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Anime Review: Darker Than Black and Hell Girl


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Darker Than Black

The stars are gone. At least the real ones. Something, an anomaly, happened. The new dots of light in the night sky represent super powered beings, contractors, who do not have humanity's best interests at heart. Darker Than Black: The Black Contractor follows a Chinese contractor, Hei, through Tokyo as he tracks, fights and destroys contractors and others in his way to finding …something. Hei's quest leads through 25 short and violent episodes, maybe 19 or 20 minutes each minus the credits.

The contractors are assassins, not heroes. They are callous, supposedly rational, emotionally flat individuals who regard humans as objects to be used and discarded in some sort of game. Hei seems different. Perfectly fine with violence, but different. The other contractors have an issue: they pay a price. Literally. The must perform an OCD task, injure themselves, eat something special or somehow fuel their actions. Hei doesn't seem to share a contract price the rest of the beings pay.

The video below shows a fight between Hei and Wei, who must use his own blood as his payment.

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More Darker Than Black and Hell Girl after the break.

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Darker Than Black: Hell's and Heaven's Gates

The Tokyo anomaly is Hell's Gate. Heaven's Gate happened in South America diametrically opposed geographically to Hell's Gate. Contractors appear to have occurred there also, but Heaven's Gate went away, taking 1,500 sq Km with it five years ago. Governments have warred, toppled and reworked relationships since the Gates appeared. The US has lost superpower hegemony and a new organization, The Syndicate, appears to be the shadowy puppet master paying and steering contractors along shrouded paths.

Hell's Gate exists in Tokyo, walled off by a government trying to shield the public from the alien and unknown. The Gate is being studied by a UN sponsored group named PANDORA, riddled with spies from other governments and groups. The group is floundering in darkness, unable to do anything but track Contractors by their stars and the aftermaths of their actions. A meteor fragment, might be the key to solving the appearance of the gate, but PANDORA loses it, then the thieves lose it again.

Darker Than Black is good. Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in The Shell good. It's streaming on Netflix, but you can pick it up at Amazon also. And the series appears to be on Youtube in it's entirety.

Hell Girl

Not nearly as successful in my eyes is Hell Girl. I wanted to like Hell Girl. The thing is it offends my sense of justice. People, mostly young girls, call upon Hell Girl through a special Web site. She pulls them into a pocket universe Hell, gives them a totem, a black straw doll with a red ribbon tied around its throat, and tells them they can use it to exact vengeance upon their persecutors. Good so far. But if they use it, they go to Hell too, when they die.

The trailer gives a taste of the horror/revenge vibe and the creepy Hell Girl.

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In the second episode, a young girl is being stalked by a deranged older man. He harasses her and her family numerous times during the day. At one point he becomes a physical threat to her and her father. She pulls the string, Hell takes over and she condemns her own soul. There is no satisfaction in the justice. Perhaps that is the point, but I do not need to have it hammered home episode after episode.

The show is interesting and some of the visuals of revenge being enacted captured a nightmarish quality. How many shows delve so deeply into dark questions of morality? What would it take for you to sell yourself to Hell? But it is a bit much to watch as a series, back-to-back. And I was left feeling empty, knowing there is no hope, that the protagonist has simply traded one Hell for another.

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