| Weiss Kreuz Gluhen - movie, 3 stars It's hard to NOT discriminate Weiss Kreuz when you actually know about the seiyuus who casted/featured Aya, Ken, Youji and Omi. If you involuntarily recall their faces behind the "enhanced version", i.e. bishounen anime characters when watching the series; or you're having nightmares after seeing their "cosplay" look in CD covers, magazines, concerts, etc... congratulations! You're having one of the syndromes for disliking the show! But to be fair to judge Weiss Kreuz (anime), disregarding the appearance of Koyasu Takehito et al for their outrageous clothing and make-ups in reality - the character design by Tsuchiya Kyoko and the artworks for the later series Weiss Kreuz Glouhen aren't bad at all as in common beliefs. However, the overall plot is too vague or you might tell it's pure cliché.
In Glouhen chapters, Aya stayed as undercover at the Koua Academy (the background settings are similar to Balamb Garden in Final Fantasy VIII, specially the classrooms and uniforms) where students were secretly trained to be elite forces. It was suspected those students were brainwashed and served as subjects in certain experiments for generating killer clones by the usual evil organization. So the Weiss team sneaked into that creepy school for investigations through a slow, non-intelligent and unfashionable process.
There's lots of deaths and violence throughout the story. The first few scenes that described the students committed suicide had the greatest impact among the 13 episodes, then, the rest of the screenplay is all repetitive. There are no main female characters because they'll all eventually die whenever they show a slight romance with the Weiss gang. I guess the author (Koyasu Takehito and others) wanted to express "the fate of being a shadow assassin" is to be "beautiful alone". Thus, the characters often go angsty, depressive, gloomy, lost, ballistic, and any sort of negative emotions. The story doesn't sound to contain a big and exceptional concept besides to crash the what-so-called villains who threaten the society into world domination, and to show what's black and white. Everything is evolved within the Weiss' self-pity like no one else suffers, and they can avenge in the name of justice. They even try to kill their allies for self-benefit.
One might also have a good laugh at the poorly arranged storyline. The Weiss never change their original names for the undecovering missions, resulting the enemy to know their identities at once. More funny is, after the discovering, they're still allowed to wander around freely. Secondly, you can notice the main persona, Aya, disappears most of the time when the Weiss gang are in battles, then suddenly shows up from the middle of nowhere to be the hero! Also, these fellow assassins love to wear "uniforms" during big kick shows and speaks lots of their emotions, burden, friendship and co-operation. To be precise, they are the most show-off and not pro assassins in the anime history! In the beginning, every battle seemed to be more sensible by using martial arts, weapons or explosive. Follows the fights drastically changed into psychokinesis weird battles at the near-end chapters without previous clues. Perhaps the special abilities of the Schwarz and other groups were introduced in earlier series, but the whole Weiss Kreuz Gluhen plot didn't run smoothly, leaving many questions unexplained and so many unconvincing deaths. Apparently the staff only focused the good looks, elegance of the characters, but neglected a deep, well-organized story.
Despite this anime carries a negative reputation, the music composed by Nishioka Kazuya is quite good and suits the style of j-pop. I EMPHASIZE on certain melodies like "Tomorrow" and "Stone Roses", excluding the quality of the singers (Weiss)... |
