Black Lagoon - Anime - AniDB (2024)

Black Lagoon - trigger-happy busty babe takes it to the bakas. Maritime western with a real dumb story.

Nice gunfights and warfare, high attention to detail. That girl's got all the good stuff too, what's wrong with her face in some scenes though?

Hey, I know that OP song! Heard it on the radio a lot and even have the mp3 somewhere, had no idea it's anime connected, thought it's just generic jpop. It's called Mell - Red Fraction, and it's quite nice.
Unfortunately can't say the same about the ED or BGM. The ending piece didn't fit at all, I hated it right from the start, but felt compelled to listen to it right through to the end at least once because of some most promising developments unfolding simultaneously on screen.
To put it simply, I thought maybe she was gonna strip all the way, but no dice.:grin:

Now the background music. I think they could've used a lot more of it during the action scenes. When they did use it, it sometimes worked good and sometimes... not so well. Like there was this kickass action sequence going on aboard the nazi ship for example, a great chance to get the viewer going all, That's right Reby, you go teach them fat nazi pigs a less... wait a minute, what's that noise there damn it? Is that kid down the street having another party? No. Then it must be that annoying fat dork rocking it out again in his pickup, windows rolled down? NO! It's the BGM! Just somebody forgot to turn up the volume...

On the whole the voice acting was okay, mostly nothing special. The ones who stand out are Reby and Dutch. Reby is voiced by some girl named Toyoguchi Megumi. She's got a voice powerful enough to do the part, and lots of expression. Dutch turns out to be a fellow named Isobe Tsutomu. Animenfo.com says this guy was Vincent Volaju. It also says he's into drama and was Hamlet and all that, but who cares for that stuff? He was Vincent freaking Volaju. Need I say more?

Would you watch a show animated by grade school kids armed with crayons, drawing people hangman-style? No.
Would you watch a show with a seventy year old toothless granny voicing that sexy chick you drooled all over in the manga? No.
Would you watch a show with a story written hastily during lunch break by a grade schooler as his home assignment and then read backwards and misinterpreted by the moron director on crack? Black Lagoon's ratings on anidb shed some new light on the answer to that last question.

I managed to fight my way through about eight and a half episodes of this show. It was tough from the beginning, the first two or three episodes were poor, the plot sucked, and I was thinking of dropping it right there, but thought oh well, what the hell,

it's just 12 episodes after all, let's try and go with it a little longer, maybe it's a slow starter.
And the story did pick up a little bit with the sumbarine and Nazi episodes, one of the rare highlights of it being Reby's talk with Rock aboard the submarine. When she lit that cigarette there of all places I thought okay, that's it, there's gonna be some unbelievably cheesy conversation right here, I could feel it coming, and so I had my finger poised on the stop button, but just then she delivered a nice, concise and coherent little speech, and I relaxed and kept watching. This whole arc was acceptable, even had some good lines here and there, like the above mentioned convo, or "I don't remember hiring Charles Whitman" etc.

It's too bad, but it just goes downhill from there pretty fast with the introduction of the maid. I suspect it might all be satire, just like the earlier stuff with the helicopter pilot, or Reby jumping around boats, or with Fritz and his speech, but even if it is: it's all very poorly done. To the point of the viewer never being sure if the joke's on him or not.
There's also a lot of completely incoherent and illogical behavior which culminates in this shooting scene in the bar where stupidity, randomness and some very uninspiring dialogue simply overflow. But instead of just getting it over with quickly the creators decide to cherish this great moment. It builds up, and builds up, the air torn apart by bullets and some real dumb comments alike, and then it builds up some more, and then I started thinking, There must be some Deus Ex Machina coming right up surely? Man, this is so painful to watch! I wish a nuke would simply fall on that whole town right now, that'd about do it! And maybe for the remaining couple episodes we could instead enjoy some of that stuff this Russian lady was watching earlier? Whoa, that might actually take this show to a whole new level!

But it didn't look like any nukes were coming, though it wouldn't surprise me that much if the maid had fired one. So anyway, I just stopped right there and dropped the shift+delete nuke on this show myself. Aaaaah... The relief!

It might sound strange after what I've just written, but I've enjoyed some of the characters, I mean during these rare moments when the many flaws of this anime weren't there and enjoyment was even possible. The Black Lagoon's original crew is quite cool, Reby especially. She's one crazy woman, good looking, and gun savvy. Also shows a strong character throughout the series. So overall she's very sexy, what a daft show to be a part of though. Some tough luck there, baby.
On the other hand, Rock, the guy they take along for the ride on the Lagoon, is a loser. No matter what the creators made him do or say, he was still a big loser compared to the rest of the crew. No amount of screen time, which they weren't sparing this guy for some reason, changed that.
And I feel I must also include the unfortunate maid on this one too. Seriously, what were these guys even thinking...

Buy it? I wouldn't put it on my shelf if they paid me for it!

I liked the girl. I liked the details on weaponry and guns. Some of the dialogue seemed impressive, especially with many other really dumb parts of it to compare to.
But on the whole I couldn't really enjoy this show because of all the cheesy moments and the silly plot.

IMPORTANT EDIT

It has been brought to my attention that there's supposed to be a huge number of other shows of the "girls with guns" variety that suck even more than this one. Well, I don't think I'm gonna bother watching them if that's the case.
So anyway, Black Lagoon might be your thing if you really have a big fetish for the girl with the big gun. Let me warn you however: I've always thought I had quite some of that myself, and this show just doesn't do it for me.

SummaryAnimation - 8 - all that effort on the TOWs and the Hind and all that... just wasted.Sound - 5 - below average job on the music, some decent voice acting.Story - 1 - I thought about it for a while, and I'm unlikely to watch, and therefore rate, anything much worse than that. It made me stop watching, so what do you expect?Characters - 5 - Reby rocks, maid sucks.Value - 2 - I don't wanna have anything to do with this. Okay, unless Playboy hires this girl.Enjoyment - 4 - I tried to enjoy it but the morons just wouldn't let me.