Review of Black Lagoon

Welcome back Studio Madhouse. The person chosen for the director role was Sunao Katabuchi whom only previously worked in various storyboard roles and one previous role in directing the anime Great Dog Lassie (1996). Madhouse and Katabuchi together created a fast-paced action anime from start to finish with what seems to be a plethora of talented staff put into different episode director roles from Tetsurou Araki to Atsushi Nigorikawa. If there was one common factor with the staff, it was they all knew how to do action well. The plot for Black Lagoon starts with a standard Japanese salary man named Rokuro aka “Rock” later, beinggiven a task to take an “item” to a client for his boss. During this journey, pirates from the “Black Lagoon Company” rob the boat to acquire said item. Rock’s boss deems him expendable in order to keep the item from being stolen, and therefore Rock somehow joins the Black Lagoon Company and their crazy crew of misfits. From there, Rock and the crew live on a pirate island and attend everything from weapon deals to encounters with maid assassins. This is literally an anime about swearing, shooting things, and killing people. It’s awesome.

Black Lagoon is straight-up violence featuring many themes showing up in anime at the time like “girls-with-guns.” Arguably the show’s six strongest characters are all female from the main chick Revy to anime stereotypes like the maid assassin Roberta and the Nun Eda a weapon smuggler. Somehow, the show slips into the show humorous scenes and dialogues during and after violent battles. Important to note that this show is gorgeously animated and the hardcore music goes along with it so well.

Be it the bullet mode animation to blood splatter to the memorable cast of characters with borderline psychologic disorders, Black Lagoon is unadulterated deviously vicious action… insert F word anywhere in between.

Madhouse did the anime industry a favor by creating two fantastic seasons of this show and cannot wait to ingest even more violence later.