Black Rock Shooter is an Art Piece

Black Rock Shooter (OAV)

[http://www.otakunovideo.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Black_Rock_shooter_pic-739540-211x300.jpg|211x300px|Black Rock Shooter]

Origin: Originally a sketch, then a Hatsune Miku music video of same

Studio: Ordet

Director: Shinobu Yoshioka

Writers: Nagaru Tanigawa and Shinobu Yoshioka

Made in: 2010

Genre: Fantasy / action / high school / drama

Premise: The anime cuts between a couple of girls getting to know each other in junior high, and their gothic-punk avatars fighting in an apocalyptic fantasy world.

Show x Show: It's a Studio Ghibli film crossed with White Reflection

Length: one hour

Junior high girls and fighting avatars? Yeah. It's weird.

What's the junior high material life? Like a Studio Ghibli film, and I mean that honestly. Very high animation rate, with minimal dialogue. A lot is conveyed by facial expression.

'''What about the butt-kicking girls? '''An even higher sheet count than the junior high segments, set in a visually stunning world of abandoned cathedrals and blasted plains. It's basically an excuse to see girls in goth outfits swing huge weapons at each other. Not that I'm complaining?

'''Can I show it to my Mom? '''Sure, but the fighting stuff doesn't make sense.

'''Can I show it to my kid brother? '''Sure, but he'll be bored by the junior high school girl stuff.

Can I show it to a non-anime fan? It's a good candidate, actually, as long as the viewer is okay with unusual juxtapositions. If the viewer likes experimental film, this is perfect.

Does the art quality vary from shot to shot? Nope.

Quality of action sequences: Very high.

Music: Interestingly, all the music is instrumental. You'll never hear a vocaloid sing, and the fighting sequences have no dialogue at all.

Direction/Editing: Film-quality during the junior high sequences; wonderfully kinetic and off-kilter during the fight sequences.

Availability: Not yet released in America; fansubs exist.

'''Warning! Spoilers ahead!'''

In reading through some of the reviews of Black Rock Shooter, I'm surprised at the amount of attention paid to its story.

From bakareviews's review: "...what it lacked was fluid cohesion and a solid story." From Borderline Hikikomori's review: "One of the biggest questions I had going into this was what the story would be like....The core problem with Black Rock Shooter lies with the storytelling. The pacing is horrid, with pretty much nothing happening in the first half." From autaku's review (since removed): "[The] somewhat extraneous scenes become particularly problematic as the film progresses and it becomes increasingly obvious that the main story would benefit from a longer runtime." It's clear to me that Black Rock Shooter is an art piece.

Both stories are structurally simple, and clearly presented through imagery. The first several minutes of the junior high sequences include no dialogue; just images of a girl's first day of junior high school. All of the vocaloid sequences have no dialogue at all.

The junior high story, moreover, focuses on jealousy between three girls, and the eventual disappearance of one. That's it. There's no depth beyond one girl getting jealous of another and disappearing.

As such, the story's not the most important element of the piece. It's a music video, which makes it more of a tone poem. It's meant to evoke emotion, as its imagery clearly does, from the bright junior high school scenes to the dingy environments of the vocaloids' fights, BRS creates moods and feelings.

In fact, BRS reminds me of the first segment of Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters Per Second, in which a boy is on an increasingly-delayed train ride to see a girl he was separated from years prior. The story couldn't be simpler: the train keeps getting delayed, and the protagonist gets increasingly worried. It's beautifully presented, and evokes the nervous emotion of a teenage boy's insecurities.

Some fans also worried about the commercial side of the production. To quote autaku's review: "is this nothing more than a lengthy advertisement to sell more merchandise?"

That's disproven, in my opinion, by the fact that most of the film's running time is devoted to the junior high story. If the project's staff were motivated primarily to make an ad for BRS figurines, why did they spend so little time on those characters?

Black Rock Shooter is an art piece, using the characters as inspiration for a Ghibli-like slice-of-life story.

Yuu Minamoto