Noir (2001)

This is an anime series that I have been intending to view for quite some time. I have had copies of the series forever that I got from a friend of mine back in “the day.” However, I was never willing to make the time to sit down and watch it. That was a mistake. The series contains a total of 26 twenty something minute episodes from back in 2001. Not all of them are gold, but there are definitely some great ones.

Basically, the show follows a couple of female death dealers, their ages are never revealed, but I imagine that they are supposed to be pretty young. As the series progresses these two chicks are caught within a complicated web spun by a clandestine organization known only as “Les Soldats.” That’s “the soldiers” in French for those playing along at home.

I have to admit that during the setup episodes, it is a little bit of a generic action style anime series. However, there is an interesting twist. Apparently, since it was originally aired on a “conservative” network in Japan, none of the battle sequences have blood. It is kind of interesting that they maintained this on the DVDs as well. Anyhow, since they could not make the gun fights “bloody” they decided to make them extremely stylized, which works out very well. I wish the makers of 24 would take a look at it, and add in some of the cinematography. As the series progressed the anime really picked up though.

After a few episodes a third female character enters the show and with her there is a new psychological element added to the show that is accompanied by the further development of the Soldats organization. It is a mostly “in the shadows” kind of group, so you are left guessing as to their motivations. However, I also found this to be true about the lead females. Really, everyone within the series kind of acted in entirely unpredictable ways.

When I finished the series, I went to check out the wikipedia article on it to see if there were any kind of clarifications about the characters, and the Soldats. Unfortunately, the article was rather sparse, but I did glean an interesting piece of information. Apparently, many people believe that Noir has been influenced by the novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. It is unknown whether or not this connection is true, but it did sound interesting.

I followed the link to the article on Foucault’s Pendulum to see what it was about. The following captions piqued my interest:

“[Foucault’s Pendulum] is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. Told in the form of a kind of satirical intellectual game, three friends create a fictitious plan (the “Plan”) that stretches throughout history and combines elements from conspiracy theories. They feed the plan into a computer that in turn helps them formulate a new conspiracy theory, which is then believed to be true by adherents of the previous conspiracies, leading to disastrous consequences.”

In the “clandestine organization” kind of mood, I decided to give it a shot. However, reading further on in the article I found another bit of humor:

“Foucault’s Pendulum has lately been called a “thinking person’s Da Vinci Code,” … So the phrase used to link Eco’s book to Brown’s implies that the latter is for people who do not think.”

In order to assess the validity of this claim, and to prepare for my rather lengthy post on the Da Vinci Code movie, I decided to actually read the Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, you are going to have to wait until the movie comes out to get that post. Whereas, my Foucault’s Pendulum post will be coming on the coat tails of this post. So you had better prepare for a long post.