Twelve Days of Anime, Post 7: Girls + Guns + Canaan

Jackie Brown was a so-so Tarantino. Okay, maybe it’s actually a decent movie, but after Pulp Fiction…it was a let-down. The main thing I remember about it was one of the character’s obsession with bikini girls shooting machine guns and kind of laughing at the guy for watching such cheesy shit. Being a too-smart for myself student at the time, you know, the kind of douche who looked down on plebes for getting all excited about Independence Day, the only cheesy shit I watched was watched ironically. Years later and look at me now. I watch anime and girls shooting guns is one of my favorite things.

As far as stuff released on DVD and BluRay is concerned, this was an okay year for kick-ass ladies, mainly for the first and last couple of episodes from Canaan. The gun fights and action sequences were really good. Unfortunately, like many stories in the genre it kind of feels like it’s stuck trying to work with the rules laid down by La Femme Nikita and over-commits to using the back story to do the job of the fore story. Canaan opened up with a potentially interesting front story dealing with bio-terrorism, but that pretty quickly turned into a means to link the the back story, dropping what looked like it was the main plot about two-thirds into it. This type of storytelling to frame the action is done all the time, but in Canaan it led to a dead spot in the series rather than fast times at blowing things up sky high. For what essentially is a throw-away, it took up way too much of the show’s time.

The main flaw in Canaan letting the background do the foreground’s job is it makes the villain impotent. It’s all about revealing the past, so the villain needs to wait for the good guys to get all the pieces together. This forces the use of one of lamest cards anime plays, the villain who lets the defeated good guys go so that the villain can continue to wait for the good guys to gather the pieces of the back story. This fails on so many character plausibility and storytelling levels. It killed Alphard, the main villain, for me.

So why am I writing about Canaan in a blog post supposed to be celebrating twelve anime moments I had this year? Canaan has no schools, no students late for school, no students transferring in, school festivals, or mentions school lunches, hot springs, beaches, no training of magic rookies, no one must try harder because everyone already does. Canaan has a slew of standard elements, so I’m not praising it for originality, just thanking it for telling a story that is missing the aforementioned elements and giving me a few episodes worth of truly noteworthy action.

Canaan was directed by Masahiro Ando, who also directed the fight-spectacle Sword of the Stranger. For a TV series, the animation during Canaan’s combat sequences is obscene. Most TV action sequences more often have me noting short-cuts instead of coolness. Canaan tallies more coolness points than really cheaty short-cuts. This show had to have had a high budget considering how great it looks, choosing wisely where to conserve and splurge and mostly hitting the mark. On that front it was satisfying to watch.