I was recommended checking out the Bee Train trilogy of girls with guns due to my want for an anime like Black Lagoon. Sounded good to me until I started watching Noir, which has made me not want to watch the other two entries in the series.
Noir is the story of two girls, Kirika and Mirielle who work together as the assassin duo Noir. Kirika is a Japanese school girl in possession of a musical locket and pistol who contacts Mirielle, a French assassin, in a bid to understand her past. While at first at odds, the two grow close as they discover a group known as Soldat is pulling their strings and the name Noir has much larger implications than what they believed.
In essence, we have a decent set-up for what could be an entertaining action/adventure. Kirika has amnesia and Mirielle wants nothing to do with her due to her line of work, only allowing herself to help Kirika at the expense of killing the girl after she’s discovered her past.
noir6That said, there are a million problems with the plot and the pacing. The main problem comes from how confusingly the story is presented. Characters are left in the dark, as is the viewer, but the slow reveal of who the Soldat are, what Noir is, and how all these forces come into play is annoying and not satisfactory. And that’s not because they don’t explain things well, it’s because the story makes something really easy to understand and pretty simple to spell out into a huge game of “How can we make our stupid, simple story seem intelligent?”.
Because of how scattered the plot is the first eight or nine episodes of the series are kind of boring. In this portion you’d typically see characters being made three-dimensional so the plot can progress with the viewer in an emotional bond with them. Hard to do so when the characters are paper thin. Even harder to do that when the viewer is bored out of his mind.
The middle is okay. By then you realize it’s an episodic show with little cohesion to the episodes aside from the Soldat. A third assassin character is introduced and it’s more of the same vanilla flavored action and story.
The final act of the story is where the show decides to stick its head up its ass. It wants to seem smarter than it is (and it does this throughout at certain points but not so prevalently as the end) and decides that instead of allowing the viewer to realize what Noir is and the value of the fifteen second speech that opens every episode of the series, it wants to repeat that speech over and over.
And it’s not just the speech about what Noir is that is drilled into the viewer. Mirielle’s parents were killed when she was a young child, leading her to her life as an assassin and one of her goals is to find who did it. She has flashbacks all the time to her parents lying dead on the floor and I’m not kidding when I say this scene is replayed fifteen or so times in the entire series. I get it! Her parents died!
It’s supposed to get us emotionally invested but nothing takes me out of a story more than constant reiteration of established points. The focal point of Mirielle’s actions are her parent’s deaths and early on we understand that. By the end, showing it again is meaningless because we get the character (what little there is of her).
Two things easily kill Noir: Repetition and the failed attempt at intelligence.
The repetition is more numerous than what I previously said too. If you plan on watching Noir, get ready to see reused footage a lot. Be prepared for constant flashbacks and even a flashback to a scene earlier in the same episode. That is what kills the beginning and end of the series. The middle isn’t quite as bad, but bookending your series that poorly means either the viewer will leave at the beginning or leave at the end with a bad taste in his mouth.
As his is an action series let’s talk about the action. That’s easy…
It blows.
I assume this show had a limited budget because what could have been awesome shoot-outs and various other action sequences boil down to bad guys standing in place and shooting while the heroes stand in place and shoot. Of course, the bad guys have never shot guns before, and also suffer from Parkinson’s Disease as they can’t shoot straight enough to hit their targets.
There’s one piece of action much later in the series that’s really bad where about twenty-five goons are on a staircase and Kirika approaches them, gun in hand. They all pull their weapons but decide not to shoot until she does. As they stand there shooting, she stands there shooting. Actually, only a couple people shoot, the others stand around with their guns at their sides wondering what kind of sandwich to order for lunch before getting picked off.
And that’s a sad thing because the action should be what holds this show together and keeps me watching, if nothing else. Instead, it’s just as piss-poor as the story.
Then there’s the problem of the characters not bleeding. My friend found an article (I’m not lying) that states that it’s all a philosophical thing. The main characters bleed to show humanity while bad guys don’t bleed because not having blood means they’re not human.
I’d like to refute that. Um, innocent people are murdered in this show and don’t bleed. I wouldn’t exactly consider the soulless, lifeless killing machine Kirika more human than the guy they assassinate who has a wife and daughter.
There’s truthfully no reason to not have blood and I feel that the impact of the action scenes, despite how bad they are, is even less because of the exclusion of blood. Nothing’s funnier than watching bad guys dance and then fall over for no reason. It makes the show seem PG, when the story is more of a PG-13 or R level.
The character’s, as expressed before, are paper-thin. There’s minor development but I wasn’t invested enough to care. Kirika is quiet, a killing machine. Mirielle drinks tea and wears really short skirts and kills people. The third assassin, Chloe, may actually have more emotion than either of the main characters despite being in the show so little.
That brings up my last point about the characters and story. Why such short skirts and heel boots? Wouldn’t an assassin want to wear something a little more…protective? It bothered me throughout that the director had an apparent idea that I would enjoy masturbating as these girls viciously murder people.
The animation is alright and the music is absolutely killer. The operatic soundtrack comes with haunting violins and an opening that really gets you in the mood for something dark and suspenseful. If nothing else, listen to the soundtrack for this show.
The only problem with the music is, much like the overuse of the same footage again and again, the music is played so much during the show as to get annoying. Be prepared for the same two or three music tracks every twenty minutes.
Noir is bad. It’s trying way too hard to be pretentious, recycles way too much footage and music, has awful action sequences and even worse characters. It’s an expression of how to do an action/thriller completely wrong. And it’s not that it’s embarrassing and awful like Jormungand, it’s that it’s boring and safe while trying to have staying power through a “mind-boggling” and “super smart” plot. Listen, adding historical significance and lots of quotes from high-brow literature and using Shakespearean language doesn’t make something smart. It can make it pretentious but pretension is easily gauged by whether it works or not and whether something is inherently smart enough to be allowed to be pretentious. Blade Runner can be as pretentious as it wants because it’s very intelligent. Noir, not so much.
And all of these problems I’ve stated can be forged into the singular nail that penultimately seals the coffin and ends this review:
Noir is boring.
