If all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target.
What They Say:
“Renegade Extended”
Meet Juuzo Inui. An Over-Extended who deals with the problems of other Extended, people who have gotten enhanced body modifications. One night, a mysterious Extended “visits” his office with an unconscious boy from a shady orphanage…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Let’s not beat around the bush. This dude’s head is a gun. That’s about as gently as the series itself eases you into it. And what other setting could a gun-headed protagonist be introduced in but the most stereotypical hardboiled environment, complete with a trench coat, a lit cigarette piercing the darkness of the gritty streets around him, and a deep voice firing off one-liners that are either so cool that they’re embarrassing or so embarrassing that they’re cool? Yeah, that’s the kind of show we’re in for. Take a rejected design from FLCL, give it the character of Spider-Man Noir from Into the Spider-Verse except almost played straight, and then insert incongruously comedic moments of him becoming so bashful that his detailed mechanical head devolves into a simplistic chibi caricature like Alphonse in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I hope you’re up for that, because no matter where you go from here, a beginning like this does not allow the luxury of eventual normalcy. Your new normal is gun heads in noir land, and that’s something you’re going to have to accept if you plan to make it through a single episode of this show.
The idea behind my practice of choosing shows to review based on the studio and/or main staff is that I’d like to believe a series by my favorite studios or people is more likely to appeal to me, but at this point it probably proves more valuable by forcing me to engage more deeply with stories that are unlike most I’d be reviewing and just happen to be animated by Madhouse, for example. Madhouse is by far my favorite studio, but unlike KyoAni, for example, it has been producing so much content for so long that its output is as varied as the medium itself, and countless freelancers from throughout the industry cycle through the studio’s doors, making it easy to find two contemporaneous productions with virtually no notable overlap in staff, and often no distinct stylistic elements in common. This isn’t a studio with a consistent aesthetic, voice, or ethos like KyoAni, but for such a prolific and thinly spread studio, I’ve found that Madhouse manages to churn out high-quality productions at a much higher percentage than any other studio of comparable size and volume.
So when I arrive at this bizarre series because Madhouse happened to be the studio to adapt it, I’m not surprised to see these absurd sights depicted with solid line work, rich colors, and slick animation. The studio may not have a particularly obvious house style, and fans tend to look at animation quality to define a studio’s worth, but I regularly find myself stricken by the color work in Madhouse titles. In particular, the color designers seem to have such a strong grip on color theory that they can make very basic, solid colors far more impactful than other productions will achieve with all the gradients, filters, and effects in the world. They feel warm even as impossible as that is when depicting cold steel in a cold, dark world like this. Of course, none of this would matter if the artwork got wonky or off-model, but there’s none of that here, except when it needs to go into silly chibi mode for a moment. And yes, the animation is strong throughout. Nothing in this episode is extraordinarily dynamic, but neither does it resort to shortcuts in place of its action pieces or subtle character animation.
But what is the show really about? The logo offers the most hilariously nonsensical Engrish tagline I’ve seen in some time: “SF hard-boiled the gun smoke drifts muzzle talks.” This feels right in line with the absurdity presented throughout the series… but the series itself seems to genuinely take itself seriously, which seems like a recipe for disaster given multiple elements of its premise. Take out the gun head and you still have an atmosphere far too hardboiled to be played straight in the last cour of the 2010s. This guy should be voiced by Nicolas Cage, letting a match burn down to his fingertips just to feel something – anything, and fascinated by a Rubik’s Cube. Or, you know, something like that. On top of that… his head is a gun. This should be surrealist gold, but it’s hard to tell what kind of series it wants to be.
In Summary:
No Guns Life is a beautifully produced enigma that seems to take itself too seriously for such a clichéd noir story before even factoring in the absurdity of the hardboiled protagonist having a giant gun for a head. I have no idea if it will become an easier recommendation from embracing its surrealism, an intriguing enough plot, or some yet-unknown quality that will surface, but I’ll give it credit for not being quite like anything else in at least some respects.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Funimation
Review Equipment:
LG Electronics OLED65C7P 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K
