Review: Trigun (Nishimura Satoshi)
Aug. 1st, 2009 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweOn a Tatooine-esque desert planet, human colonists struggle to survive in a hostile environment, their population spread thinly among small, American-West-style ranches and towns. As if climate, banditry and the delicate balance of their technological infrastructure (based around barely-understood "plants" brought from Earth) weren't enough, they also have to contend with the depredations of Vash the Stampede, a legendary gunfighter who leaves a trail of disaster (though, oddly, not death) wherever he goes. Two unlucky insurance adjusters, Meryl Strife and Milly Thompson, are assigned to track down the man known as the Humanoid Typhoon and determine if he is, in fact, responsible for all this Class G property damage. As they chase one rumor after another, they keep crossing paths with a genial, red-coated young man with a passion for peace and doughnuts and an instinct for trouble ...
... and if you haven't guessed who he is by now, you haven't watched enough anime.
Based on the manga by Nightow Yasuhiro, Trigun is horse opera-meets-space opera: its tech is steampunky and its protagonist a descendant of Destry and Shane, his skill with a gun earned over the course of a past he'd prefer to forget but that continues to haunt him. (I'm a sucker for this character trope -- Rurouni Kenshin and the manga Pumpkin Scissors both sucked me in with variants on it.) It's also intensely shounen, with villains cast in the goofy-grotesque mold (think squeaky-voiced midgets, fat giants, and cyborgs with bulging foreheads) engaging the hero in one duel after another as the long-term plot unspools between times -- including the development of romances so subtextual that nobody ever manages to say anything remotely mushy. (Although we do get one fade-to-black over a strongly intimated sexual encounter.) Its humor is broad and its low frame rate and crude effects are very much of their time (late nineties).
But Trigun is saved from banality by several important qualities.
... and if you haven't guessed who he is by now, you haven't watched enough anime.
Based on the manga by Nightow Yasuhiro, Trigun is horse opera-meets-space opera: its tech is steampunky and its protagonist a descendant of Destry and Shane, his skill with a gun earned over the course of a past he'd prefer to forget but that continues to haunt him. (I'm a sucker for this character trope -- Rurouni Kenshin and the manga Pumpkin Scissors both sucked me in with variants on it.) It's also intensely shounen, with villains cast in the goofy-grotesque mold (think squeaky-voiced midgets, fat giants, and cyborgs with bulging foreheads) engaging the hero in one duel after another as the long-term plot unspools between times -- including the development of romances so subtextual that nobody ever manages to say anything remotely mushy. (Although we do get one fade-to-black over a strongly intimated sexual encounter.) Its humor is broad and its low frame rate and crude effects are very much of their time (late nineties).
But Trigun is saved from banality by several important qualities.
First, there's its relative brevity (26 episodes), requiring the story to move forward rather than linger over filler. Some of the backstory has to be pretty rapidly handwaved along as well, but this didn't usually damp my enjoyment. I was also pleasantly surprised by the way the plot built its characters and themes rather than establishing all its trick-ponies in the first two episodes and trotting them out repeatedly thereafter.Overall, an entertaining ride, recommended for shounen fans who think.
Second, there's the quality of its cast: all of the principals -- Onosaka Masaya as Vash, Hayami Sho as his frenemy Wolfwood, Tsuru Hiromi as Meryl, Furusawa Tohru as Vash's brother Knives, and Hisakawa Aya as theiranima figurementor Rem Saverem -- have long resumes, frequently with star turns in other notable anime, and convey the emotion of a scene to the ear quite effectively even when there's very little to observe with the eye. (I've only dipped into the English dub in spots, but it seems to have its own charm.)
Finally, while it's quite violent, cutting away from onscreen death (and implied sexual violation) at the last moment, Trigun's violence is seldom inconsequential. Vash is a pacifist in a world where life is cheap and villains can't always be checkmated in a war of maneuver. He refuses to back down from his ideals, but the counterarguments for the use of deadly force are never short-shrifted, either. Nor is the possibility of sin unbalanced by that of redemption. The story is at base anti-tragic: people may commit horrible crimes, but that need not define them if they repent, make restitution, and strike out for a more hopeful future. I'm a sucker for this line of reasoning, too, and it's pleasant to discover it in a whizz-bang action plot.
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