★★½
“Get yer kits out…”
With its combination of alternate reality sci-fi and stylized action, this feels like it could have come from the mind of Mamoru Oshii, creator of things such as Avalon and Assault Girls. It’s not. Instead, it was created by toy manufacturer Bandai – like most of their shows, it works largely as a 25-minute long advertisement for product, in this case specifically model kits. But there are some interesting ideas to be found here, though they are somewhat let down by action that clearly has no interest in being realistic, and a tendency towards maudlin emotion. I was left wondering who, exactly, it was aimed at, because the sentimentality feels at odds with the young men who are likely the target consumers.
It takes place in a high school where the favoured hobby of Koharu Tachibana (Shiraishi) is making plastic models. After buying kits of a gun and a figure called Alice, and assembling them, she wakes to find herself an unwilling participant in ‘Girl Gun Fight’. Four teams of three young women, are pitted against each other in battle, overseen by each team’s commander – hers being Alice (Ohara). Between rounds she’s returned to school, along with the other participants, but naturally, nobody believes this story. There’s an awkward twist, in that if you lose all three of your lives in the game, that’s it. You do not get back to the real world, with all trace of you, including other people’s memories, being wiped out.
That’s a wonderfully dark concept, which we see realized as members of the team’s try, and fail, to protect their last life. But it also possesses almost industrial levels of perkiness, particularly reflected in idol-like pop video inserts, and bumpers of enthusiastic model-making. Tonally, it’s all over the place. I suspect that might be the point, in the same way I don’t know at whom it’s aimed. I’m inclined to go for male wish fulfillment, with Koharu being about as far as possible from the typical model-building nerd. On the other hand, it has a lot in common with the “magical schoolgirl” trope, often found in anime, and it’s driven largely by the power of friendship.
That’s especially true in the final two episodes, when Koharu, Alice and the survivors meet the wizard behind the curtain. It all gets a bit too sentimental for my tastes, with the protagonists falling over themselves in a rush to self-sacrifice. The other weakness is action that, in the main, is nothing special – it’s very stagey, in a way at which Power Rangers might look askance. More hard-hitting fights would have added nicely to the contrast with the cheesier elements. Still, I burned through the ten episodes in three sittings, and was entertained, though the emotional impact I felt fell short of what the show was aiming to generate. I also do not feel any strong urge to take up kit-building as a hobby.
Dir: Yûsuke Taki
Star: Sei Shiraishi, Yuno Ohara, Anna Ishii, Natsuki Deguchi