Studio Trigger have made a name for themselves as a nest of seemingly drug-powered insane creatives. They've become famous for their distinctive visual style combined with feverish, crazy stories that nonetheless make sense to one immersed in this high-octane drug trip. Kill la Kill is my first Trigger show, and as such, it comes as a bit of a shock. I'd heard rumors, but this is the kind of thing that nothing can really prepare one for.
For the first two-thirds of its run, Kill la Kill is glorious. It doesn't quite hold up to some of the greats: It can't tell a crazy-whacked out story on the level of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, or go into the same character depth as something like K-On! or Cowboy Bebop, but it does hold up admirably. It follows Ryuko Matoi, a transfer student at the fucking bonkers Honnouji Academy, where fights to the death occur on a daily basis, every school event is some variation on a battle royale, and the incredibly powerful student council rules not only the school but most of the country thanks to their control of the Goku Uniforms, which imbibe the wearer with superhuman strength. With the help of her own uniform Senketsu (who happens to be sentient), and her new friend Mako, Ryuko aims to fight her way up to the student council president Satsuki in order to obtain information that will allow her to avenge her father's death.
The first thing one notices about Kill la Kill is how insanely gorgeous and stylish this thing is. I've recently said that Cowboy Bebop is the most stylish thing I've ever watched, and I'd probably still hold to that, but Kill la Kill is a different beast altogether and makes a very serious grab at Bebop's hold on that title.Where Cowboy Bebop's style is confident, suave, and laid back, Kill la Kill is aggressively, energetically almost frantically stylish. Its visual style is what can only be described as loud. The art may be rather simplistic, but it's colorful and expressive to the extreme. Also, fucking gorgeous. Google Image Search "Kill la Kill screenshots" and be bombarded with a barrage of fantastic images that are at once very nice to look at and easy to parse.
What's even better is how Kill la Kill animates. It's frankly scary how well this show moves, and the variety of moods it portrays. Almost everything here is exaggerated: characters drastically scale up or down for effect, move at inhuman speeds for comedy and action alike, and distort their proportions to suit the scene. Kill la Kill is a show that isn't afraid to drastically change its artstyle to suit the mood at hand, and it results in basically every beat of the show hitting twice as hard. There's a version of Kill la Kill in another universe where the giant Ira Gamagoori doesn't suddenly grow to take up the whole room when his presence becomes extra threatening, or where there isn't an inexplicable rainbow-colored lens flare that follows Ragyo Kyruin's overwhelming presence, and that world is much worse for it.
The character's unique interactions with the artstyle, and Kill la Kill's effective use of animation to emphasize the various characters' defining characteristics is backed by a fantastic soundtrack. While most of the incidental music is good in its own right, with blood-pumping action tracks and fantastic comedic themes, it's the large number of character leitmotifs that really make this soundtrack unique. Almost every character comes with a personal theme song that absolutely fits them to an incredible degree - they capture the spirit of the character perfectly, and imbue scenes centered around the character with a truly transcendental feeling, as though the character's presence is flowing out of the screen and into the real world itself. These may be the best character themes at capturing their character I've ever heard. My favorites have to be Ragyo Kyruin's slow, throbbing and intense synth-rock-pop thing with German chanting that just absolutely channels the depth of this woman's malicious, radiant presence, and Nui Harime's cutesy jingling melody that is almost immediately overridden by oppressive, loud, psychotic synth that makes the jingling tantalizingly close to being heard is just perfect for the character's completely unrepressed psychopathy with the thinnest possible veneer of cuteness thrown over it.
To recap, so far Kill la Kill is a gorgeous show that is masterfully animated to increase the impact of each and every event in it, backed with a fantastic soundtrack that enhances this even further. I guess this is where I go "Unfortunately, the story/writing/characterization doesn't really hold up"?
Well, kind of.
Well, kind of.
For the first two-thirds of its run, Kill la Kill is glorious. It doesn't quite hold up to some of the greats: It can't tell a crazy-whacked out story on the level of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, or go into the same character depth as something like K-On! or Cowboy Bebop, but it does hold up admirably. It follows Ryuko Matoi, a transfer student at the fucking bonkers Honnouji Academy, where fights to the death occur on a daily basis, every school event is some variation on a battle royale, and the incredibly powerful student council rules not only the school but most of the country thanks to their control of the Goku Uniforms, which imbibe the wearer with superhuman strength. With the help of her own uniform Senketsu (who happens to be sentient), and her new friend Mako, Ryuko aims to fight her way up to the student council president Satsuki in order to obtain information that will allow her to avenge her father's death.
This may seem like a very basic set-up, but it's utilized well. There's genuinely interesting themes here: Ryuko's struggle to take down the school from the inside turns into a struggle to take it down from outside, and interesting points are brought up in favor of Satsuki's tyrannical rule over Honnouji. There's plenty of good character development here as well, from Ryuko, as well as the many colorful characters surrounding her, and I do mean many and colorful.
