But as I’m not left excited about the potential or possibility of more in this anime, DOGS has thus been reduced to a mindless hour of action with no beginning or end.

CHARACTER - Like the story, given the near-exactness of the presentation, I’m not quite sure why none of the characters have the charm they do in the manga, and I can’t say for sure whether my distaste is just because I was disappointed overall with this production. Perhaps the shortness of each episode has something to do with it after all — even if the sequence of events is the same, you watch through the episode faster than you would read through the chapters and you thus don’t have as much time to really care about the characters; you are less inclined to pause and rewatch the seconds of intriguing footage than you are to pause and reread a few interesting panels or pages. Mihai is an older man with a sad past. So what? Badou is a good-for-nothing with an amusing tobacco addiction. So what? Naoto is a young woman with a sad past. So what? Heine is a mysterious freak. So what?

Sure, all of these characters still have the potential to be interesting, just like their manga selves, but that potential is less obvious this time around, and I was easily bored.

ARTSTYLE & ANIMATION – Shirow Miwa’s art is gorgeous — his energetic character designs, incredible action sequences, and highly detailed environments are together the greatest strength of the manga; I can forgive the somewhat plain story and slowly-developing characters just because I can look at that art. As such, I spent many months worried about how all that style and detail would translate into animation. I wanted to be optimistic, but it seems that optimism was ill-placed after all. (Figures, right?)

It’s a given that much of Miwa’s careful detail will have to be sacrificed in animation, but DOGS was a much lower budget production that I would have imagined. For almost all long to mid-range shots, characters are drawn in a lazy, oddly elongated manner; their facial expressions are a joke. Most action scenes move along too quickly for this to be noticeable, but as soon as it slows down, it gets embarrassing. Close-ups are crisper, but really don’t fare that much better, especially for Heine and Badou, who appear strangely generic and without any of the attitude found in their manga counterparts. For them, animators really don’t seem to have bothered too much in capturing Miwa’s style and only replicated the most basic aspects of his character designs. Mihai and Naoto are less of a dramatic departure, but that may be because both designs are less unique to begin with.

Thankfully, many of the backgrounds are actually pretty all right. The cityscapes are still vast and grungy, and many shots are still taken from all sorts of interesting angles. Still, they’re not amazing by any stretch.

MUSIC - The little opening theme, if you can call it that, is endearing at first — a little reminiscent of the jazz tunes of Cowboy Bebop or Baccano!, which would be appropriate enough with all the action in DOGS. But considering the rather serious and depressing themes of three out of four stories, the upbeat and cheerful melody quickly feels inappropriate. The rest of the soundtrack for the series is incredibly negligible. Many scenes are simply silent with most of the music accumulating in the action sequences, but there’s nothing really memorable.

VOICE ACTING – The OAV uses the same cast as the drama CDs, which I thoroughly enjoyed. A few fans have criticized the use of “brand name” voice actors like Akira Ishida and Takahiro Sakurai but I think both do a fantastic job as Badou and Heine respectively. They give some much needed emotion to the characters when the animation fails utterly, and both depart significantly from their previous voices so even though I’ve heard Ishida and Sakurai’s voices many times before, hearing them here doesn’t invoke thoughts of their other roles. I also really like Akio Ohtsuka as Mihai; though the actual acting isn’t nearly as impressive as the former two, the voice suits the character very well. Naoto I find to be the least impressive, but that could be a mixture of my indifference towards the character and the generic narration she gave for most of her episode. Also, I think it’s worth noting Toshihiko Seki as Bishop, the blind priest, who has some hilariously delivered one-liners.

