shinigami’s blog

This post is all about the “girls with guns” Bee Train trilogy, so it compares El Cazador with Noir and Madlax, but there are no spoilers for those 2 series.

I’ve waited for El Cazador with bated breath and liked the first episode so much that it renewed my enthusiasm for anime. My first impression was far better than the Madlax one, about on par with Noir - I liked the action and the atmosphere more in Noir, but El Cazador had some funny moments and the “wee!BeeTrainYukiKajiura” factor. (Here’s the post on that because I’m not going to go through it again.)

Now far from me to say that El Cazador is a bad series, but it’s disappointing when compared to Noir and Madlax. Yes, I have watched Madlax at last and it was really good after that horrible first episode. (I thank kacpy for giving me the motivation to retry watching it.)

El Cazador mixes the “mysterious amnesic young girl” (both Noir and Madlax - and a plethora of other anime, of course) with “the leads get together in the first episode” (Noir, except this is not significant) and the “mysterious supernatural stuff” (Madlax, except they don’t make it engaging, they don’t have you guessing and noticing details).

I’m not biased against this series, I was thrilled by the first 2 or 3 episodes, and considering that it capitalizes on Noir and Madlax I don’t see why it shouldn’t be compared to them.

In a trilogy that was nursed for so many years you’d expect the third series to be at least as good as the others, but El Cazador simply is not. It’s too slow in a bad way. Noir and Madlax were also slow, but they were building something and you could see that as you were watching. I’m not saying El Cazador is not just taking its time, but it’s too subtle at doing that. The overall effect is that after the first episode ends with them riding in the sunset you get to see just the same thing over and over in different settings. Episode 6 shows us a bit of Nadie’s past and there are bits of info in some of the others, but the info is predictable (and repeated) and, unlike in Madlax, you aren’t teased into being interested with each new detail.
More on this bellow. Let’s start with:

“But wasn’t Noir the same? And wasn’t Noir just like El Cazador with all those episodic missions?”

In Noir this worked because those episodes built the relationship between Kirika and Mireille and this relationship actually mattered - from the first episode you knew that this is the mystery of the series. You watched the missions because in seeing more of Kirika and Mireille acting and interacting you got closer to the “heart” of the series. Don’t say it’s just a post factum interpretation or a result of being spoiled by reviews because:
1. It’s the mystery of Kirika’s past and her connection to Mireille that drives the whole affair (*ahem* :P).
2. What was the title? “Noir”. Come on, you got the freakin’ duo in the OP and that whole story, you knew what “Noir” meant, you were interested in it, and you thought Noir must mean Kirika and Mireille.
1+2 - if you weren’t interested in Kirika/Mireille you might have watched any other series instead.

But, IMHO, in El Cazador the dynamics between Nadie and Ellis aren’t significant enough to play the same role, not even by far. Compare the first Noir episode with the El Cazador one - Nadie is hired to pick Ellis up. That’s it. Even if this is later revealed to be Destiny or Conspiracy or sth my point is that right now it’s not relevant.

Besides, where is the character development in El Cazador?

Now let’s get back to the boredom.

Madlax worked as a mystery, it made you guess. As I watched it with a friend we had to stop twice during the series because of our schedules, and each time when we met again we shared our theories. In fact we stopped during the final episodes just to make our guesses again and again. Since the beginning with the pasta line and the other tiny clues we saw that there is a mystery there. But one that was at first intriguing and that we could later hope to unravel, akin to that in a mystery novel.

The info we get in El Cazador doesn’t work like that (at least yet, but I am talking about a significant number of episodes - 9 episodes is a lot to take if you are not drawn in.) but in a more conventional way.

In Madlax we saw all the various players, but we didn’t know how they’d all come together and neither did they, but seeing each illuminated area let us see more of the big picture than the characters did. That’s why we could hazard guesses instead of just waiting for the characters to tell us what they thought.

In Noir we had the light on Kirika and Mireille, the rest was dark, we found out very little stuff, we watched them figure out things. In the first part of the series we didn’t get to see any relevant scenes that the duo didn’t see, there was no “council of villains” scene, no Altena grand speech, no nothing, just the mystery.

In El Cazador it’s, again, a mixture of the two. There is a spot of light on all major players, but we don’t get to see anything significant about any of them and there is no mystery as to where they stand in the big picture. This plays out as a conventional way of telling a story and it relies on our interest in the characters themselves (What does Rosenberg really want? What about L.A.? How did the tall guy and the loli get together?). But without info on them the characters just aren’t interesting - why would they be interesting? just for being there? - and it makes these slow introductory episodes truly boring. We simply watch the events unfold like in a typical action series except with little action. All in all, not “bad”, but disappointing for what El Cazador could (should?) have been.

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