GRENADIER: HOHOEMI NO SENSHI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ActionGrenadier
SPECIAL AdventureGrenadier: Hohoemi no Senshi Specials

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  30/100
  The Woman in Black Fled Across Feudal Japan, and the Busty Gunslinger Followed.

  It’s a contentious period in feudal Japan. The ancient order of the samurai, devoted wielders of some of the finest swords in human history, have been struggling to adapt to the introduction of modern firearms... As well as helium balloons. So feudal Japan in the 1920’s, I guess. In any case, this conflict has led to bloodshed on both sides, as the samurai battle against the Senshi, AKA those who have been specially trained in gun usage. There seemed to be no end to the devastation caused by this conflict, until a strange busty blonde gunslinger saunters onto the scene. Armed with pistols, a bountiful supply of ammunition, and more importantly, a bright and friendly smile, sixteen year old Rushuna Tendou is a staunch pacifist who believes that the ultimate combat strategy is to eliminate the enemy’s will to fight. She travels with her two newfound allies... A formerly violent samurai who struggles to see things from her perspective, and a loli who makes magical balloons... But when faces from her past come back to haunt her in the most mysterious ways possible, the world will learn that when this blonde bombshell goes off, you won’t lose your life... Just your will to fight.

  It doesn’t take a trained eye to realize just how limited the production of Grenadier was, especially as there were several factors working against it. First off, while it was produced by Studio Live, they were borrowing the facilities and resources of Group TAC, and while each of these entities apparently had a long history behind it, I can’t find any information on Studio Live(an impossible name to google if I’ve ever seen one), and Group TAC has done barely anything of note themselves... They made the Street Fighter movie that people only remember because of Chun-Li’s boobs, they did the cheap and kind of boring Those Who Hunt Elves, and honestly, the only thing I’ve seen from them that I really liked was Twin Spica, a charming yet dirt cheap series that nobody remembers, and that I only finally decided to watch last year. On top of all of that, all trace of TAC existing seems to evaporate around 2010, with their fate being listed as Bankruptcy liquidation. If that wasn’t bad enough, Grenadier was also the directorial debut of Hiroshi Kojina, a man who had only really worked in animation and character design prior to this opportunity.

  Kojina has done some directorial work since Grenadier, with one particular highlight being the 2011-2014 stretch of Hunter x Hunter, a fairly popular franchise that I’ve never seen, and I’m going to guess by that show’s popularity that he has grown with experience, but from everything I’ve managed to gather from behind the scenes material, the production of Grenadier was rough. At times, Kojina had to split his attention between this production and some work he was wrapping up on from a previous project. The key animations were several weeks late. This was all happening around 2004, when digital coloring was still in its infancy, so they had issues with color balancing and applying visual filters. I don’t envy them all they had to go through, but it’s still worth pointing out that there were several anime that came out around this time that had to deal with similar circumstances, but managed to be aesthetically pleasing in spite of all that. Grenadier’s problems were not unique. As a matter of fact, I’d go out on a limb and say the biggest issue was with budget allocation... They spent so much money on jiggle physics and a handful of action scenes that everything else had to suffer, just like in RWBY volume 2.

  Thus, there are a few moments of impressive animation throughout the series, but they’re few and far between, and the majority of the series just looks ghastly. The animators were clearly trying with what they had, but what they had wasn’t much... With the resources left over from Rushuna’s assets, the animators employed every budget saving technique they could, cutting every corner they could find, and it’s beyond obvious, especially with the big samurai war in episode one. There is a scene, probably a mistake but scarily not for certain, where a guy gets shot and just freezes there in midair as everyone else on his side storms past him. Frozen key frames and panning shots are heavily abused throughout, and while some decent money went into them, most of the fight scenes are edited so poorly that they become extremely hard to follow. The character designs don’t really do anything for me, everyone but Rushuna looks like a one-shot Yugioh character in the most drab and boring period-appropriate clothing imaginable. I don’t know, this is probably a matter of personal taste, but I’ve never really liked the feudal Japan aesthetic, and a bland color palette does nothing to improve things.

