Gungrave Review/Commentary
May. 8th, 2009 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI just finished watching Gungrave. It's good. It's not unflawed, but it's really very good. There's a lot to say about it, so I'll try to put down as much as I can think of. Plotwise, it's a friendship/revenge story about the mafia in a fantasy pseudo-America in a fantasy pseudo-mid/late 20th century. It's based on a video game, but it's a well-crafted story. Fans of good character development and friendship-antagonism, would do well to check it out.
Spoilers Follow:
Summary
The story covers about 30-35 years of the friendship and falling out of two orphans who grow up on the streets together (imagine Kaneda and Tetsuo with less apocalyptic destruction and living into their 40s). Harry is a charismatic happy-go-lucky type with a naturally amiable character, unmixed with much in the way moral scruples except for loyalty. Brandon, our hero, is also a big fan of loyalty. He is Harry's exceptionally taciturn right-hand man, with a talent for weapons and a much more developed sense of conscience. Long story short, Harry and Brandon pull themselves out of the gutter and into the mafia, where they rise meteorically as a crack team, until Harry's increasingly overweening ambition puts them on the outs. Harry wants to murder the current godfather and take over; Brandon disagrees; Harry kills him. But wait. Because this story is a fantasy, Brandon gets brought back from the dead 13 years later in a "necro-rised" form to topple Harry's darker, scarier mafia regime, and thereby hangs the rest of the tale.
The Bad
There are three problems with this anime (well, four: one of them is minor), and I'll get them out of the way now so I can talk about the good stuff:
1) The minor one: the animation's often not that great. In fact, it's been a while since I've seen walking animated so poorly. But that's a quibble. Good story telling will out over cheap animation.
2) The women suck. It's not really even worth talking about.
3) The fight scenes are often implausible, silly, and hard to follow. This, I think, is where the video game background comes in. It's the only place I sense "video game," and it's a shame that the "shoot as many targets as possible as fast as possible" aesthetic got in the way of interesting fight choreography (and led to the Borgification of many creepy, resurrected super-zombies).
4) The moral compass of the story is skewed. Not just the characters: the story. Too often, there is a narrative that Big Daddy's earlier regime in the mafia organization, Millennion, was "good" and Harry's Millennion is "bad." There's no question that Harry's is worse: it kills a lot more people, has more people living in fear, and employs scary monsters. But Big Daddy's Millennion, which we're repeatedly told he established out of a binding desire to "protect" the "Family" (broadly speaking) also kills people freely; beats up people who can't pay off loan sharks; works as a shadow government controlling outside normal, political, democratic, etc. process; and makes its top shareholders insanely rich (including Big Daddy)--at whose expense, one wonders? Now, we also get lip service paid to the idea that Big Daddy knew he wasn't a saint. But it is no more than lip service. He is presented as the saintly old man who can do no wrong. This has the effect of making him appear hypocritical. (Harry notes this at one point, and Harry is correct. Sorry, Brandon.) It makes Brandon, BD's chief advocate, seem at best naive.
The story's core principle of loyalty is also hard to follow. For good guys and bad guys alike, it seems to supersede most/all other values. For example, Lee seeks revenge on Brandon for killing Bob, who was his best friend, and this is "bad," yet Brandon seeks revenge on Harry for killing Big Daddy, and this is "good." There's a question of which loyalty trumps which. Brandon places Big Daddy's Millennion at the pinnacle of his moral priorities, but for all the lionization of the "good" Millennion, I'm not sure what good this devotion to it accomplishes. At one point, it leads Brandon to abandon Big Daddy's daughter, Mika (directly after telling her they're "family" and despite the fact that she is a helpless 13 year old with no one else in the world and people trying to kill her) because his loyalty to Millennion demands he go after Harry. Weird much?
The Good
On the upside, there is some acknowledgment of the moral entanglements these conflicting loyalties generate and the difficulty of parsing who or what is really "good" or "bad." All the characters (except the zombies) are presented as human, with their own moral strengths and weaknesses, which brings us to the good stuff.
