Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is a high budget arthouse mashup of Madoka☆Magica and Kill la Kill, created with passion by top talents of the industry, only to be misunderstood and forgotten by its contemporaries.
If, for some reason, you aren't convinced to watch it yet, here is a review for this masterpiece - completely spoilerless (the only spoiler it has is for Madoka☆Magica - hidden in the creative background chapter). This review contains absolutely no information about the plot of this anime, but you will understand upon reading whether you will enjoy it or not.
So, what makes Black★Rock Shooter (TV) brilliant?
IT REQUIRES A SMART AND DEMANDING VIEWER WITH RICH WATCHING EXPERIENCE TO TRULY APPRECIATE IT
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) flopped when it aired, and its quality has nothing to do with its marketing failure. While not flawless, there are way worse works that are legendary cult classics - even among other works by the people who created Black★Rock Shooter (TV). Black★Rock Shooter (TV) was a marketing failure because... nobody understood it! Well, knowing how Ordet were comfortable with creating anime that nobody liked (which doesn't necessarily mean they are bad, okay there?), it wouldn't be too surprising if they simply did not even care if someone wouldn't understand some of their works.
That's it. The most voted negative reviews all complain how their authors either did not understand something, or how nothing in this anime makes sense (which is a less honest way to say that a given work is beyond their comprehension - quantum physics does not makes sense to many as well, but it actually works, okay there?). It is not just some immature teenagers who complain how they cant' understand something - even adult viewers often have problems understanding this anime... and it did not even attract adults. This avant-garde masterpiece attracted an audience of teenage vocaloid fans who were simply not mature enough to enjoy it. If you find a person who knows about this gem, it is going to be someone who was a teenager when it has been airing in 99% of these cases, and in 90% of even these rare cases, they would tell you that they did not like it because they did not understand anything, or wanted more action instead of drama. Curiously, two years later, SHAFT made the very same mistake with their vocaloid-based Mekakucity Actors - but this is not a review of Mekakucity Actors...
The side-effect of this mismarketing was it also didn't reward the show with creative reputation of avantgarde anime that would allow it to attract the audience of snobs who watch avant garde anime to distance themselves from the mainstream. Thus, Black★Rock Shooter (TV) only allows really demanding and experienced viewers to truly appreciate it - and there aren't many such viewers around, which is good for finding experienced viewers with good taste to follow, and not good for the popularity of the anime.
Now, the reason why all this review was written - to make you understand whether you are going to like the show or not. Most people can't really appreciate it enough - including those who like it, because these are different things to just like something and to get so impressed that you will find yourself thinking about it months later. You will most likely not enjoy Black★Rock Shooter (TV) if:
- You can't relate to young female characters with typical struggles of young female, and/or you can't empathize with people who are unlike you;
- You are disappointed that there is not enough action and too much drama in this anime - you will be better off watching Kill la Kill (another work by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a co-author of Black★Rock Shooter (TV)) instead, until you are mature enough to enjoy drama;
- You are a victim of expectation bias, and the reputation (looks, ratings, reviews, critical reception) of a work and its creators influences your impressions more than the contents of the work itself. If you praise Neon Genesis Evangelion for its symbolism just because it is Neon Genesis Evangelion, despite its creators directly stating that there is no meaning to its symbols, you have to be very careful to not fall victim to the same bias while watching this;
- You only enjoy art house anime and think that "art-house" means "profound topics with bad animation" (in this case, you also probably did not like Monogatari series because you thought that it is nothing more than a lolicon bait);
- You feel uncomfortable with the confusing magical feeling it gives off (remember Monogatari series?);
- You feel that, in order to enjoy it, you have to force yourself to understand it instead of just getting the key points intuitively while watching it;
- You can't feel a work more than you can understand it, and you can't let yourself get absolutely flummoxed out and lose yourself in your feelings, as if it is not some anime but a 3-hour-long classical concert.
