Gunsmith Cats is Purrfect
I am so sorry for that title
I’ve been trying to watch more anime recently because for a while I’ve been very on and off with it. That’s a little strange because I used to watch anime all the time when I was about 13 or 14 and at 15, I watched Gurren Laggan (which happens to be the greatest anime ever made) and from there my love for anime has peaked and it slowly fizzled out.
From there, I just kinda stopped watching anime, I did read Chainsaw Man and some other manga but that was about the extent of it. Recently, however, I’ve been wanting to watch more anime for a slightly embarrassing reason… I met a girl.
I take these afternoon classes twice a week from 2pm to 5pm and at the beginning of this quarter, a new student joined the class and I’ll admit, I caught feelings and in conversing with her, I found that she enjoyed anime. As soon as I got home, I realized that I needed to start watching anime again to impress her. I created this massive watchlist of all the anime that I needed to watch and I started getting really excited to watch anime again. That next week, I found out that she had a boyfriend so… I guess this whole thing is for my own enjoyment then.
It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it. The first anime that I saw after my hiatus, if you wanna call it that, was Gunsmith Cats.
Each anime that I watch from this watchlist is randomly picked from a spreadsheet. This one was the first one picked by Lady Luck (or rather a random number generator where I generate a number and then watch the anime that the number correlates with on my spreadsheet).
Gunsmith Cats is an OVA with only 3 episodes, about half and hour each so it should be about 90 minutes in total, if you watch it all in one go and you should! It just flows better that way and this is coming from the guy who watched one episode of anime per day.
I think for that reason, it was a great way to ease myself back into anime because 90 minutes is the perfect runtime for me. I talk about books, TV shows, anime and even games at times (not on here though) but in my heart of hearts, I’m a movie guy. Film is my favourite art form. I find it difficult to commit myself to a TV show or anime but I could commit myself to a movie any day of the week, usually, it’s only an hour and a half of your time. The runtime was big contributing factor to my viewing pleasure.
Gunsmith Cats also feels really western inspired in the way most 90s anime do, stuff like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Samurai Champloo. I haven’t seen any of those besides Cowboy Bebop so I could be talking out of my ass and I probably am but you know what I mean, right?
It follows two women who sell guns but they don’t exactly have a gun’s licence and so this NARC uses that as leverage to get them to help the police in apprehending this criminal dealing illegal arms and from there it turns into something much bigger than the two of them. It probably already sounds like the plot of some classic 80s, maybe 90s action film and I can safely say that it doesn’t just sound like that but feels like it too AND I LOVE A CLASSIC ACTION FILM! This is only helped by how fluid the animation looks in pretty much all the action heavy scenes. Even the more wordy segments look just as good as the action packed scenes. The thing is that since it has two female leads, this anime has a feminine touch that I feel like a lot of the big 80s and 90s action films lack (except maybe Aliens, I watched that yesterday and it rocks), especially in the 80s. The 90s had a lot more variety in the action genre, if you look at someone like Neo from The Matrix who is literally a twink.
Getting side-tracked, I’m saying that I like the more feminine energy of Gunsmith Cats. I admit, as a dude, who am I to speak on femininity? But I’m just trying to say that it’s a breath of fresh air, especially in the anime sphere. I know that I’m a dude but I have met many women who just straight up don’t like anime because of the way that girls are portrayed and it seems to be a little better now with people like Fujimoto out there writing women well but still, the anime sphere feels male-dominated at times and it’s probably nice to have an anime like this. The main characters are bad-ass but they’re also just regular women trying to put bread on the table, grabbing that bag and they just want to get back to that life again and get all this police work over with.
Gunsmith Cats does have its flaws, it still falls into the usual traps of fanservice. Don’t get me wrong though, fanservice can be done well, like in Bakemonogatari where it elevates the rest of the show but I don’t really think it’s done too well in Gunsmith Cats. I will say though, the fanservice is really far and few between to the point where complaining about it feels like nit-picking.
However, I need to emphasise again that this OVA just looks stylish. The first thing that came to mind when I was watching this was Pulp Fiction because we have to admit, Pulp Fiction is a good looking movie.
The low quality still that I pulled from Pinterest doesn’t do it justice so to further hammer home my point, I want you to go to youtube and look up “slowed to perfection + reverb” and you will probably find a bunch of songs slowed down with loop of some gif from a 90s anime that just looks really stylish. Now Gunsmith Cats manages to look like one of those gorgeous, 90s, anime gifs all the time. ALL THE TIME! You want easy youtube views? Slow down a random song and put this random gif from Gunsmith Cats over it and then just upload it to youtube and it would fit right in.
Anyway, I can sense this review coming to a close. I hope that I articulated myself well enough and if not, there’s always next week. As arbitrary and useless as I feel numerical ratings are, I do rate the anime that I watch but that’s mainly for myself. I did however give Gunsmith Cats a 94%. I don’t know why I can’t be normal and rate it out of 10 but it’s 94.
Thank you for reading this and go check it out, it’s only 3 episodes long. See ya next week for a review of a Tarantino movie. Don’t try to guess, there’s only like 10 movies in his filmography so you’ll exhaust your options. Stay Tuned!