This is a story about getting old (or older), more something one expects from a "literary novel" than an anime, but this anime paints its portraits with great grace. I have never seen an anime that ages people so effectively. Through skips of three, five, or more than ten years, we see our characters evolve: their speech, manner, dress, hairstyle shifts. Harry gets wrinkles; Brandon needs glasses. It's subtle, steady, logical, in character. By slow degrees, it brings our characters to the end of their journeys, to the sum total of a decade (or two or three) of relationships built with the people around them, of mistakes made, lessons learned (too late). Lee is not a well-developed character, but his grief over Bob's death is immediately relatable because we have seen him and Bob go arm-in-arm for twenty years. Brandon and Harry are well developed, and the trajectory of their friendship is perfect--perfect--from both a character-driven and a plot-driven perspective.
So now I will spoil the end because I can't go further without doing so. Harry and Brandon spend a good number of episodes out to get each other, but again like Tetsuo and Kaneda, they snap out of it in the end. They realize that despite all the genuinely horrible betrayal that lies between them, they are, in essence, still best friends. Their era over, they finally choose to end each other's lives, in harmony, bringing the narrative full circle. This is structurally brilliant. It also fits the characters. Harry's eleventh hour recognition of his errors feels natural, not forced, a logical consequence of losing all he's built, coming face-to-face with Brandon, and thus, facing head-on at last the guilt that's gnawed at him for years over taking Brandon's life. Brandon, for his part, has always been torn between loyalty to Harry and to "Millennion." He remains torn, but his love for Harry was, I think, never deeply buried. He is by nature a loyal follower, calm, steady. Like anyone, he's capable of outrage, but bloody revenge does not suit him, and face-to-face with Harry and nothing left to win or lose, he'd instinctively let his revenge slip away.
The hail of bullets notwithstanding, there's a restraint in this story I find endearing and right. It reminds me a little of Monster. Affection is built by daily routines, by lives shared, not romantic melodrama. I like that one of Harry's central relationships is with his father-in-law, Bear Walken, and that it is both steadfast and troubled: steadfast because neither man wants to disrupt wife/daughter, Sheri's, happiness, troubled because Bear knows very well that Harry has destroyed the kinder, gentler Millennion he initially worked for. I even like Harry's relationship with his wife, not that she's much a character, but in its few scant scenes, it gives the impression of an imperfect couple genuinely supporting each other's happiness as the years trudge by.
I like Brandon and Maria. I don't like Maria. She's the worst dink of an anime chock full of dinky women (though slightly redeemed by her death scene). But the gestalt of Brandon and Maria I like. It makes sense that he wouldn't mind (or even notice) that she's a dink because the world he inhabits is one in which women are porcelain on pedestals and she plays the role so well. Brandon and Maria: they dated (or something) in high school (or something) but not too seriously because he was persona non grata in her more middle class house. After her adoptive father's murder, she is taken in by Big Daddy about the same time Brandon joins the mafia. Eventually, she partners up with Big Daddy and has his child. In essence, Brandon gives her up to BD. It's clear that he loves her, but he feels that, being a hitman, he's not good enough for her (um, Brandon, you're a hitman for Big Daddy). For all his reasoning may be a bit odd, the lingering affection and gradual attenuation of his relationship with Maria is sweet and relatable. That their affection survives her falling in love (or something) with Big Daddy, building a life with him, having a child with him is very human and as good an indication as anything of true depth of feeling.
The central pair, of course, is Brandon and Harry, whom I keep likening to Tetsuo and Kaneda, not because the relationships are so very much alike, but because they are both excellent examples of that beautiful and rare animal, the truly platonic life partnership. I love Harry and Brandon's non-slashability, "guyness" of their friendship. They don't touch; they don't need to. Sitting side by side in a car or on the gravel overlooking the ocean, they are as close as any lovers. I love that they say, "I love you," just by saying each other's names. I love the way Harry tirelessly advocates for Brandon and Maria (even up to making it part of his spin for killing BD), that he advocates for the two of them far more strongly than Brandon does. I love that Brandon, back when he's utterly in love with Maria, takes about ten seconds to decide to skip town forever with Harry and that Harry tells him he should stay and get a real job and life with Maria. I love that they laugh at the same jokes, on the strength of a glance, without joke ever having been spoken. I love that in the very end, they love each other with their guns because that's the world they live in.
The Random
In this pseudo-fantasy-America, the Japanese flourish with the same tenacity as the British in Buffyverse's Southern California. It's kind of cute.