OVERALL - The DOGS OAV has been a huge disappointment for me, though in retrospect, I’m not sure why I had such high expectations. Still, aside from the poor technical aspects (mostly terrible animation and lackluster music), most of this anime’s drawbacks are uniquely difficult to pinpoint. The story and characters are almost exactly as they were in the manga, so why do they feel so different? For the first time, I theorize that DOGS might just work better as a comic and the anime only serves to overemphasize the weaknesses that were already present in the source. Though the same events are covered, the anime does feel strangely rushed, the most important consequence of which is that you don’t feel very attached to the characters. It isn’t as intimate, and without that connection to the characters, much of the interest and potential is lost — unfortunate, as the potential is what I found most appealing about the DOGS manga… along with the art. That Miwa’s art was bastardized as much as it was undoubtedly adds a bit of bitterness on my part.

So if you’re a fan of the manga, you’ll likely be disappointed. If you’re not, you’ll likely be indifferent — enjoy the action scenes for what they’re worth and then forget about it because it wasn’t actually that interesting.

"Fuck up. Gentlemen"

First of all, let me point out I am a huge fan of the Dogs manga, originally I never intended to watch the OVA's because I had heard that they were a very disappointing adaptation of the manga. I decided to give them a watch because of the more recent chapters of Dogs: Bullets and Carnage that I had been reading and wondered how it would be if it was actually animated, so it was with some trepidation that I watched the OVA's.

Secondly, this is not an adaptation of Bullets and Carnage, so anyone coming here expecting to see that will just have ... to do with watching the original manga play out being animated.

Thirdly, it's very disappointing.

Dogs doesn't seem to work as an anime, I can't describe why it doesn't work, it just doesn't. If you want to understand what I'm getting at go and read the manga then watch the OVA's, you'll soon realise what I mean.

Now I'll be honest, Dogs story was never one of its biggest strengths, however in the manga it was enjoyable, it was entertaining, and at times it was downright funny. But the manga's storyline doesn't translate well onto the screen and it becomes all too obvious what the weaknesses with the storyline were. If there's one thing that's frustrating about Bullets and Carnage, it's that it tries to present the storylines for each character as separate entities, without really taking notice of the character interactions, as such the story feels more disjointed and broken up than the sort of one shot chapters that actually spawned it.

Another issue is that some of the humour is lost, this is more prevalent in Badou's chapter than anyone else's, his most memorable scenes in the manga are again, a victim of not translating well and his episode in the anime (in my opinion anyway) suffers more than anyone else's in the story.

The art in Dogs was always the selling point of the manga, it looked gorgeous, and the action scenes were very intense, in the anime though, the quality has dropped considerably. The character models by Kumi Ishii do at least resemble the characters in the manga but most of the time they look awkward, especially Heine and Nill who both seem to have undergone a massive change from the manga, and it doesn't suit them, in fact, most of the character designs in the anime don't suit the characters. I will cede though that at least they look good in colour.

The biggest disappointment about the art though is the action. I wondered how David production would be able to pull off the amazing action scenes in the manga, and to be quite honest, they can't, maybe that's a sign of their inexperience (they've only done 5 anime after all) but I digress; the action doesn't look good in the anime, and I mean that it doesn't look good, the manga had a way of making the action look good thanks to its outstanding panelling, the anime naturally doesn't resort to this and it suffers tremendously because of it, the gunfights are boring, the chase scenes are boring, the standoffs are boring, in fact when it's not busy being boring it's looking bad thanks to the character models. Don't go into this anime expecting to see the amazing art in the manga, you won't get it.

Before I cover the voice acting I should address the music, and really, there's nothing worth addressing, the score is instantly forgettable being some sort of weird jazz/techno hybrid which tries to create a noir feeling similar to something seen in Darker than BLACK but fails. The music won't be getting any awards anytime soon so here's the next question.

How about the voice acting?

Well, my instant reactions to the voice acting where mixed, especially Heine's voice, Takahiro Sakurai makes Heine sound older than he actually is in the manga, his voice is too deep for me to believe him as a convincing Heine and made the character less of the cool cat that he is in the manga. Shizuka Itou and Akio Ootsuka manage to make passable performances as Naoto and Mihai, but the honour of best voice actor in this little disappointment of an anime goes to Akira Ishida.

