Looking for a downer? Gunslinger Girl, often jokingly refered to as Noir 2.0 for it's slow pacing and theme of young girls with guns, delivers in spades. This is the sad story of a group of pre-teen girls turned cybernetic assassins, the men that train them, and the company that owns them all. Dark and a bit over the top with its theme, this is a well crafted anime that isn't for everyone.

Young girls make the perfect assassins. They are unassuming and most wouldn't expect a pigtailed violinist to suddenly whip out a machine gun and mow down a room. Once their memories are wiped they are willing to bond with any adult figure presented to them and try to please them, or at least they do in this series. Each girl has their memories wiped, their desire to please increased, and a ton of cybernetic implants that do everything from enabling them to ignore pain to increasing their reflexes and strength. They train day in and day out, not just with various firearms but in how to act in social situations. The same reflexes that will shoot a man for making the wrong move but also not shoot the waiter who is simply setting the table. They frequently go in for surgeries to fine tune their level of submissiveness, and if have new unacceptable memories wiped clean. All the while their adult handlers have to perform a fine balancing act between dominator and comforter just to keep them stable.

The series is mostly about the relationships between the girls and the handlers, demonstrated through the differences between the girls themselves. Shy Henrietta was sold into her predicament, and sees her handler as a beloved older brother, begging for more time with him and even learning an instrument just to please him. Rico is simply happy to be able to get out of bed each morning and will gladly take any abuse from her handler as long as she can. Triela is the oldest of the girls and doesn't know where she stands with her handler, and she demonstrates a much stronger independent streak than the others while simultaneously wishing for a total brain wipe so she can start over again. They don't react to the killing they have to perform, they aren't allowed to, so they react to other experiences to demonstrate the emotions that are repressed deep within them. The situations are often set up to provoke the most viewer outrage or sympathy, but they sometimes unwittingly cross the line from being evocative to becoming a self-parody. The total lack of humor paired with the overwhelming air of depressing and lost hope can end up giving you the giggles if you aren't completely into what is happening on screen, and with the slow plotting you aren't always completely gripped.

While the action in Gunslinger girl is breathtakingly beautiful to watch, don't blink or else you will miss it. Most of the time you will see still or almost still scenes of characters conversing. The series is almost entirely a character study, with the action merely a distraction to set up internal conflict rather than an ends of its own. It also has a lot of style, some of which works better than others. The opening and ending are both in regular 4:3 format, but the series itself is presented in a custom decorated letterbox format for no obvious reason. The music consists of nice background pieces, including the clichéd tranquil classical scores for scenes where there's a great deal of blood being shed.

Cliché is the word that comes to mind for a lot of aspects of Gunslinger Girl. These girls are your Rei Ayanamis, your Kirikas, only younger and newer. There's not a lot of new things being explored, just the same questions as have been explored in other series. If they are questions you aren't tired of and you like little girls in questionable situations slaughtering people then Gunslinger Girl is for you. Most people will find the series too slow and depressing to be a good investment of their time. - Angie 'Foodbunny' Dietrich .