Zombie Review: Gungrave

A friend recently recommended some new anime to me: Gungrave. Some of the guys that did Trigun were involved in this as well which also piqued my interest.

Gungrave is about the same length as Trigun (approximately 650 minutes), so it is a fairly quick watch. Overall I found it quite amusing, except for one little thing….

There will be some minor generic spoilers with relation to the story progression, though nothing terribly specific.

The story opens with the character on the cover of the DVD (“Beyond the Grave”) saving a girl and a scientist defeat some zombies. Then we get some backstory, and then a whole bunch more backstory. In fact we actually rewind several years and find out how we got where we are today for about half the series. During this, I found myself forgetting about the first sequence of the anime, that is until we find the first zombie (corpses that have been “necrolized” and are actually referred to as “ordmen); then I remembered that we were actually in a flashback and wondered how we were going to get back to where the show started.

I really enjoyed the “flashback” portion of the anime. The story was fairly well done though the protagonist was occasionally annoyingly terse. Once we got back to the main event, lots more death and destruction occurs. Which brings me to the part I didn’t like… the girl, Mika Asagi, is supremely annoying. I realize as the watcher I have more information than her, but she just continues to ask these idiotic questions and makes ludicrous suggestions/demands that make me want very badly for someone to shoot her, repeatedly, in the trachea.

Other than the incredibly annoying chick, this anime was quite enjoyable and I would recommend it to others. One big difference from Trigun: lack of humor, though if it had been inserted I don’t know that it would have held its air of despair as well as it did.