Noir: The Complete Collection
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DVD Cover Information
Artist: Artist Not ProvidedBrand: ADV Films
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language); Japanese (Original Language)
Format: Animated, Box set, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 650 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-14
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Section 23
Movie Reviews of Noir: The Complete Collection
Movie Review: "I kill people so easily . . . why am I not sad?"
Summary: 5 Stars
Noir is a gripping and distinctive drama of assassins at war with deadly and powerful criminals, neither bloody nor brutal as a typical anime vigilante avenger shoot-em-up nor a rollicking over-the-top adventure of babes, cops, robbers, and car chases. In fact, Noir boasts not a single character with a sense of humor and nary a drop of blood, in spite of a fabulous body count. Like the traditional film noir adventures it most resembles, this series gets by on sheer intensity of emotion.
The pair of assassins who make up the hit-team called Noir are young and female, but otherwise nicely opposite in personalities. Mireille Bouquet, French, blond, beautiful, in her mid-twenties, became a professional hit-woman after she and her uncle escaped from a gang war in her native Corsica. She is a loner, but sophisticated, fashionable and charming at need, with a tight circle of friends and associates in the Paris underworld. A dead shot and icy cool under fire, Mireille considers herself at the top of her profession until she encounters her soon-to-be partner, Kirika Namura.
Kirika is an enigma even to herself. Her memories go back only a year, when someone established an identity for her at a Japanese high school and left her on her own, normal in appearance but so cold and alien inside she terrifies even herself. Self-conscious and self-enclosed to an extraordinary degree, Kirika seems in constant pain. She owns an ornate European watch that plays a haunting melody, one she associates with the name Mireille Bouquet. She also knows that, at need, she can kill any human being she chooses with any weapon.
When Kirika and Mireille arrange a meeting in Japan, a squad of hit men ambushes them. The two women annihilate their attackers with graceful, ruthless efficiency. Their common enemy, the Soldats, are immensely powerful, somehow connected to both women, and will likely come after them again. Mireille sees Kirika as a key to the secrets of her past and the deaths of her murdered family, as well as a threat to the well-kept secrets of her career as an assassin for hire. She agrees to take the younger woman in. Kirika, desperate for any chance to learn about her past and for any tenuous connection to a living human being, quietly agrees even when Mireille says she will have to kill her as soon as she learns what she needs to know. Thus, the elite and mysterious team of assassins known as Noir is born.
Noir tells its tale in a way so stylized and laconic you can sometimes scarcely believe you are buying into its story. The character's dialog and expressions often have to studied together to be understood. Every bit of furniture and scenery is a symbol. Yuki Kajiura's beautiful semi-classical soundtrack, much of it inspired by Catholic liturgical music, sets off each scene like the score of a ballet.
Mireille is a professional killer-for-hire who, in the course of the 26 episode series, only manages to take out contracts on bad guys, never the innocent. This framing conceit worked perfectly well in many John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies and makes no less sense in this story. We are witnessing what Mireille will become, not what she was. Kirika as a haunted amnesic super-warrior is in territory worked by Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels and many other fictional characters dating back to Oedipus. Her waif appearance and stark, tightly wound personality are wonderfully conveyed by the minimalist animation style. When the camera is on Kirika, you find yourself watching the narrowing of her eyes, the tight curling of her mouth or tilting of her head that signals a crack in her armor, a slight hint of surprise, pain, or tears.
Kirika's pain and Mireille's shifting reaction to that pain are the emotional heart of the series. They engage a number of despicable and dangerous criminals in the opening episodes, including Chinese triads, East German drug lords, American corporate mercenaries, and corrupt French judges, settling scores for some clients and just earning fees for others. However, the threat of the Soldats re-surfaces again and again. Why is this all-powerful organization trying to both kill them and recruit them to its cause? Is the reclusive and beautiful Lady Altena an angel or murderous religious zealot? Chloe, a vivid, smiling, cold-blooded teen-age knife-fighter who intervenes in several of Noir's battles, is cryptic about everything but her passionate schoolgirl crush on Kirika and equally passionate devotion to her patron, Lady Altena. Mireille and Kirika know, however, she could easily kill the both of them if the urge took her.
Dozens of thugs, revolutionaries, crooked cops, and fanatical cultists are gunned down as Mireille and Kirika fight to avoid the secret fate of Noir. If murder is a sin, as the Soldats insist, the assassin is damned by knowing that this is so and by bearing the burden and memory of all her crimes. Kirika must overcome the darkness crushing her soul and Mireille, despite her bloody past, may be only one living who can help Kirika. That is the paradox underlying the ancient fate of Noir. Their struggle to defeat that terrible destiny makes for a intense and entertaining story.
Summary of Noir: The Complete Collection
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