In other words, Studio ARMS Elfen Lied
Something that got me - at least at the start of the show - was how Elfen Lied didn't really have a sort of over-arching plot. The show starts off with a mysterious girl breaking out of a remote prison facility and brutally murdering everyone in her path. Ladies and gentlemen let me just halt the review for a second and say this; Elfen Lied's first five minutes contain some of the goriest scenes to ever be animated by anybody. I cannot stress this enough: If you are easily disgusted or scared by gore and/or nudity, please do NOT watch this anime. Elfen Lied is without a doubt the goriest anime I have ever seen. and considering the amount of gore in Umineko no Naku Koro ni that is an achievement. Anywho, the brutally murderous woman escapes and walks to a cliff. One of the men in the tower of the prison shoots her with a high velocity Sniper Rifle right in the head. Due to her mysterious powers it does not kill her but wounds her and she falls off of the cliff.
MEANWHILE, IN JAPAN (Where else...)
A woman arrives in a city after taking the train. After a while she meets up with her cousin, who is our main character (?), Kohta. Kohta and his cousin, Yuka, decide to head to beach to reminisce about their childhoods. When they arrive on the beach, they see a naked pink-haired girl standing there, looking confused. It just so happens that this is the same girl we saw escape the prison earlier. However, her bullet to the head seems to have changed her demeanour. She runs around for a bit and falls over, and wee see Kohta go over to see if she's alright, and a weird sight slightly shocks him. He sees two small horns sticking out of her head. The girl has apparently lost her memory, and can only mutter a single syllable/word: Nyu. With this information, Kohta aptly names the girl Nyu and brings her back to his new house, along with Yuka. The rest of the show is about is about the leaders of the prison trying to take our pink-haired 'heroine' back to the prison and also about Kohta re-discovering his past and just who 'Nyu' really is. The plot is slow to start but it picks up tremendously after the fourth episode once we start going into the back-story of some of Kohta and Nyu, and it's sometime that is a truly tragic yet visceral story and one of my favourites in anime.
The characters are this shows weakest point on the grounds that only two members of the cast get any sort of development, being Lucy (Nyu's real name) and Kohta. Since these two are the only two that get development, I'll be focusing on these two characters for today.
Kohta
I really didn't know what to think of Kohta when the show began. He kinda felt like a generic anime protagonist who slowly builds up a harem of sorts as the show goes on and that was making me worried. Luckily, while the harem did sort of come to fruition, it never really became anything romantic with maybe the exception of stuff near the end of the show with a certain character. He suffers from some sort of amnesia, not really knowing what happened in the past after his sister, Kanae, mysteriously died. As we find out later in flashbacks, Kohta was hospitalized due to the extremely violent ways in which his sister and father were murder before his eyes. While not my favourite main protagonist of any anime by a long shot (still prefer Battler Ushiromiya), he's a serviceable character and does his job pretty well.
Lucy (Nyu)
A tragedy. A real absolute tragedy in anime character form. Lucy's past is just plain sad. Being born a Diclonious (basically a human with a horn head and the ability to control vectors - Magical Arm things which can slice open anything within range), she was ridiculed right from the start of her life. Bullied throughout school with no friends, at the young age of 10, Lucy began to kill people just because she could. As she grows older, her violent tendencies begin to become more and more frequent. Lucy's character is by far the best in the show and one of the most brutally tragic in anime (not the same sort of tragic like Nagisa from Clannad or Yurippe from Angel Beats! but still sort of tragic...it's hard to explain).
The animation for Elfen Lied was done by a studio called Studio ARMS (not sure if I can make a good pun out of that given the subject matter). For an animation studio that I personally haven't really heard of, this is some pretty good stuff. Sure the 3D Animation for the vectors looks a bit weird but other than that the show is animated fine. Characters are designed faithfully to their manga counterparts and the backgrounds are done exceedingly well for something that was done in 2004. The action scenes all have a solid frame rate and the animation is extremely fluid. Not to mention, the opening animation is beautifully stylized after the artwork of famous Artist Gustav Klimt.
The soundtrack is again, terrific. From the serene, beautiful yet haunting opening Lilium to the feel-good rock of the ending theme, the soundtrack in Elfen Lied is pretty damn good. Sure, they use a tonne of different variations of the opening theme, so you could say it lacks track diversity, but at the same time they all fit so well to the depressing mood of Elfen Lied. It may not be a big soundtrack, but it works perfectly, which is fine for me.
Elfen Lied is one of the most notorious anime ever due to it's gore and controversial nudity, yet somehow they only enhance the show and add to the tragedy that is unfolding around us as we watch the world of the characters being torn apart bit-by-bit. While the lack of development for supporting characters (except maybe Kurama at a push) is a bit of a downer, everything else makes up for it. Elfen Lied is one of the best thriller anime ever made, and if you can stomach it, it could be one of the best you'll ever see. Period.
Story: 9
Characters: 7
Animation: 10
Sound: 10
Personal Enjoyment: 10
FINAL SCORE FOR ELFEN LIED: 9.2/10
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