  The music really isn’t all that great either, alternating between generic fantasy orchestrations and annoying, overblown synth tracks. The opening is one of the worst I’ve heard, and I don’t usually complain about openings because the worst ones are usually just white noise to me, but this one? On the few occasions I didn’t skip it, it was hard to get through, as there was nothing attention grabbing about the visuals, and the song itself was just elevator music with Japanese lyrics. Imagine the Scrapped Princess op without the awesome celtic flair. The English dub has a few bright spots, namely Wendee Lee’s immediately charming performance as the title character, which might be one of her most underrated. She can play Rushuna as sweet, motherly, airheaded and chillingly threatening without changing her register in the slightest. The rest of the dub doesn’t come close, which is weird considering the fact that Bang Zoom also hired Lee to write and direct the dub, so along with her starring role, she had her fingers well and truly in the pot.

  From what I can tell, Lee tried to remain respectful to the Japanese dialogue while still making it accessable to American audiences, but she might have been straddling the line a little too hard, because there are some awkward fucking exchanges in this thing. The cast was mainly comprised of no-names and classic Geneon actors... Most of whom were at least a shade past their prime... And while nobody aside from Wendee Lee really stands out in a good way, the worst part is that we spend the entire anime listening to Sam Riegal. I have never liked Sam Riegal. He’s one of those actors whose line deliveries are always really loud and stilted, and I’m pretty sure all his performances sound the same. My favorite performance of his was in Lucky Star, where literally all he had to do was portray a voice actor who wasn’t acting, and even then, his costar Stephanie Sheh still blew him out of the water. She’s here too, of course, under her classic stage name Jennifer Sekiguchi, and she’s fine, but her role is over way too soon. I don’t know anything about the sub, I’ve heard it’s equally bad, but I’m monolingual enough that it’s relatively painless in comparison.

  For anime fans over a certain age, the words AMV Hell carry a significant weight to them. If you remember this series at all, it’s either as the pinnacle of weeb culture on youtube, or it’s as a cringe reminder of what happens when Robot Chicken fans strike out on their own. As someone who was present throughout the entire AMV Hell catalogue, and has kept up faithfully with the modern successor Ponies the Anthology(I’ve never pretended to be cool), I can say with some authority that AMV Hell was never the funniest thing in the world, but the familiarity of it struck my officially diagnosed autistic brain in just the right way to become a permanent part of my life. Most people get one or two songs stuck in their head, but I’m far more likely to get an entire playlist of music clips playing on repeat throughout my work day, all because I’m remembering an uninterrupted string of AMV Hell clips in order along with the occasional memeable movie quote. Sorta puts your brain’s annoying obsession with Mariah Carrey in perspective, doesn't it?

  I can’t count the number of anime... No, the amount of media in general that I checked out because of AMV Hell, and while some of them I wound up loving with all my heart, there are others that wound up in kind of a weird place, where even after I sought them out in their entirety, the only interesting or memorable thing about them STILL wound up being their appearances in AMV Hell. A couple examples include Princess Princess, whose canonical concert was dwarfed by AMV Hell’s re-edit to the tune of a classic pop song; Monochrome Factor, which is now only memorable for its connection to a DND comedy sketch called The Dead Alewaves; And Grenadier, an action anime from the mid-2000s that would have been lost to time forever if it didn’t have a couple of memeworthy moments throughout. I might as well spoil this now, but have you ever seen that one clip of a busty blonde anime babe spinning around like a turret with her gun drawn, and then shaking fresh ammo out of her cleavage so she can reload while still spinning? I’d like to think this bit of animation is well known even to people who’ve never heard of AMV Hell, frankly.

  Okay, so we’ve established that Grenadier has been immortalized due to the infamy of one or two memeable scenes, but what of the anime itself? If your curiosity got the better of you, and you decided to seek out Grenadier on its own terms, would you find an anime that’s worthy of standing the test of time? Well, one thing I should point out right off the bat is the most obvious thing about this anime: Grenadier is a blatant rip-off of Trigun. Rushuna is a silly, upbeat, pacifistic gunslinger with extraordinary firearm prowess who likes to walk into violent situations and manipulate them into ending peacefully. She exclaims virtues of love and peace, but knows when to hold back and let people make their own choices. She travels with a man who has a history of violence, which he initially deems necessary, and her enemies are made up of weird assassins with quirky fighting techniques, led by a traitor from Rushuna’s past. She also seems to possess boundless amounts of luck, as the situations she finds herself in seem to go out of their way to end in her favor. She’s so much a clone of Vash, I wish I could make the two shows crossover so I could ship them.

