So I went and got hold of a copy of Gunsmith Cats: Bulletproof on DVD yesterday. It’s been bloody ages since I last saw this animé (I must have been in secondary school when it debuted on these shores), and I never actually saw how it concluded. Since Forbidden Planet were doing a 2-for-1 offer on animé, I thought I’d be foolish to pass up a chance to own it in its entirety….
What strikes me about this story is the directly political theme, which is revealed in full in the last act. I liked the fact that it placed a gun-control favouring politico as the villain of the piece – a direct contrast to the gun-toting, bounty-hunter heroines operating on the outskirts of the law. That, along with Kenichi Sonoda’s extreme gun fetish (and subsequent attention to detail) marks the Gunsmith Cats animé out as an extreme pro-libertarian text. If this element wasn’t so apparent in the manga, it makes its presence known here to great effect.
As with all manga adaptations, it is significantly condensed, but certainly worth a view if one hasn’t already seen it. Me? I fucking loved it. Birds, bullets, blood and an astute little bit of political insight too – for all its Japanese origins, it’s a noticeably “American” show, in ways other than its Chicago setting. Great stuff!
~MRDA~
I didn’t know that there was a Gunsmith Cats anime I only have some of the Manga.
Yeah – they released a trio of episodes on DVD almost a decade back, now collected onto DVD for convenience and cost-reduction. It’s a great little OAV miniseries though there’s a lot from the manga left out (Minnie May’s prostitute past and stuff like so….)