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Oct 06 2013

Categories: episodic review, kill la kill
Tagged: kill la kill

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“UPPERCUT!”

Looks like the Dai-Gan battleship from Gurren Lagann. In fact, every two minutes or so, I’m like, “Didn’t I see this already in Gurren Lagann?” No, it’s not a complaint. Kill La Kill is finally Gainax realizing what they do best (minus Anno-san), and doing it. It only took them, oh six years and a new studio to realize this, but I’m glad they did. Gainax is a husk of their former selves. The Eva teams broke off with Hideaki Anno to form Studio Kara to work on Rebuild of Evangelion while most of the Gurren Lagann team left to form Studio Trigger. Studio Trigger was quite impressive in their debut of Little Witch Academia (which earned them over half a million in Kickstarter funds for LWA 2), and this series, Kill La Kill, is not only their first anime series, but an original story to boot. And Kill La Kill is impressive.

Everything about Kill La Kill oozes style, brutality, and Gurren Lagann. It’s just a series of over-the-top moments followed by over-the-top moments punctuated with scenes that ask you, “Are you having fun yet?!” Sure, the plot is totally nonsensical… but… I don’t care. It’s fun. That’s something anime has forgotten recently. There’s shows like Free! that tries too hard, Monogatari has somehow turned into weekly sermons, and most shows are either drama, bad fanservice comedies, or moe type shows… where’s the fun genre? That’s what Kill La Kill is. Fun. And it’s going to stab you to make sure you are having it.

(At least the plot makes more sense than Nagi no Asukara. Wait, what? They live underwater but go to an above ground school? What happens to their books?! What about their TI-85s? How can you boil water underwater? I’m okay with a premise, i.e. people can live underwater, but shit needs to make sense past that. Like even if they live underwater, I want an explanation of how they can bring books back and forth… or why can’t they go to school underwater? It’s not like there’s no room, and there’s only like four kids who go to school… it can’t be that hard.)

The plot is simple. Spunky new girl tries to topple oppressive student government that compares itself to Nazi Germany and spouts lines from Animal Farm. No, I’m not kidding. They quote the fucking pig. (Also, aren’t fascism and communism on different ends of the political spectrum?) Anyway, it’s basically the Shu-led government from Guilty Crown, and the leader girl bestows school uniforms that give powers to select students. The weakest uniforms have no star rating, while the strongest is three stars. Of course, this is almost the same as the beastmen structure from Gurren Lagann, with four three stars generals under the leader who knows something, and each of the three star generals representing an aspect of school or beastmen society. Kill La Kill follows the same power structure as Gurren Lagann, and, if you didn’t get it, they show you this structure as a spiral in the show. It cannot be more blatant what they are doing, and it makes me think there is a twist coming.

Another reason I think there’s a twist coming? After bombarding us with spiral graphical designs, Matoi’s first opponents secret special weapon is a fucking drill. And guess what? Matoi smashes the drill. Demolishes it with no effort. And then her opponent pulls out his real secret special weapon: a box. A fucking box. And then, there’s a lot fewer spiral references. Even the spiral nipples of the ‘Murica ring girl gets cut down.

The animation quality is excellent. The animation has its own style and flair, and everything about it screams Gurren Lagann brought to the modern age. This scene where we are first introduced to the fucked up city and Ryuko Matoi is excellent starting with a pan out and down from the school to the docks. Of course, the city is built as a spiral, with the school at the tip, and the conditions getting worse and poorer on the way down. Along the way, there’s plenty of interesting architecture (Shaft has a competitor!), interesting meta text (again, Shaft has a competitor!), and the final reveal of Ryuko Matoi. It’s fantastic, and it’s a great contrast to all generic, tropetastic, “Hey, this is new transfer student X” scenes that you’ll see in any other show this season.

The costume looks exactly like a poor beastman trying to get the jump on Kamina. At this point in the show, I realize everyone is basically screaming at each other. Only an estimated 20% of the dialogue is done at normal voice levels with the rest being manly (or womanly) screams of manliness. Also, no, I don’t see any similarities… I mean, this show has a protagonist who finds an artifact in her dad’s basement that gives her the power to stand up to some inhumanly powerful creatures with similar powers that dwell within a huge wall. That other show… well… the protagonist has yet to reach his dad’s basement.

Human tempura! Are we having fun yet?!

Costume rape by a costume. Gotta love fanservice at the expense of logic. I like how her suit is an ultrapowerful armor, yet it only covers select parts of her body leaving the bulk of it exposed. Then again, this is typical RPG logic. Though I would love for female RPG protagonist to look and be armored up like Brienne from Game of Thrones.

And her costume powers up by venting steam?! What the hell? Studio Trigger just hit the, “We don’t care anymore!” button.

One of my favorite random scenes. Why does the piano need spikes? We need to show how badass even the piano is… let’s give it spikes! I even like how they had the foresight to put corresponding holes for the spikes inside the piano and draw the strings going around said holes. Sure, the piano is musically compromised, but who the fuck cares? It has spikes! I’m disappointed they didn’t slap a racing stripe and spoiler on it as well.

Is it just me, or are there are a lot scissors in anime lately? And none in Monogatari? I hope Zoe Hange develops a new weapon against the titans called a “tendon slicer” that’s basically a giant pair of scissors.