  One piece of trivia I’ve heard about this show is that it was produced while the manga was still ongoing, so they had to deviate from the manga’s story about halfway through, and that(To some degree that I’m not sure of) even Rushuna wound up becoming a slightly different character than her manga counterpart. I’ve never read the manga, so I don’t know where this series became a Trigun rip-off, all I know is that it’s so obvious that I am far from the first person to point it out, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve said this in previous reviews, I don’t automatically hate rip-offs, it’s perfectly possible for a piece of media to vastly exceed the quality of the media it blatantly stole from, so the question becomes, is Grenadier a GOOD Trigun rip-off? No. Don’t get me wrong, the philosophy is there, and I’ll even give the series some small props for managing to keep a consistent tone, unlike Trigun’s jarring dark turn halfway through. Unfortunately, while Rushuna may spout the same basic ideals as Vash, the series doesn’t come anywhere close to backing up or exploring its philosophy.

  First off, and I know it might sound mean to hold this against her, Rushuna is only sixteen, and she doesn’t have the wealth of experience and pain that fueled Vash’s anti-violence campaign. As far as we know, she hasn’t directly experienced the kind of loss that he has, she isn’t dealing with the kind of guilt that he was, she’s just travelling around preaching because somebody else taught her to do so. In spite of this, her skills as a senshi are straight up bullshit. Now, don’t get me wrong, Vash was guilty of this too. Every once in a while, he’d pull out some shenanigans that went a bit too far outside the suspension of disbelief, but the difference was, he did it sparingly, and after being alive a few centuries, it was at least conceivable that he could do what he was doing. Rushuna straight up ignores the laws of physics several times every episode, to the point that only the most lazy/creative Dungeons and Dragons player could come up with. “Oh, his sword can’t cut that boulder? I shoot four bullets at the sword, giving it extra momentum! Let me roll for it!!!” Her beliefs are never challenged either, like at all.

  On its own merits, this series is kind of boring. It’s very rarely funny, outside of some generic anime slapstick, and the occasional unintentional hilarity of some random bullshit not making any sense. Prepare to laugh when “the wind dies down,” for example. There are set pieces that should have set up some profound humor, but the writers whiffed on pretty much every opportunity. The story also gets a lot more annoying when the loli with the magical anachronistic helium balloons joins the party for no good reason. It’s not a good ecchi title.. Hell, you can’t even really call it an ecchi title, because while there’s a ton of fanservice... At least one bath scene per episode, I’m not kidding... The animators still went to great pains to make sure you could never see Rushuna’s nipples when she’s naked. I’ll be real with you, I’ve never understood the appeal of that kind of fanservice. I give Grenadier a pass because I know they were shooting for a good TV time slot, unlike the allegedly adult-oriented Chivalry of a Failed Knight. I don’t know, I came into Grenadier expecting it to be more interesting than I remembered, but... We’ll always have the memes, I guess.

  Grenadier is available from Media Blasters, both in two different DVD sets, as well as a more recent Blu-ray release, all of which is available pretty cheap from Rightstuf. The original manga by Sousuke Kaise is also readily available from Tokyopop.

  Whenever an anime from the past manages to cling to relevance as a cultural reference rather than by its own merits, it’s perfectly natural to develop a curiosity about it, and a desire to go back and see if it has more to offer than just the small part of it that stuck in the public consciousness. Sometimes, following these breadcrumbs can lead you to a hidden and underappreciated gem that will change your life. Other times, it can lead you to disappointment. I don’t regret revisiting Grenadier myself, but I still struggle to find anything in it that would make it worth recommending it to other people. I didn’t hate it... It failed to capture the magic of Trigun, but it’s not the only anime to do that, and it’s certainly been done a lot worse. I definitely appreciate how the narrative spent way more time and energy on telling it’s story than it did in forcing Barbie doll fanservice on us, even if that story was really dumb and derivative. I admire its ambition, if nothing else, even though it never feels like the people behind it had the depth or maturity to realize that ambition.

  I give Grenadier a 3/10.

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