Reviews

Gunslinger Girl is an anime about a set of Fratellos (siblings) of cyborg girls and their “handlers.” This fact that I can't give you a better word for the people responsible for the girls is sort of the entire point of the anime. The series revolves around the relationships between the Fratellos. It is truly awe-inspiring how much development happens in every shot of the anime. Every scene is depicted with such grace and conviction for what it's trying to show us, even though the pacing of the show is deliberately slow. It develops characters and relationships with long walking scenes and scenes of them doing regular “work” stuff like training and doing missions. It tells us about the girl's relationships through subtle dialogue between the girls, through moments of solitary reflection after an event. It's difficult to try to explain the amount of work the imagery and directing do. Every detail told in the anime is done so subtly and delicately that it demands your attention. If you're not used to, or able to, put in as much attention to detail as the series demands, it will seem slow and boring. It is not an action series. It's a psychological drama that drives into the psyche and personalities of its characters by showing us what they're like, not by telling us. If it shows you a long scene of simply two characters walking is because how they walk with relation to each other and the mannerisms in which they do so is important for building the characters and their relationship. If it shows you a long scene of a girl simply reading a book it's because it demands that you think about why she's doing that, what are the implications and ramifications of her doing so when everyone else is somewhere else and with what expression she is doing it with. This anime is brilliant in a way that is hard to describe, and hard to see. Hopefully, I made my point. This anime is not for everyone. It requires work to appreciate. It's extremely serious and contains very serious themes. Doing so requires it to be somber and dark for the entirety of the run. The tension set by the plot is always present and the pacing serves to reaffirm that. The series is not perfect, or if it is I missed it, but the way that it does its character development is very special. It has my highest recommendation.