| about
trismugistus.com
and digital-bondage.net
are my web sites.
trismugistus.com
is where I upload my anime, manga and tv&film reviews,
and also where I occasionally post short stories and
longer works I've written.
digital-bondage.net
is my wallpaper site and provides anime, manga and other
desktop wallpapers in a variety of resolutions. I also
have some psds for you to download.
I also run a site called scan-city.org,
which provides some scans for you to download and use
in your wallpapers.
You can also read my blog here
or check out my anime list here.
I also have pages on devart here
and urbis here. |
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| details |
| The Genre: action |
| The Format: 2 seasons across 3 DVDs each from
Geneon/funimation |
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| The plot: Rokuro Okajima is meek, mundane
and metropolitan. His business trip to South East
Asia turns from pleasure cruise to festival of
pain when modern-day pirates board the ship and
take him hostage.
Revy, Dutch, and Benny are merciless, maniacal
and mean. Together, they make up the crew of the
Black Lagoon. They are the exact opposite of Rokuro
in every way but one... A mercenary group has
targeted them to steal the data disc that Rokuro
had, and with it, classified information that
threatens the peace and security of the entire
world! Amen. Hallelujah. Peanut Butter.
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| opinion
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| I'm reviewing these together as really this
is one of those shows that is a full 24-episode
run, just broadcast with a long gap at the half-way
point.
I sometimes wonder if all anime shouldn't be
made in this fashion. You get noticeable improvements
in the animation quality, as well as story improvements.
Although having said that, in this case it would
be difficult to make a hash of Black Lagoon, given
the quality of the manga source material, especially
with how closely they stick to it.
Which brings me, neatly, to my first point. Is
the anime better than the manga?
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Well, I have to say that, on balance,
looking at the series as a whole, yes it
is marginally better.
Now that may be something of a surprise.
I'm not generally one for anime that sticks
religiously to the source manga like it's
a storyboard, but here they've actually
not quite done that. What they've done is
take the manga and stick closely to the
bits that work best and tweak the bits that
don't to make them better.
Also, being an action anime, action always
flows better in animated form, so it gains
there too. But the trump card is in the
ordering.
In the Black Lagoon manga it's chapter
based, as you'd expect, but what the mangaka
Rei Hiroei has done is make the individual
stories of variable length. So, for example,
the story about the Nazi treasure hunters
lasted, I dunno, 5 chapters, but the story
where they go to Japan lasts 10 chapters
- that sort of thing.
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Also, with the exception of the first story,
the sequence of the stories doesn't really matter
hugely. I mean, it does in that we need to meet
some characters before other bits make sense,
or other plots can happen, but those are relatively
minor details, and easy to fiddle around with
so that they're injected into the right place
for the anime.
Anyway, my point is that in the anime they've
shifted the stories around and done something
rather cleaver.
In the manga, Rock's 'journey' less clearly follows
an arc. I mean, he's always the same person, but
the tone shifts a bit between stories. So sometimes
he may just seem a little whiny, sometimes he's
making a good point. Sometimes he's coming to
a realisation about himself, others he's not really
bothered.
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Well in the anime they've arranged it so that
his journey of self-discovery is more apparent.
Oh - I should just inject a note here. Firstly,
as I write this, only the first two volumes of
the manga have so far been released in the west.
However, I did actually import the native language
version of the first five volumes, so what I'm
saying is, I've looked at Black Lagoon, but only
really read the first two volumes. So my opinion
on which is better may change when I finally get
to read the next few volumes, though I kinda doubt
it.
And I must also stress something that really
does not work in the anime. In the last story
of the second season, they go to Japan. In this
story, Rock acts as a translator for Balalaika
into Japanese, the idea being that the residents
of Roanapur speak something else.
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Okay, that works on that level, but quite
what the hell the non-Japanese are meant
to be speaking is damned confusing. A lot
of the dialogue is spoken in English (well,
if you can call it English - it's horribly
mangled, since the Japanese lack some of
the phonetics that English requires, but
that's a different issue for another time)
but then the characters will just randomly
flip back into Japanese, even though that's
not what they're actually speaking.
It's very confusing.
Now I happen to know that the same thing
does happen in the manga, since the original
copy I've got does have English in some
of the word balloons, but I'm almost certain
it will work a lot better there. Not least
of all because of the Jap-lish the actors
speak (I feel rubbish for criticising them,
as they can't help it, but it really does
detract from the series).
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One of the other disappointments with Black
Lagoon is the extras, or rather, the lack thereof.
For both of the seasons the special edition version
was released with a "steel book". This,
as the name suggests, has a metal front and back,
but also inside are slots for 4 DVDs.
However, they only released each season on 3
DVDs (with 4 episodes on each disk) so that leaves
a slot to fill. So, in order to fill that fourth
disk they obviously collected together bucket
loads of stuff, from interviews with both the
Japanese and American cast and crew, and an in-depth
discussion of Black Lagoon to a profile of Rei
Hiroei, right? Plus there was the usual promotional
trailers, and clean opening and endings, yeah?
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Well, no. Take the last few "plus"
bits - which are the bits you get on every anime
release ever - add some metal pencil boards and
make a half-arsed attempt at a ten-minute interview
with the American cast and you've got the entirety
of the Black Lagoon extras. And most of those
are the season 1 extras. The season 2 extras disk
literally has 10 minutes worth of stuff on it...
if you watch it twice.
Quite frankly it's not good enough.
Anyway, so in terms of the tone of the show,
what they've done is moved the slightly sillier
stories into the first half, and the slightly
more serious stories into the second half.
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Not that both halves don't have both
elements, it's just that the balance shifts
ever so slightly. So maybe before it was
55-45 in favour of humour and then in Second
Barrage the tone shifts to 45-55 humour-serious.
It's a clever trick as it kinda lulls you
into a false sense of security. This I think
is best shown in one of the earlier stories
involving the Nazi treasure hunters.
The basic idea is these are genuine Nazis
- they believe in the whole shtick, but
Hiroei constantly shows them in a mocking
and comical way, so on some level we almost
come to like them. Then, when Revy and Dutch
do their thing, especially at the end, it's
like a sucker-punch to the gut and suddenly
we're in really dark, murky water - a Black
Lagoon, if you will.
It's like there's a thin veneer of comedy
and light-ness to things, but as soon as
this is scratched, a thick, black morass
leaks out.
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What's so clever with the anime's ordering
is that as the show progresses, that veneer gets
thinner and thinner, so it doesn't take much for
the nasty stuff to leak out. Plus, by that time
we're so sucked into the world we don't really
need the same level of silly humour to make it
all work.
I think you can tell I'm somewhat keen on Black
Lagoon and I've not even gotten to the subtle
attraction between Revy and Rock or how awesome
Balalaika is or anything.
It really is a very good show indeed. |
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| summary |
| The Summary: Cool as a cucumber and twice
as shooty (eh?). |
| The Score: 5/5 |
| The Pictures:
(click for larger versions) |
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