Harry is a lot like Eva Peron (in Evita; I don't know much about the historical figure). If Harry had been a woman, he would have married Big Daddy. Mark my words: Maria would have been out of there with a quick, "Hello and goodbye. I've just unemployed you." Actually, it would have given him a whole new set of reasons to aim Brandon and Maria at each other. The more I think about it, the more I think I might have preferred the story with Harry as a woman. At least, it would mean that there was one good female character.
I like the background pathos that Harry loves kids but he and Sheri can't have any. But how weird is it that in a world where they resurrect the dead and convert living people into super people who can detach parts of their bodies and operate them by remote control they can't figure out why Harry and Sheri are infertile? That's called getting your funding priorities straight! :)
As for Brandon, the following is interpretation, but I think it fits well with the canon. I read Brandon as an honest-to-goodness innate asexual. He's not aromatic; he definitely has a perennial thing for Maria, but I don't see evidence that it's sexualized. It could just be that we don't see that because he's reserved and trying to let her go. But I can think of a couple of moments that actually argue (at least slightly) against a strong sexual attraction. He buys her a dress at one point (if I recall right) and doesn't recognize it when he sees her in it; that suggests, at least, a certain lack of engagement with her appearance. There's also a flashback to their early days together in which she hugs him and, after some bafflement, he hugs her back. This could very easily be the moment to kiss her, but he doesn't. Maybe he's just shy and clueless? Sure. But he doesn't look like he wants to kiss her. On the contrary, he looks 100 percent content simply standing there hugging her. Maria aside, we get no inkling that Brandon has any sexual involvement with anyone else. In his teen years, his friends are shocked to see him taking an interest in Maria; this, it would appear, is unprecedented. In his later life, Maria seems the only object of affection, the only one Harry ever mentions, and if anyone shows concern for Brandon's love life, it's Harry (and BD). Yet Brandon does not appear stymied. He seems almost content to relinquish Maria to BD yet shows no drive to find anyone else. He also fits the profile of most asexuals in being a high introvert. The more I think about it, the more I think one could, in fact, plausibly read Brandon as a virgin, and one of those rare virgins who is one simply because he doesn't see any reason not to be. Of course, it's also completely consistent with canon to read him as heterosexual, but I prefer the asexual reading because it is rare to see asexuals in fiction, much less as attractive protagonists of action-adventure stories.
Spoilers Follow:
Summary
The story covers about 30-35 years of the friendship and falling out of two orphans who grow up on the streets together (imagine Kaneda and Tetsuo with less apocalyptic destruction and living into their 40s). Harry is a charismatic happy-go-lucky type with a naturally amiable character, unmixed with much in the way moral scruples except for loyalty. Brandon, our hero, is also a big fan of loyalty. He is Harry's exceptionally taciturn right-hand man, with a talent for weapons and a much more developed sense of conscience. Long story short, Harry and Brandon pull themselves out of the gutter and into the mafia, where they rise meteorically as a crack team, until Harry's increasingly overweening ambition puts them on the outs. Harry wants to murder the current godfather and take over; Brandon disagrees; Harry kills him. But wait. Because this story is a fantasy, Brandon gets brought back from the dead 13 years later in a "necro-rised" form to topple Harry's darker, scarier mafia regime, and thereby hangs the rest of the tale.
The Bad
There are three problems with this anime (well, four: one of them is minor), and I'll get them out of the way now so I can talk about the good stuff:
1) The minor one: the animation's often not that great. In fact, it's been a while since I've seen walking animated so poorly. But that's a quibble. Good story telling will out over cheap animation.
2) The women suck. It's not really even worth talking about.
3) The fight scenes are often implausible, silly, and hard to follow. This, I think, is where the video game background comes in. It's the only place I sense "video game," and it's a shame that the "shoot as many targets as possible as fast as possible" aesthetic got in the way of interesting fight choreography (and led to the Borgification of many creepy, resurrected super-zombies).
