How many times have you seen a “horror” movie use the cliché crutch of a dead or possessed girl to try and scare you. How many times has it actually worked? My biggest problem with movies like these is that the mechanism of possessed/dead girl and religious undertones is so overused that audiences are completely desensitized to them. At the end of the day, you don’t fear the possessed girl. Instead, you find it laughable. By contrast, the Gunslinger Girl Anime series isn’t a horror series at all, yet its use of girls is all too scary.
Imagine a world where a government welfare organization saves orphaned children who are terminally ill or on the brink of death for the purpose of creating emotionless killing machines. That’s the story of Gunslinger Girl. The Social Welfare agency has made it their business of saving young girls from death in order to use their bodies as cybernetic temples of death. Each girl is skilled in several assassin-like-arts from martial arts to marksmanship to foreign-language fluency.
Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino (Gansuringâ gâru: Iru teatorîno) is the sequel to the original Gunslinger Girl series released in 2003. The series pits the cold-hearted cyborg assassin, Henrietta, against the fully human assassin Pinocchio. Both Henrietta and Pinnocchio share a callous disregard for human emotion and subconscious desire to find the inner emotion they have somehow lost. Throughout the series Henrietta continues to develop feelings for her handler, Jose.
The rich storytelling meshed perfectly with guns and violence makes Gunslinger Girl an excellent Anime series. This is more than a simple cyborg story. Gunslinger Girl is filled with a multilayer plot that is compelling and overwhelmingly entertaining. You’ll feel Henrietta’s pain when doctors say that she is not human and lacks the ability to feel. The level of character development in this 13 episode series is amazing. If you haven’t seen the original Gunslinger Girl series, you can still watch Il Teatrino and be moved by this gripping yet frightful tale. The animation style of Il Teatrino differs from the original Gunslinger Girl, but I actually felt it was closer to the Manga.
Unfortunately, this box set does not contain episodes 14 (Light of Venice, Darkness of the Heart) and 15 (Phantasma), which were included in the Japanese set. The first season is getting a Blu-ray release in 2010, so hopefully when the Blu-ray release comes out for Il Teatrino it will feature the full series.
Title: Gunslinger Girl 2: Il Teatrino–The Complete Series