Yes Katsura fans, Ishida manages to be extremely impressive as Badou, you can literally feel that Ishida is putting his heart and soul into this performance as he embraces Badou's (very unique) personality wonderfully. Ishida needs to play crazy roles like this more often, rather than go with the weird (and annoying) bishonen that is Break Xerxes, and the creepy emo that is Gaara, I mean it when I say that Ishida is the best thing about the voice cast, his acting managed to save the sound aspect from a much lower score.

The characters are nowhere near as impressive as they were in the manga, Mihai and Naoto were never going to win any awards to begin with, it was always Badou and Heine that stole the show for me but they suffer in the anime, it's hard to describe, again it's something that you have to read the manga to understand what I'm getting at but they're nowhere near as cool as they were in the manga.

Now, I'll be honest, I made a lot of comparisons between the manga and the anime here, I admit that the anime should be judged on its own merits but it's very hard to do a review of the Dogs anime without doing comparisons to the manga in a lot of places, it's not a terrible anime by any stretch of the imagination but it is very, very disappointing. It's also worth mentioning that the anime can't pull a stand alone move either, as there are so many indications of the producers wanting to do a Bullets and Carnage anime as well.

Maybe Dogs was never meant to work as an anime.

What do you know, I think I solved my own problem there.

Meh, I read the manga for only a bit (actually, when I stopped reading the manga, it was also the point where the anime stopped).

Art: I must say I was very disappointed. Repeated action scenes, mediocre gun fights, time delay on gun shots, but the character illustrations are ok, the background scenes were only very mediocre. All in all, for an "action" and supposedly "dark" anime, it just doesn't give that feeling. It gives it a normal setting, nothing interesting. There were also very corny action scenes. If your a pro hitman or killer, how do you miss 15 shots when the target is standing ... still. Also when it shows Heine "jumping around", I laughed at the slow movement. I can't say much more about the art, but in short, I was disappointed.

Sound: This was also a point where I didn't like it at all. You know how sometimes you read the manga, and you imagine a voice for the characters? I do that a lot ,and I must say a lot of the characters didn't fit my prediction of voicing. It might be selfish or just my opinion, but I believe that Naoto, Badou could have had better voice actors. Heine was average, I guess it suits him, although they need that evil sound. Naoto sounds too soft, and doesn't sound like a character seeking revenge or living a life of revenge. Badou just sounds too foolish and when he starts going on a rampage, his voice just doesn't click. There was no opening and ending (expected) and no background music. Time delay on bullet shots. Like after a bullet is shot, it takes 2-3 seconds to make contact with something. This was a bad part in the anime.

Characters: I actually enjoyed each of their character traits. A chain smoker machine gunner, an experimental human that is cool and and emits a bad side, a girl training with the person she wants to kill (although this type of character has become more common now), and a old pro hitman that emits humor and seriousness. The drawings also suit them. Nothing more to say about the characters except that I liked it a lot because it is unique, fresh, and memorable.

Story: I must say, they packed in a lot in 4 episodes. Two episodes contain a character background story, and the other two are character type stories (but you kind of get a little bit of Heine's background story). What I liked is how they connected the characters together. Nao as a paper delivery girl, Badou on the bus and meeting with Mihai, Heine partnered up with Badou, the list goes on. They connect it well for a character part OVA. Only thing I didn't like was that it was really predictable. Every action and movement, I can guess what's gonna happen next. Maybe because the art is slow?

Enjoyment: I enjoyed it actually, seeing the characters and the ending of the OVA. It really captivates the audience (me anyways). The Naoto and Heine episodes really contain a moment on finding who the characters in the ending were. I enjoyed it while it lasted I guess. However, too many factors bring this down: cliche moments, predictability, bad action scenes, lacking sound, delay in sound, the list goes on for a bit. Although in my point of view, this OVA deserves a 3, just keeping with the manga, the great characters and some of the things they did with the story, made me give it a final score of 4.

TL;DR It gets a 4, I enjoyed watching it, but it could of been a darker anime, better action packed, less corny scenes, and maybe make it a little faster pace?