4) The moral compass of the story is skewed. Not just the characters: the story. Too often, there is a narrative that Big Daddy's earlier regime in the mafia organization, Millennion, was "good" and Harry's Millennion is "bad." There's no question that Harry's is worse: it kills a lot more people, has more people living in fear, and employs scary monsters. But Big Daddy's Millennion, which we're repeatedly told he established out of a binding desire to "protect" the "Family" (broadly speaking) also kills people freely; beats up people who can't pay off loan sharks; works as a shadow government controlling outside normal, political, democratic, etc. process; and makes its top shareholders insanely rich (including Big Daddy)--at whose expense, one wonders? Now, we also get lip service paid to the idea that Big Daddy knew he wasn't a saint. But it is no more than lip service. He is presented as the saintly old man who can do no wrong. This has the effect of making him appear hypocritical. (Harry notes this at one point, and Harry is correct. Sorry, Brandon.) It makes Brandon, BD's chief advocate, seem at best naive.
The story's core principle of loyalty is also hard to follow. For good guys and bad guys alike, it seems to supersede most/all other values. For example, Lee seeks revenge on Brandon for killing Bob, who was his best friend, and this is "bad," yet Brandon seeks revenge on Harry for killing Big Daddy, and this is "good." There's a question of which loyalty trumps which. Brandon places Big Daddy's Millennion at the pinnacle of his moral priorities, but for all the lionization of the "good" Millennion, I'm not sure what good this devotion to it accomplishes. At one point, it leads Brandon to abandon Big Daddy's daughter, Mika (directly after telling her they're "family" and despite the fact that she is a helpless 13 year old with no one else in the world and people trying to kill her) because his loyalty to Millennion demands he go after Harry. Weird much?
The Good
On the upside, there is some acknowledgment of the moral entanglements these conflicting loyalties generate and the difficulty of parsing who or what is really "good" or "bad." All the characters (except the zombies) are presented as human, with their own moral strengths and weaknesses, which brings us to the good stuff.
This is a story about getting old (or older), more something one expects from a "literary novel" than an anime, but this anime paints its portraits with great grace. I have never seen an anime that ages people so effectively. Through skips of three, five, or more than ten years, we see our characters evolve: their speech, manner, dress, hairstyle shifts. Harry gets wrinkles; Brandon needs glasses. It's subtle, steady, logical, in character. By slow degrees, it brings our characters to the end of their journeys, to the sum total of a decade (or two or three) of relationships built with the people around them, of mistakes made, lessons learned (too late). Lee is not a well-developed character, but his grief over Bob's death is immediately relatable because we have seen him and Bob go arm-in-arm for twenty years. Brandon and Harry are well developed, and the trajectory of their friendship is perfect--perfect--from both a character-driven and a plot-driven perspective.
So now I will spoil the end because I can't go further without doing so. Harry and Brandon spend a good number of episodes out to get each other, but again like Tetsuo and Kaneda, they snap out of it in the end. They realize that despite all the genuinely horrible betrayal that lies between them, they are, in essence, still best friends. Their era over, they finally choose to end each other's lives, in harmony, bringing the narrative full circle. This is structurally brilliant. It also fits the characters. Harry's eleventh hour recognition of his errors feels natural, not forced, a logical consequence of losing all he's built, coming face-to-face with Brandon, and thus, facing head-on at last the guilt that's gnawed at him for years over taking Brandon's life. Brandon, for his part, has always been torn between loyalty to Harry and to "Millennion." He remains torn, but his love for Harry was, I think, never deeply buried. He is by nature a loyal follower, calm, steady. Like anyone, he's capable of outrage, but bloody revenge does not suit him, and face-to-face with Harry and nothing left to win or lose, he'd instinctively let his revenge slip away.
The hail of bullets notwithstanding, there's a restraint in this story I find endearing and right. It reminds me a little of Monster. Affection is built by daily routines, by lives shared, not romantic melodrama. I like that one of Harry's central relationships is with his father-in-law, Bear Walken, and that it is both steadfast and troubled: steadfast because neither man wants to disrupt wife/daughter, Sheri's, happiness, troubled because Bear knows very well that Harry has destroyed the kinder, gentler Millennion he initially worked for. I even like Harry's relationship with his wife, not that she's much a character, but in its few scant scenes, it gives the impression of an imperfect couple genuinely supporting each other's happiness as the years trudge by.
