I guess the whole Black Rock Shooter thing was pretty exciting for the Internet. A bunch of subs were released within a couple hours of the raws (most of them just use the DVD subtitles so what’s the point?) and within a few more hours the blog dissections were clogging the tubes. Blame its connection with Vocaloid if you want, but I think the truth is probably a lot more simple and fundamental.
Obvious statement 1: Anime is moving drawings. Obvious statement 2: BRS is a drawing.
Huke’s “look” is unique, at least among the styles that contribute to anime and populate sites like Pixiv. For me, the prospect of seeing one or more of these intriguing pieces move around onscreen was enough to get excited over.
The problem, of course, is that anime is not strictly a visual art medium, it tends to be a storytelling medium (unless you’re Dai Sato, but I digress). Turning a drawing into an animation is one thing, but turning it into a story is an invitation to failure. What Huke and the folks at Ordet did on that front turned out to be (IMO) successful. In fact, rather than solve the problem in a direct way, they created a roundabout solution. It left the artworks’ atmosphere intact while making something wholly accessible and easy to grasp, despite joining two seemingly disparate story threads in the middle rather than go in a straight line. I mean, it’s not rocket science or David Lynch, but it gets a nice slow clap from me. The killer fight choreography and animation didn’t hurt.
I’m just musing at this point on something: anime is locked into a very particular set of visual styles. They evolve, sure, and they vary between designers, artists, and studios. But Huke’s artwork poked just enough outside of that usual plus/minus to be so intriguing to people that an anime was considered viable. That gives me hope for more visually varied and interesting stuff in the future — even if a large number of those same people will still dismiss the next visually adventurous and narratively nonlinear work they see as “too pretentious.”
Bonus musings:
She appears to die at the very beginning. Open formats that leave a lot unspoken and unanswered are great to me, but don’t seem to be overly popular with anime fans as a whole. Why did the world end in YKK? If western fandom’s worship of this OVA is analogous to the sales of the DVD itself, I’m guessing we’ll see this stuff addressed in another volume. I would certainly welcome it, provided it doesn’t fall off the wagon with too much explanation and concreteness.
I wonder if the scene where Mato is crying in her bedroom, illuminated by moonlight, is meant to be a sort of foreshadowing (or at least, what passes for foreshadowing in a non-linear story). Her skin is very pale in the moonlight and she looks, briefly, more like Black Rock Shooter than herself. Like I said, the whole thing isn’t terribly deep despite its abstraction, so maybe I’m reading too much into it.
Anyway… I guess I’m not immune to hype machines, if in fact that’s what happened. But I did enjoy it, might watch it again — at least the action sequences.
