Mardock Scramble: The First Compression

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Mardock Scramble: Asshuku

Japanese: マルドゥック・スクランブル圧縮

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Information

Type: Movie

Episodes: 1

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Oct 8, 2010

Producers: Aniplex, Starchild Records

Licensors: Sentai Filmworks

Studios: GoHands

Source: Novel

Genres: Action, Sci-Fi

Theme: Psychological

Duration: 1 hr. 9 min.

Rating: R+ - Mild Nudity

Statistics

Score: 7.43¹ (scored by 27,882 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #1953²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #2383

Members: 71,206

Favorites: 164

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Synopsis

Rune Balot is a down-and-out teen prostitute in Mardock City. One day, she's picked up by an ambitious casino manager named Shell who gives her everything she could want. Renewed by a false innocence, a false past, and now the false life Shell has given her, Balot feels grateful. However, she can't help but be curious about why he's done so much for her, so she does some research about his past on a computer. This turns out to be a mistake which will change her life greatly. When Shell finds out what she's done, he attempts to burn her to death by blowing up her car.

Due to the high crime rate in Mardock, a new law called "Scramble 09" has given police carte blanche to take extreme and otherwise illegal measures to revive crime witnesses. With this in mind, they allow a professor to bring Balot back from the brink of death by reassembling her entire body with reinforced synthetic fiber. When she finally wakes up, her confused mental state eventually turns toward revenge as Shell is revealed as her killer.

(Source: Nippon Cinema)

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	Mardock Scramble
Sequel:	Mardock Scramble: The Second Combustion

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Characters & Voice Actors

Balot, Rune

Main

Hayashibara, Megumi
Japanese

Penteano, Œufcoque

Main

Yashima, Norito
Japanese

Welldone the Pussyhand

Supporting

Tanaka, Masahiko
Japanese

Septinos, Shell

Supporting

Nakai, Kazuya
Japanese

Boiled, Dimsdale

Supporting

Isobe, Tsutomu
Japanese

Medium the Fingernail

Supporting

Wakamoto, Norio
Japanese

Dr. Easter

Supporting

Touchi, Hiroki
Japanese

Mincemeat the Wink

Supporting

Miyake, Kenta
Japanese

Flesh the Pike

Supporting

Waki, Tomohiro
Japanese

Rare the Hair

Supporting

Kanai, Mika
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Nakanishi, Go

Producer

Matsuura, Hiroaki

Producer

Kudou, Susumu

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Foster, Steven

Script, ADR Director

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Opening Theme

No opening themes have been added to this title. Help improve our database by adding an opening theme here.

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Ending Theme

"Amazing Grace for Balot (アメイジング・グレイス for Balot)" by Minako Honda

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Reviews

Aug 17, 2012

MangoFox

Recommended

If there’s one thing that can be said about anime, it’s that it can get quite controversial at times. From the Ecchi genre, to the Horror genre, to the Psychological genre, anime is often presented with scenes of intense language, violence, gore, nudity, sex, and highly questionable themes. Mardock Scramble is one such anime.

The story follows a young Rune Balot, who as a child was raped by her father. Enraged, her brother then proceeds to shoot the father. As her family falls to pieces, Rune grows up as an underage prostitute, and where she is ultimately caught and put in jail. Enter Shell, the ... main antagonist of this anime, who gets her out, gives her shelter, offers her his love and support… and then proceeds to blow her up.
Severely injured and on the verge of death, she is then rescued by Dr.Easter , who effectively turns her into a sexy Japanese version of Robocop. She is then given the ability to hack electronics, kick ass, and take names. To bring the crimes of Shell to light, she partners up with Oeufcoque, a highly intelligent electronical mouse that can transform, doubling as; her wardrobe, voice collar, gun, knife, shield, radar, emotional support, and love interest. Effectively putting batman’s utility belt to shame.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, yes this anime is rated R-18+, with themes of rape, incest, prostitution, murder, and impending bestiality. To put into perspective how fucked up this anime gets. One of the villains, is a giant tit sack. . . No really. While his boss, Mr. Pussyhands, gives quite a new meaning to the term “pussyslap”, and takes the act of “masturbation” to a whole new level.

One of the things I can say about this anime, is that it is very dark, and takes itself very seriously. You get a feel for Balot’s fear & mistrust of strangers, her loneliness & desperation, and her pain & anguish. As you begin to comprehend the tormented soul of Rune Balot, you start to get an understanding of what this anime is trying to convey.
A ‘balot’ , or ‘balut’, is an underdeveloped duck embryo. It is a representation of the fragility of Rune’s character as well as her torqued innocence. While Oeufcoque (French for egg shell), serves to protect Rune, both physically and mentally.

This dark and gritty concept, question of morals, and beautiful use of symbolism, makes this an anime I would definitely recommend checking out. The animation is a mix of 3d cg, brilliant slow mo, and fast paced action. While the anime takes very serious tones and displays them in a very serious manner. Which is a nice break from all the mindless violence, gore, sex, and nudity often found in other anime.

