Its a contentious period in feudal Japan. The ancient order of the samurai devoted wielders of some of the finest swords in human history have been struggling to adapt to the introduction of modern firearms... As well as helium balloons. So feudal Japan in the 1920s I guess. In any case this conflict has led to bloodshed on both sides as the samurai battle against the Senshi AKA those who have been specially trained in gun usage. There seemed to be no end to the devastation caused by this conflict until a strange busty blonde gunslinger saunters onto the scene. Armed with pistols a bountiful supply of ammunition and more importantly a bright and friendly smile sixteen year old Rushuna Tendou is a staunch pacifist who believes that the ultimate combat strategy is to eliminate the enemys will to fight. She travels with her two newfound allies... A formerly violent samurai who struggles to see things from her perspective and a loli who makes magical balloons... But when faces from her past come back to haunt her in the most mysterious ways possible the world will learn that when this blonde bombshell goes off you wont lose your life... Just your will to fight. It doesnt take a trained eye to realize just how limited the production of Grenadier was especially as there were several factors working against it. First off while it was produced by Studio Live they were borrowing the facilities and resources of Group TAC and while each of these entities apparently had a long history behind it I cant find any information on Studio Livean impossible name to google if Ive ever seen one and Group TAC has done barely anything of note themselves... They made the Street Fighter movie that people only remember because of ChunLis boobs they did the cheap and kind of boring Those Who Hunt Elves and honestly the only thing Ive seen from them that I really liked was Twin Spica a charming yet dirt cheap series that nobody remembers and that I only finally decided to watch last year. On top of all of that all trace of TAC existing seems to evaporate around 2010 with their fate being listed as Bankruptcy liquidation. If that wasnt bad enough Grenadier was also the directorial debut of Hiroshi Kojina a man who had only really worked in animation and character design prior to this opportunity. Kojina has done some directorial work since Grenadier with one particular highlight being the 20112014 stretch of Hunter x Hunter a fairly popular franchise that Ive never seen and Im going to guess by that shows popularity that he has grown with experience but from everything Ive managed to gather from behind the scenes material the production of Grenadier was rough. At times Kojina had to split his attention between this production and some work he was wrapping up on from a previous project. The key animations were several weeks late. This was all happening around 2004 when digital coloring was still in its infancy so they had issues with color balancing and applying visual filters. I dont envy them all they had to go through but its still worth pointing out that there were several anime that came out around this time that had to deal with similar circumstances but managed to be aesthetically pleasing in spite of all that. Grenadiers problems were not unique. As a matter of fact Id go out on a limb and say the biggest issue was with budget allocation... They spent so much money on jiggle physics and a handful of action scenes that everything else had to suffer just like in RWBY volume 2. Thus there are a few moments of impressive animation throughout the series but theyre few and far between and the majority of the series just looks ghastly. The animators were clearly trying with what they had but what they had wasnt much... With the resources left over from Rushunas assets the animators employed every budget saving technique they could cutting every corner they could find and its beyond obvious especially with the big samurai war in episode one. There is a scene probably a mistake but scarily not for certain where a guy gets shot and just freezes there in midair as everyone else on his side storms past him. Frozen key frames and panning shots are heavily abused throughout and while some decent money went into them most of the fight scenes are edited so poorly that they become extremely hard to follow. The character designs dont really do anything for me everyone but Rushuna looks like a oneshot Yugioh character in the most drab and boring periodappropriate clothing imaginable. I dont know this is probably a matter of personal taste but Ive never really liked the feudal Japan aesthetic and a bland color palette does nothing to improve things. The music really isnt all that great either alternating between generic fantasy orchestrations and annoying overblown synth tracks. The opening is one of the worst Ive heard and I dont usually complain about openings because the worst ones are usually just white noise to me but this one? On the few occasions I didnt skip it it was hard to get through as there was nothing attention grabbing about the visuals and the song itself was just elevator music with Japanese lyrics. Imagine the Scrapped Princess op without the awesome celtic flair. The English dub has a few bright spots namely Wendee Lees immediately charming performance as the title character which might be one of her most underrated. She can play Rushuna as sweet motherly airheaded and chillingly threatening without changing her register in the slightest. The rest of the dub doesnt come close which is weird considering the fact that Bang Zoom also hired Lee to write and direct the dub so along with her starring role she had her fingers well and truly in the pot. From what I can tell Lee tried to remain respectful to the Japanese dialogue while still making it accessable to American audiences but she might have been straddling the line a little too hard because there are some awkward fucking exchanges in this thing. The cast was mainly comprised of nonames and classic Geneon actors... Most of whom were at least a shade past their prime... And while nobody aside from Wendee Lee really stands out in a good way the worst part is that we spend the entire anime listening to Sam Riegal. I have never liked Sam Riegal. Hes one of those actors whose line deliveries are always really loud and stilted and Im pretty sure all his performances sound the same. My favorite performance of his was in Lucky Star where literally all he had to do was portray a voice actor who wasnt acting and even then his costar Stephanie Sheh still blew him out of the water. Shes here too of course under her classic stage name Jennifer Sekiguchi and shes fine but her role is over way too soon. I dont know anything about the sub Ive heard its equally bad but Im monolingual enough that its relatively painless in comparison. For anime fans over a certain age the words AMV Hell carry a significant weight to them. If you remember this series at all its either as the pinnacle of weeb culture on or its as a cringe reminder of what happens when Robot Chicken fans strike out on their own. As someone who was present throughout the entire AMV Hell catalogue and has kept up faithfully with the modern successor Ponies the AnthologyIve never pretended to be cool I can say with some authority that AMV Hell was never the funniest thing in the world but the familiarity of it struck my officially