It’s episode 2, and we have a Gunslinger Girls without many gunslinging girls in it. This time, nearly the entire focus is on their new nemesis-to-be, the boy assassin known as Pinocchio. We also say “welcome back” to a pair of old friends from the first series, as well as the return of Angelica.
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Go Straight to the Screenshots | Go Straight to the Review
The highlights of this episode:
- A man sends a boy named Pinocchio on a mission to “take care of” someone. After the man tries to take Pinocchio’s gun away upon his entering an apartment, Pinocchio cuts him with a knife, killing him. A young girl watches on in horror as her father’s body bleeds on the floor when Pinocchio walks up to her and, with a rather sad expression, shoots her in the head.
- Now older (older meaning, in his mid to late-teens I think), Pinocchio leaves piano practice and is met up with a young girl named Aurora who follows him around, and whom he generally tries to ignore. That night, Pinocchio lays on top of a car, thinking a little bit about his past, after having completed another mission.
- Pinocchio and the man who sent him on a mission in the first screen (whom Pinocchio calls “uncle”) talk in a restaurant. Pinocchio’s uncle asks him how things are going, but Pinocchio just says his social life could be better. His uncle warns him that he needs to learn more about society or else he won’t be able to work in his profession much longer. Pinocchio’s uncle then tells him that his next job will be a big one, where he’s working with a couple of other people.
- Later, Pinocchio’s uncle meets with 4 other older men, who decide to bomb the Straight of Messina Bridge, using the talents of the bomb makers Franco and Franca to team up with Pinocchio. The goal of this project being to halt a project which the four men see as being funded by heavy northern taxes solely to benefit southern Italy.
- Franco and Franca show up to see Pinocchio. While Pinocchio shows Franca where to part the car, Franco goes into Pinocchio’s apartment to scope things out, going so far as hiding a gun in the bathroom. Franco tells Pinocchio that he doesn’t trust his skill and points a gun at him, asking him what he would do. Pinocchio just tells him that he’d get into knife range, probably using an old injury on his leg to his advantage. This seems to temporarily satisfy Franco.
- Pinocchio goes out shopping to buy food and wine for himself, Franco and Franca when he runs into Aurora. Aurora says that she’ll ask her mother to make dinner for everyone, but Pinocchio declines, and tells Aurora to please stop following him around, since “nothing good will come to her” by following him around.
- Back in Pinocchio’s apartment, the trio discuss the plan. Franca explains that all that’s been built so far are the bridge piers, so that would probably be their target. Pinocchio asks if they’ll set the explosives themselves, and Franca tells him that they will, or innocent people may get killed. Pinocchio finds this rather odd given that she’s a freelance terrorist. Franco explains that neither of them have any particular ideology or goal, and that’s one reason.
- Over at the social welfare agency, Rico shows off how to use some big guns to a new recuperated Angelica. Meanwhile, Hilshire and Marco are talking about Angelica’s progress, as well as a mission that Hilshire and Triela are going on to investigate the death of a man in Milan - the man which they believe an assassin named Pinocchio knocked off…
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Well, they start this episode off showing that this Pinocchio character can be as ruthless, if not more so, than the girls of the Social Welfare Agency, killing his target’s daughter for…whatever reason (I guess because she was a witness). However, this even seems to have made him overprotective of Aurora, the girl that follows him around in the town he lives in. Despite his ruthlessness, his concern for Aurora does seem to show a softer side to Pinocchio, and I could very well see him eventually being a character who “turns from the dark side,” so to speak.
I got a little more used to the animation in this episode I think, though I think that’s largely because we either saw completely new characters, or a pair of characters in Franco and Franca whom we hadn’t see much of before.
Then we got to the end when we actually got back to the Social Welfare Agency, and I was once again reminded why I think handing this series off to another animation studio, especially one who decided to do a piss-poor job with both animation, but continuity as well, was a bad idea. After watching the raw, at the end, I was like “ooh! We get to see a new girl!” Except once I watched the raw, the girl wasn’t in fact a new girl, it was…Angelica! She looks completely different! And Marco now has switched from black hair to blond hair, apparently as well. Which is odd, since in the same scene, they refer to the remarkable progress that Angelica had made - referencing the last episode of the first series, even though I don’t recall her being seriously injured at this point in the manga. So they’re trying to be consistent as far as the return of Angelica, but decide to change the character designs all around. Tell me how this makes sense?
In any case, story wise, I thought this episode was pretty good, and I guess that, starting from next episode on, I’ll probably have most of my complaints about the differences between the first series and this series out of the way, and will (hopefully) focus more on the story. It looks like Franco and Franca will be a bigger part of this series, which will be nice since I thought they were a curious pair in the first series, and of course one of the biggest selling points of this second series was that it would include the Pinocchio story arc (which I’ve started but haven’t finished in the manga).
In any case, I’m probably going to have to just swallow the animation and character changes for now and focus on whether it has a good story or not, which I guess is ultimately is most important, but it’s hard not to pay attention to the animation when one is used to what we saw in the first series.