I like Brandon and Maria. I don't like Maria. She's the worst dink of an anime chock full of dinky women (though slightly redeemed by her death scene). But the gestalt of Brandon and Maria I like. It makes sense that he wouldn't mind (or even notice) that she's a dink because the world he inhabits is one in which women are porcelain on pedestals and she plays the role so well. Brandon and Maria: they dated (or something) in high school (or something) but not too seriously because he was persona non grata in her more middle class house. After her adoptive father's murder, she is taken in by Big Daddy about the same time Brandon joins the mafia. Eventually, she partners up with Big Daddy and has his child. In essence, Brandon gives her up to BD. It's clear that he loves her, but he feels that, being a hitman, he's not good enough for her (um, Brandon, you're a hitman for Big Daddy). For all his reasoning may be a bit odd, the lingering affection and gradual attenuation of his relationship with Maria is sweet and relatable. That their affection survives her falling in love (or something) with Big Daddy, building a life with him, having a child with him is very human and as good an indication as anything of true depth of feeling.
The central pair, of course, is Brandon and Harry, whom I keep likening to Tetsuo and Kaneda, not because the relationships are so very much alike, but because they are both excellent examples of that beautiful and rare animal, the truly platonic life partnership. I love Harry and Brandon's non-slashability, "guyness" of their friendship. They don't touch; they don't need to. Sitting side by side in a car or on the gravel overlooking the ocean, they are as close as any lovers. I love that they say, "I love you," just by saying each other's names. I love the way Harry tirelessly advocates for Brandon and Maria (even up to making it part of his spin for killing BD), that he advocates for the two of them far more strongly than Brandon does. I love that Brandon, back when he's utterly in love with Maria, takes about ten seconds to decide to skip town forever with Harry and that Harry tells him he should stay and get a real job and life with Maria. I love that they laugh at the same jokes, on the strength of a glance, without joke ever having been spoken. I love that in the very end, they love each other with their guns because that's the world they live in.
The Random
In this pseudo-fantasy-America, the Japanese flourish with the same tenacity as the British in Buffyverse's Southern California. It's kind of cute.
Harry is a lot like Eva Peron (in Evita; I don't know much about the historical figure). If Harry had been a woman, he would have married Big Daddy. Mark my words: Maria would have been out of there with a quick, "Hello and goodbye. I've just unemployed you." Actually, it would have given him a whole new set of reasons to aim Brandon and Maria at each other. The more I think about it, the more I think I might have preferred the story with Harry as a woman. At least, it would mean that there was one good female character.
I like the background pathos that Harry loves kids but he and Sheri can't have any. But how weird is it that in a world where they resurrect the dead and convert living people into super people who can detach parts of their bodies and operate them by remote control they can't figure out why Harry and Sheri are infertile? That's called getting your funding priorities straight! :)
As for Brandon, the following is interpretation, but I think it fits well with the canon. I read Brandon as an honest-to-goodness innate asexual. He's not aromatic; he definitely has a perennial thing for Maria, but I don't see evidence that it's sexualized. It could just be that we don't see that because he's reserved and trying to let her go. But I can think of a couple of moments that actually argue (at least slightly) against a strong sexual attraction. He buys her a dress at one point (if I recall right) and doesn't recognize it when he sees her in it; that suggests, at least, a certain lack of engagement with her appearance. There's also a flashback to their early days together in which she hugs him and, after some bafflement, he hugs her back. This could very easily be the moment to kiss her, but he doesn't. Maybe he's just shy and clueless? Sure. But he doesn't look like he wants to kiss her. On the contrary, he looks 100 percent content simply standing there hugging her. Maria aside, we get no inkling that Brandon has any sexual involvement with anyone else. In his teen years, his friends are shocked to see him taking an interest in Maria; this, it would appear, is unprecedented. In his later life, Maria seems the only object of affection, the only one Harry ever mentions, and if anyone shows concern for Brandon's love life, it's Harry (and BD). Yet Brandon does not appear stymied. He seems almost content to relinquish Maria to BD yet shows no drive to find anyone else. He also fits the profile of most asexuals in being a high introvert. The more I think about it, the more I think one could, in fact, plausibly read Brandon as a virgin, and one of those rare virgins who is one simply because he doesn't see any reason not to be. Of course, it's also completely consistent with canon to read him as heterosexual, but I prefer the asexual reading because it is rare to see asexuals in fiction, much less as attractive protagonists of action-adventure stories.