diagnosed autistic brain in just the right way to become a permanent part of my life. Most people get one or two songs stuck in their head but Im far more likely to get an entire playlist of music clips playing on repeat throughout my work day all because Im remembering an uninterrupted string of AMV Hell clips in order along with the occasional memeable movie quote. Sorta puts your brains annoying obsession with Mariah Carrey in perspective doesnt it? I cant count the number of anime... No the amount of media in general that I checked out because of AMV Hell and while some of them I wound up loving with all my heart there are others that wound up in kind of a weird place where even after I sought them out in their entirety the only interesting or memorable thing about them STILL wound up being their appearances in AMV Hell. A couple examples include Princess Princess whose canonical concert was dwarfed by AMV Hells reedit to the tune of a classic pop song Monochrome Factor which is now only memorable for its connection to a DND comedy sketch called The Dead Alewaves And Grenadier an action anime from the mid2000s that would have been lost to time forever if it didnt have a couple of memeworthy moments throughout. I might as well spoil this now but have you ever seen that one clip of a busty blonde anime babe spinning around like a turret with her gun drawn and then shaking fresh ammo out of her cleavage so she can reload while still spinning? Id like to think this bit of animation is well known even to people whove never heard of AMV Hell frankly. Okay so weve established that Grenadier has been immortalized due to the infamy of one or two memeable scenes but what of the anime itself? If your curiosity got the better of you and you decided to seek out Grenadier on its own terms would you find an anime thats worthy of standing the test of time? Well one thing I should point out right off the bat is the most obvious thing about this anime: Grenadier is a blatant ripoff of Trigun. Rushuna is a silly upbeat pacifistic gunslinger with extraordinary firearm prowess who likes to walk into violent situations and manipulate them into ending peacefully. She exclaims virtues of love and peace but knows when to hold back and let people make their own choices. She travels with a man who has a history of violence which he initially deems necessary and her enemies are made up of weird assassins with quirky fighting techniques led by a traitor from Rushunas past. She also seems to possess boundless amounts of luck as the situations she finds herself in seem to go out of their way to end in her favor. Shes so much a clone of Vash I wish I could make the two shows crossover so I could ship them. One piece of trivia Ive heard about this show is that it was produced while the manga was still ongoing so they had to deviate from the mangas story about halfway through and thatTo some degree that Im not sure of even Rushuna wound up becoming a slightly different character than her manga counterpart. Ive never read the manga so I dont know where this series became a Trigun ripoff all I know is that its so obvious that I am far from the first person to point it out but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Ive said this in previous reviews I dont automatically hate ripoffs its perfectly possible for a piece of media to vastly exceed the quality of the media it blatantly stole from so the question becomes is Grenadier a GOOD Trigun ripoff? No. Dont get me wrong the philosophy is there and Ill even give the series some small props for managing to keep a consistent tone unlike Triguns jarring dark turn halfway through. Unfortunately while Rushuna may spout the same basic ideals as Vash the series doesnt come anywhere close to backing up or exploring its philosophy. First off and I know it might sound mean to hold this against her Rushuna is only sixteen and she doesnt have the wealth of experience and pain that fueled Vashs antiviolence campaign. As far as we know she hasnt directly experienced the kind of loss that he has she isnt dealing with the kind of guilt that he was shes just travelling around preaching because somebody else taught her to do so. In spite of this her skills as a senshi are straight up bullshit. Now dont get me wrong Vash was guilty of this too. Every once in a while hed pull out some shenanigans that went a bit too far outside the suspension of disbelief but the difference was he did it sparingly and after being alive a few centuries it was at least conceivable that he could do what he was doing. Rushuna straight up ignores the laws of physics several times every episode to the point that only the most lazy/creative Dungeons and Dragons player could come up with. Oh his sword cant cut that boulder? I shoot four bullets at the sword giving it extra momentum Let me roll for it Her beliefs are never challenged either like at all. On its own merits this series is kind of boring. Its very rarely funny outside of some generic anime slapstick and the occasional unintentional hilarity of some random bullshit not making any sense. Prepare to laugh when the wind dies down for example. There are set pieces that should have set up some profound humor but the writers whiffed on pretty much every opportunity. The story also gets a lot more annoying when the loli with the magical anachronistic helium balloons joins the party for no good reason. Its not a good ecchi title.. Hell you cant even really call it an ecchi title because while theres a ton of fanservice... At least one bath scene per episode Im not kidding... The animators still went to great pains to make sure you could never see Rushunas nipples when shes naked. Ill be real with you Ive never understood the appeal of that kind of fanservice. I give Grenadier a pass because I know they were shooting for a good TV time slot unlike the allegedly adultoriented Chivalry of a Failed Knight. I dont know I came into Grenadier expecting it to be more interesting than I remembered but... Well always have the memes I guess. Grenadier is available from Media Blasters both in two different DVD sets as well as a more recent Bluray release all of which is available pretty cheap from Rightstuf. The original manga by Sousuke Kaise is also readily available from Tokyopop. Whenever an anime from the past manages to cling to relevance as a cultural reference rather than by its own merits its perfectly natural to develop a curiosity about it and a desire to go back and see if it has more to offer than just the small part of it that stuck in the public consciousness. Sometimes following these breadcrumbs can lead you to a hidden and underappreciated gem that will change your life. Other times it can lead you to disappointment. I dont regret revisiting Grenadier myself but I still struggle to find anything in it that would make it worth recommending it to other people. I didnt hate it... It failed to capture the magic of Trigun but its not the only anime to do that and its certainly been done a lot worse. I definitely appreciate how the narrative spent way more time and energy on telling its story than it did in forcing Barbie doll fanservice on us even if that story was really dumb and derivative. I admire its ambition if nothing else even though it never feels like the people behind it had the depth or maturity to realize that ambition. I give Grenadier a 3/10.