The cast is truly phenomenal, made up of a large amount of main characters that all somehow manage to feel distinct, unique and worthwhile, largely in part to their absolutely beautiful character designs and how effective the show's animation is in portraying personality. I wanted to mention a few that I liked the most here, but it's really difficult to pick. Almost every character in the show has a couple great moments, raging from the myriad small moments in which various characters prove themselves to be more complex than they appear to the big emotional climaxes involving our leads, and it's an injustice to any to pick another out above the other. Ryuko, Mako, Senketsu, Satsuki, the Elite Four, Aikuro, the Mankanshokus, Tsumugu, Nui, Ragyo: Any one of these characters is brimming with more personality and jaw-droppingly powerful scenes than entire casts in some other shows. This means, that there's constantly something going on in terms of character, and it's surprising how little of it feels contrived or like it's only there for the sake of being there. Even minor, one-episode characters are memorable, ranging from endearing to utterly hateable.
It's obvious in the first two thirds that the show is building up to something, and the build up is handled well: intertwined with the moment-to-moment plot in a manner that makes it all the more intriguing and that helps maintain a sense of importance even for events that are ultimately only significant for one episode. It's good foreshadowing, and the last third does pay off most of the things that are set up here. There's a concept or two that seem like they should be more important than they ultimately are, but it's obvious they're just there for the sake of making one fight scene more interesting. In general, there's almost nothing that's set up that's just awkwardly left unused in the last third.
It's obvious in the first two thirds that the show is building up to something, and the build up is handled well: intertwined with the moment-to-moment plot in a manner that makes it all the more intriguing and that helps maintain a sense of importance even for events that are ultimately only significant for one episode. It's good foreshadowing, and the last third does pay off most of the things that are set up here. There's a concept or two that seem like they should be more important than they ultimately are, but it's obvious they're just there for the sake of making one fight scene more interesting. In general, there's almost nothing that's set up that's just awkwardly left unused in the last third.
About two-thirds of the way through the show finally hits what it was building up to and fucking explodes. Shit gets fucking crazy in the final third of this one, and it gets unrepentantly, unflinchingly dumb in the best of ways, even more than the first part of the series. While Kill la Kill is decidedly a loud, twitchy, fast-moving action show through the entirety of its run, its last third is near constant action, with the plot going in a completely different and somewhat unexpected direction. Whilst it really is a wonder to behold, with a lot of the show's best action scenes happening in this stretch, I feel this part is somewhat lacking thematically, and I found the direction the show's plot took to be a bit disappointing: it comes out of the blue and goes in a completely different direction than the first part would have you expect. Instead of continuing to build on the characters and themes that the first two thirds had developed, the final third of Kill la Kill smashes them together in a bombastic, loud, colorful explosion of a finale.
This is fine, but isn't my cup of tea. I much prefer some nice character and theme stuff to go along with my explosions, and the last third of Kill la Kill doesn't really deliver on that. It's not that it completely stops its characters arcs, but it takes emphasis away from them (and what emphasis there is left delivers only the ol' cliche "friendship is magic" message, though admittedly it does so very well) and this left me disappointed: I wanted to keep discovering more of the things that Kill la Kill had hidden away from me the way I'd discovered them in the first part, but instead I was expected to use the things I'd already discovered to keep me invested in watching characters fight.
And, honestly, despite my better judgement and stubborn unwillingness to let it do so, it worked. The final third of Kill la Kill may be a lot less interesting to me than the first two thirds, but everything that was fundamentally great was still there. I had nuanced characters clashing in this over-the-top, absolutely ridiculous nonsensical high octane fever dream of a plot. Let's not forget the thing that's the most evident about Kill la Kill: The visuals rock. This is in the top two best looking shows I've ever seen, and good looking action scenes are fucking awesome when I care about the characters, especially when some of the phenomenal animation flourishes may as well count as character moments in and of themselves. I wasn't invested on the same level as the first two-thirds, not really, but I was having an absolute fucking blast watching some cool-ass shit happen on my screen
The last third wasn't my cup of tea, but it was a cup of tea so delicious I downed it in one go and asked for more.
9/10
Kill la Kill moves. It moves so much. From the constant, fluid and incredibly creative animation to the rapid motion of its story and the non-stop barrage of character moments, Kill la Kill is a show that very seldom stops to take a breath. As such, it's a testament that it's never tiring: It's constantly engaging, whether it be in its plot or incredible fight scenes. I've watched anime better than Kill la Kill, but I don't know if anything tops this show on a production level. When I reviewed Cowboy Bebop I said that this was a show that could've been worthwhile just by relying on its incredible style: it didn't need to have substance. After a pretty juicy first two thirds, Kill la Kill's final third does do this, cruising on its style and the characters and themes the first part built, and it remains a fantastic time throughout. Sometimes entertainment is just so damn stylish I don't care if there's not much to it. High octane has never been better.
