Review of Trigun
"I'm just killing the spiders to save the butterflies." 1998 saw three popular shows going down the unusual route of combining futuristic sci-fi and cowboy-filled westerns as the backdrop to their story. "Cowboy Bebop" stands out as the biggest name amongst the trio, while "Outlaw Star" has all but faded into distant memory. Sandwiched between them is "Trigun", which made a big splash, but never quite achieved the evergreen status of "Cowboy Bebop". I'd heard about "Trigun" being similar to "Cowboy Bebop", but personally I don't think the similarities stretch much beyond the marriage of sci-fi and westerns settings. If anything, it's "Rurouni Kenshin" that "Trigun" sharea strong connection with, and I'm surprised that this connection doesn't get spotlighted nearly as often as the Trigun-Bebop one. Like Kenshin, Vash, the protagonist of "Trigun" , wanders from place to place, hiding his power levels under a goofy exterior; like Kenshin, Vash is also a stubborn pacifist, refusing to kill even those who try to kill him. Despite all of this, the ginormously misunderstood Vash has a $$60,000,000,000 bounty over his head, along with unwanted nicknames such as "Vash the Stampede" and "The Humanoid Typhoon". Luckily for him, his reputation might be fearsome, but no one actually knows what "The Humanoid Typhoon" looks like, and this allows him to move around more or less freely.
Until trouble inevitably catches up with him, that is.
The earlier portions of "Trigun" are episodic, and mostly starts off with two insurance companies employees Meryl and Millie going to a town looking for this "Vash the Stampede" fellow, intending to keep an eye on him and hopefully prevent him from doing massive damage to buildings and costing their company money. Of course, they would end up running into Vash without realising his identity, Vash would accidentally find himself in the middle of a big ruckus, and the town would go up in smoke.
There are reasons aplenty why I shouldn't have liked "Trigun". For starters, I don't dig the art style - there are some impessive character design concepts, but mostly it just looked ugly to me. Also, a lot of episodes are formulaic, particularly the early ones. Then there's the comedy - I first watched "Trigun" in my budding days of being an anime fan, and back then the silliness of anime humour often got on my nerves. But in spite of all these barriers, I took an instant liking to "Trigun". Its writing is solid, and the show mixes comedy and serious business so effectively that I didn't mind its silliness; and in fact, the sharp contrast between goofball Vash and serious Vash really adds to the show. Still, there are times when the comedy goes overboard, like when Vash does his "love and peace" routine, which I find unbearable.
"Trigun" undergoes a drastic change in the second half. The series shifts into a darker tone, and the episodic format changes into an overarching story about Vash's struggles against Knives, a figure re-emerging from his shadowy past. The bad guys up until this point had been weaklings, but now far stronger ones had started to appear, and the battles began to take on qualities not too dis-similar from those in the super power fighting genre. Though the elements are well executed, some viewers will prefer the lighter action/goofier mix earlier in the series. Personally though, I enjoyed the more continuous story and the more interesting battles.
The second half of "Trigun" encompasses both the best and the worst of the series. On one hand, there's a lot more plot to be found, as well as some of the coolest characters in anime like Wolfwood and Legato. On the other hand, a lot of stuff were never fully explained; questions marks looming over things like the nature of plants (not those plants!) and the motivations and backgrounds of the Gun-Ho Guns are never resolved.
Perhaps the aspect I liked the most was finding out more about Vash's past. His relationship with Rem was especially memorable, allowing insights into the major influence on his character, which is in turn reinforced as we see more of his actions and choices later on. At the same time though, this also relates closely to the aspect of the show I have the most problems with: the philosophy with which Vash - and to a lesser extent, Rem - approaches life, and in particular its contrast with that of the antagonist, Knives'. Knives isn't your average power hungry villain who wants to take over the world, or goes around killing everyone just because he's crazy. In fact, he's so rational that he makes Vash look incredibly juvenile. While Vash wants to save everyone, Knives reasons that to save the butterfly, you have to kill the spider. It's all well and good having a villain who speaks sense, but when the villain speaks so much more sense than the hero, when the hero has no comeback to the villain's words, then there is something fundamentally wrong with what the series is trying to say. What's also mightily frustrating is the inconclusive ending. True to his self-conflicting philosophies to the end, Vash takes a course of action that doesn't really solve anything in the long term. After all that, nothing really changed. It surely ranks up there as one the worst endings in anime.
"Trigun" could have been a mediocre anime, for its formulaic format and stale story elements. "Trigun" could have been a great anime, for hurdling its potential stumbling blocks with awesome characters and superb execution of the aforementioned stale story elements. In the end though, it's held back by flaws in its story and philosophical ideals, and has to settle for being very good.