Welcome to the only new series I’m blogging from the Winter season: Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino. I greatly enjoyed the first Gunslinger Girl series, so I have pretty high hopes for this one. We’ll see how this one turns out.
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Go Straight to the Screenshots | Go Straight to the Review
The highlights of this episode:
- Hilshire and Jose look for gifts for Triela and Henrietta from their trip to France, when the storekeeper says he has the perfect gift for a girl named Henrietta. On the train back, Hilshire gets a call that they’re going on a mission when they get back, to try to prevent terrorism by the Five Republics during a demonstration in Rome.
- Jean, Jose, Henrietta, and Rico walk towards the demonstration site, being passed by many coughing protestors, who apparently had tear gas used against them. Along the way, Henrietta thinks to herself how she wish she and Jose were closer.
- While Jose and Henrietta patrol the police perimeter, an explosion goes off, sending Jose to the ground. Henrietta, seeing that Jose is cut, pulls out her gun and is ready to fire, but Jose stops her, saying it’s just a scratch. Henrietta then spots one of the police separate from the others and jump into a van that drives off. Then Priscilla drives up on her Vespa, having seen and heard the explosion, and Jose and Henrietta ask to borrow and chase after the van on it (much to Henrietta’s delight, since she’s able to cling onto Jose while riding it).
- The terrorists celebrate how effective a new bomb that they had tried out in the explosion was when Jose and Henrietta catch up on the Vespa. Jean calls them and tells them to keep chasing them for now, and that they’ll corner them later. Rico asks Jean if she should kill the terrorists, but Jean just tells her to “hurt them as much as she needs” since they’ll need to question a couple of them. Triela and Hilshire also show up to cut the terrorists off, and Triela sets a trip by uncovering a manhole on the street
- Members of the agency successfully force the terrorists into some back ally ways, and the terrorists in the car and Henrietta exchange fire, resulting in the passenger side person falling out of the van, which causes Henrietta to have to stop their pursuit. The van’s wheel then gets jammed in the open manhole, and Triela takes out the driver and another terrorist from a distance with her shotgun.
- Two more terrorists try to make a run for it, but end up running to Rico and Jean, who shoot, but don’t kill, both of them. Triela starts inspecting the van up close to see if anyone is left when one final terrorist jumps out and tries to stab her, but she blows a big ol’ hole in him by firing her shotgun at him at point blank range.
- That night, Henrietta goes to see Jose, but he isn’t in his room, but Henrietta sneaks in anyway. She sees a wrapped present and wonders if it’s a present for her from France. When she opens it, she sees that it’s an old kaleidoscope, but then she looks at the bottom, it says that it’s for “my beloved, Louise Antoinette Laure. Thinking that it’s a gift to Jose’s unknown lover, Henrietta runs off crying and is eventually run into by Triela. Triela brings her to her and Claes’s room. When Henrietta tells them the name of the woman on the bottom, Claes recognizes the name as the mistress of a 19th century French author, who wrote about the affair in a book, but used the name Henriette for the name of the mistress in the story.
- After Henrietta leaves, Triela asks Claes if the story ended happily for the lovers, and Claes tells her it didn’t. Triela ponders why Jose would buy a gift with such bad luck.
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One can’t say much about the story of the first episode, since it is mainly just to get viewers reaccustomed to the story in Gunslinger Girl, though we seem to have more violence in this episode than really most of the episodes in the first series (though that was kind of true of the first episode of the first series as well).
Unfortunately, most everything in this series screams out “cheap sequel,” though I hope I’m ultimately wrong. However, the animation quality, the use of shaking still images for “action” scenes (ie, a money saver), and cheap sounding background music all seem to point to a series made on the cheap. I don’t mind the voice actor changes all that much, but it’s hard to get my mind thinking this is a sequel when the two main characters - Jean and Henrietta look so different from their first series counterparts. Probably the highlights of the first episode was the opening credit sequence and the action sequences involving the girls.
It’s hard to put a series the Disappointment of the season award after one episode, but given it’s quality, this show seems to be heading in that direction. Like I said, I hope I’m wrong, but usually first episodes are supposed to show the best you have, not the worst you have, meaning that it may get even worse later.