Now, you will most likely enjoy Black★Rock Shooter (TV) if nothing above describes you. The odds are higher if:
- You have accumulated enough watching experience, and you will get absolutely blown away by this gem and by the fact that some noname studios could create something that holds up more than 12 years after its release (written at 23 April, 2024), while generic seasonal garbage gets produced, consumed and disposed like Durex condoms;
- You are a fan of Madoka☆Magica and find its successors to be of unacceptable quality and/or its predecessors to not have the same vibes you love Madoka☆Magica for. Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is the only show that does justice to Madoka☆Magica, even doing some things better than its predecessor. Trust me, I saw many pathetic attempts to emulate the great classic, and so far, Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is among the only two anime that even can be described as a "successor", "reference", "tribute" or "homage" instead of a "plagiarism" or "rip-off". The second one is called Selector Infected WIXOSS, but this is not a review of Selector Infected WIXOSS;
- You can and you want to get an absolutely unique experience of getting shocked, terrified, emotionally demolished and literally shaking while understanding almost nothing;
- You think that you would not enjoy it because you now know that this work is most likely beyond you, but you still want to see what a work of art should be to be above your level;
- You were successfully convinced by me that it is a brilliant work and you'll love it because the expectation bias introduced by me right into your brain will trick you into thinking that it is great, which wouldn't have happened if you haven't read this review before;
- You are just smart enough to enjoy it. Let's face it, some art really requires the consumer to be bright enough to appreciate it.
IT LEAVES NOTHING BUT IMPRESSIONS, ALLOWING YOU TO WATCH IT AGAIN AND AGAIN LIKE FOR THE FIRST TIME UNTIL YOU COMPLETELY MILK IT OUT
This is the part which most viewers of this anime fail (or, maybe, it is the part that fails the most viewers?).
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is deliberately created confusing and inaccessible to be felt instead of understood. This anime is all about feelings. It is not just about story, it is not just about characters, it is not even just about ahead-of-its-time production. It is about feelings. You have to suspend your understanding and only feel it to appreciate it. If you can't know how you can just feel cinema... has a song in a language you don't speak ever made you feel something? This is how you should watch this masterpiece - as if you were listening to a song. Shut up your rational being and let this work talk right to your heart, and you will experience its magic.
Nobody who watched this masterpiece remembers anything about it but how they felt about it, be their feelings positive or negative. I even heard from some people how they couldn't remember anything about it, except how scary it was. And you, too, will not remember, and, most importantly, you must not remember anything but your feelings about it. In fact, this review says nothing about the plot of this anime, because considering that it is a show you feel instead of understanding it, telling any more about it would be considered a spoiler.
If you feel comfortable with its magic and let it surround you, it will make your limbs tremble, it will crush your soul, it will absolutely demolish you, it will make you cry - out of despair at its climax, and out of happiness in the very end - it may even make you laugh hysterically and, in the end, it will relieve you. If you watch it with your heart open, you will experience the entire palette of human emotions with Black★Rock Shooter (TV).
ITS AHEAD OF ITS TIME PRODUCTION VALUE STILL HAS NO DIRECT COMPETITORS
Black★Rock Shooter (TV)'s production - the visuals, animations and sound design - is at the forefront of the technology that was available back in the day. The animators behind this show utilized every technology they worked with to its full potential. No matter what the current year is, Black★Rock Shooter (TV) always looks and sounds better than (at least!) 99% of anime made that year. Black★Rock Shooter (TV) aired in 2012 - just compare how it looks to the most popular anime of that time and you simply will not believe that it was made the same year with Sword Art Online!
The key feature of this anime, the CGI animation, is executed so well that many people can't even notice that it was used. It is not the Ufotable-style CGI made to look like traditional hand-drawn animation, but the artistic CGI fine-grained to give an impression of a psychedelic trip. Considering that Hiroyuki Imaishi himself (Gurren Lagann, Kill La Kill), was responsible for these CGI shenanigans, he definitely could've made it Ufotable-style, but his creative choice was not to (and for a good reason!). If you think that Beastars and Land of the Lustrous have the best CGI, Black★Rock Shooter (TV) will make you doubt it.