I hope you enjoyed this review, and as always, thank you for reading.
(P.S. I wonder what the director’s obsession with eggs is all about though. Dr. Easter, Boiled, Scramble, Balot, Oeufcoque, Shell, and Humpty Dumpty. Now all they need is a character named Sunny Side Up)

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Nov 3, 2011

DraconisMarch

Mixed Feelings

Short and sweet:

Story - Very interesting, but suffered from pacing issues. It moved wayyy too fast and didn't explain what was going on--or why--very well. Then again, some people may like this kind of vagueness that puts the jobs of interpretation and filling in the gaps on the viewer. If they had tacked an extra 20-30 minutes onto it, they could've SLOWED THE HELL DOWN and taken their time.

Art - Incredible, clean, and beautiful, except I'm not a fan of the grain layering they used over the duration of the film. It was different, but not my taste. Watching it ...

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Nov 20, 2010

5camp

Mixed Feelings

This installment of Mardock Scramble is the first in what’s planned to be a 3-part series. In it, a teenage prostitute is killed by the man who took care of her, but she’s brought back to life by some magical science to try get revenge on her killers. She’s given a robotic body, lots of skin tight clothing and a highly intelligent golden mouse who can transform into whatever he wants, normally a gun of some sort.

It’s hard to talk about Mardock Scramble without giving out some plot setting spoilers. People might say that descriptions of the plot aren’t spoilers at all, but it does ... seem a shame to hurt one of the few things this movie actually does very well. The exposition, often a clunky and tedious part of a movie, was revealed in a gradual course of exchanges between the female lead, Balot, and her mouse sidekick, Eufcoque. Asides from revealing how the world works and what the extents of Balot’s and Eufcoque’s powers are, it also builds up the relationship between the two in one of the most strangely charming duos I’ve ever seen. Balot doesn’t exactly think straight, hardly surprising given her past, and abuses her powers for various reasons. Eufcoque doesn’t think like a human, seeing as he’s a mouse and everything, but his mind works off a logic that hauls in Balot and builds a trust between the two. Using the other as a springboard for further exploration, the movie excels in the exchanges between the two that make up about half of the movie.

I did say that this was one of the things that it actually did well, which implies that the movie performed less favourable in other areas. This movie has a lot of grand ideas about how great it is and how it’s exploring themes of depression and sexual desires, but most of it is done in such awful fashion that parts of the movie come out as unintentional humour. There’s a group of underground surgeons towards the end of the movie with a taste for attaching parts of human bodies to themselves. One guy has eyes all over his body, which was probably supposed to be intimidating but really just looked stupid. There was another guy with breasts sewn all over his body like that ghost from the Fat Stocking episode of Panty and Stocking. The rest all equally looked like characters Apocalypse Zero. As for the disturbingly literal nickname of their leader, Pussyhands, the less said the better.

These characters were probably supposed to symbolise humans living out their sexual fantasies, but like much of the rest of the foreshadowing and imagery, it mainly resulted with scenes in various degrees of clunky or stupid. A bunch of the characters are given names related to eggs, such as Boiled and Shell, probably meant to symbolise birth of a new life or whatever, but that was rather eye-roll inducing, like calling the violent villain in your show Vicious or something. There were some more standard problems, such as lots of cryptic conversations that failed to grab the interest, or overbearing level of madness they gave characters that didn’t fit well into the story. Oh, and playing Amazing Grace as your ending song was pretty eye-rolling too.

Not all of the symbolism failed, to be fair, the relationship between Balot and Eufcoque being the best example. Heck, anything good about this movie came about when it was just those two together. The best scene in the movie was one where Balot asked Eufcoque to love her, with the golden mouse’s stuttered retort being that he wasn’t capable of loving as a mouse and that “I can’t just turn into a male human in order to love you”. The scene, asides from revealing a slightly messed up side to Balot’s mind, also shook Eufcoque and revealed we wasn’t quite as assured and logically perfect as earlier scenes had you believe.

(As an aside, I kept expecting Balot to turn Eufcoque into a dildo. That wasn’t just a dirty mind at play in a highly sexualised anime. Balot kept going on about how she just wanted someone to love her, with the only way she knew love in her depraved life was through sex, but Eufcoque kept pointing out that he was just a vessel that was incapable of love and that he was just a tool to pretend she was being loved. See where I’m going with this? Contrast this to our good friend Mr.Pussyhands, who quite literally has sex with his hand. I would not be that surprised if Eufcoque becomes masturbation aid at some point in the later movies)

Again, this movie only ever good when it was just interactions between the main character and her mouse sidekick, the rest of the movie being dumb, sometimes painfully so. Thankfully a lot of the movie was just interactions between the main two, which is enough to keep my interest to watch the later installments. But it’s not enough for me to recommend it either.

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Mardock Scramble: The First Compression

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Balot, Rune

Penteano, Œufcoque

Welldone the Pussyhand

Septinos, Shell

Boiled, Dimsdale

Medium the Fingernail

Dr. Easter

Mincemeat the Wink

Flesh the Pike

Rare the Hair

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Mardock Scramble: The First Compression

Alternative Titles

Information

Statistics

Available At

Resources

Synopsis

Background

Visit MALxJapan MALxJapan -More than just anime-

Related Anime

Characters & Voice Actors

Staff

Opening Theme

Ending Theme

Reviews

Interest Stacks

Recommendations

Recent News

Recent Forum Discussion

MoreTop Anime

MoreTop Airing Anime

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Visit MALxJapan
MALxJapan -More than just anime-