bingerama

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=7382

I’m not sure why the ‘BLACK’ in the title is capitalised, like it’s supposed to have any meaning aside from just the colour. Maybe it is a reference to the fact that the main character’s name is Hei (black in Mandarin) and he wears black when he’s in ass kicking mode, in which case the ‘Darker than’ doesn’t quite make sense. Perhaps this is something that will come to light later in the series and justify the ridiculously poser title?

The show is set in futuristic Japan, where some kind of mysterious field called Hell’s Gate has appeared and reduced the area around it to a toxic wasteland, which the government has built a wall around to contain. The appearance of this field has also created a race of beings called ‘Contractors’, who have assorted super powers, and who have to pay some form of obeisance after they used their powers (a little twist that I found quite interesting). These Contractors are also somehow linked to stars (maybe not real stars, but lights generated by Hell’s Gate that look like stars? no clue) and so can be studied and analyzed by the Astronomy department according to the way their stars move, which is another plot piece that I think is rather fascinating.

I’m currently totally hooked on this and I don’t know why. It’s one of those things that you can’t put down to any one concrete element of the show. It’s a combination of the soundtrack, the animation, the story, the script and just the general feeling you get that makes you want to keep watching. It’s weird cos this anime isn’t exactly the happy happy feel good kinda thing - in the first 5 minutes of the first episode you see this guy breaking his own fingers with his bare hands, which is pretty damn disturbing in my opinion. But I’m totally hooked. I really like Hei’s character, maybe because he’s so adorable when he’s acting like a normal human being that he’s extra hot when he’s playing the assassin dude.

The only thing that I’ve found unsatisfactory so far is that Miki Shinichiro is playing a character that is not incredibly charming. Boo.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 6:22 am and is filed under Darker than BLACK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.