Beastars this, Land of the Lustrous that... Meanwhile some forgotten avant-garde anime from 2012:
IT HAS UNIQUE CREATIVE BACKGROUND - CREATED BY TOP TALENTS, INSPIRING AND REFERENCING PUELLA MAGI MADOKA☆MAGICA, AND FORESHADOWING KILL LA KILL
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is a product of ultimate creative freedom of some of the top talents of the anime industry associated with Kyoto Animation and Trigger. If you ever wanted to see what a group of really talented artists is capable of when they are completely creatively independent of their employers and are allowed to create anything they want, you should definitely watch Black★Rock Shooter (TV).
Many people notice how Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is similar to another fantasy psychological thriller - Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica, but not many realize its relationship with this legendary genre-defining anime is way more complex. They both were in production in the end of 2000s-start of 2010s, and influenced and referenced each other. Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is, essentially, an older twin sister of Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica.
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) was actually inspired by Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica. It is the only anime that emulates Madoka☆Magica that good while having its own unique style. Character designs and archetypes, plot points, visuals and animations, themes and ideas... they complement each other so well that even the music in both anime sounds so similar, you can replace the entire soundtrack of Madoka☆Magica with the soundtrack of Black★Rock Shooter (TV) or vice versa, and they would fit just perfectly. It is obvious that these Madoka-esque vibes are not accidental.
Moreover, Madoka☆Magica, apparently, has some references to the Black★Rock Shooter franchise, too. ClariS, the singers of Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica's OP song "Connect", have even made a cover of a song that later became the opening of the Black★Rock Shooter (TV) - you can find it on Youtube and Nicovideo. There are even some AMVs for Madoka☆Magica with their cover.
Spoiler, click to view
It is not just barely believable at this point that Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica, a show of a grade that appear only once a decade if not less often, can have such an amazing counterpart that was created just a year after. Considering awkward production processes at Ordet and difficult personality of its founder Yutaka Yamamoto, its existence is almost an actual miracle. Maybe some lonely girl wished for it to happen and contracted Kyuubey?..
After Black★Rock Shooter (TV) flopped because nobody wanted to watch a school drama with action elements, Hiroyuki Imaishi, the director for its fight choreography, responded by creating Kill la Kill, a reverse of Black★Rock Shooter (TV) - an action anime with elements of school drama. Then he, apparently, learnt the general public would happily enjoy anything easy to digest with lots of flashy fights going on, and then Trigger has never produced anything as great as Black★Rock Shooter (TV), but that's a whole another story...
NONE OF ITS FLAWS EVER MADE ANY OTHER ANIME LESS POPULAR
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is imperfect, but given how brilliant it is for the aforementioned reasons, its flaws are easy to overlook and forgive. Its problems are not worse in both quantity and quality than the problems in most of the cult classic anime - in fact, many legendary anime have even worse flaws. We had another poorly written anime about teenagers with mental illness, where only the fights were the cool part of the story. It is called Neon Genesis Evangelion and it is one of the most successful anime ever. The problems of Black★Rock Shooter (TV) mean nothing compared to my entire rant about how brilliant this anime is and why you should watch it, these problems are really nothing compared to how great it is.
Actually, watching it for the first time - if you watch it the right way, with your heart open, and let the feeling of magical confusion consume you - it may shock you so much that you will not even notice that something is wrong. If this show is made for you, these flaws are not going to be something you will pay attention to.
IT IS STILL A CULT CLASSIC - PROBABLY THE MOST CULT CLASSIC AMONG LEAST POPULAR ANIME
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) enjoys cult following, despite not being very popular. There are still people talking about it. There are still people suggesting each other to watch it, like me. There are entire communities in Discord and other social media dedicated to the Black★Rock Shooter (TV) and the franchise around it that maintain interest to its existence. This is the most cult anime among all unpopular anime I know, and probably the most cult one among all unpopular anime ever.
IT GIVES IMPORTANT AND PAINFUL LESSONS TO BOTH ARTISTS AND THEIR AUDIENCES
Aside from the main moral message of the show, Black★Rock Shooter (TV) and the story of this masterpiece - the story of its creation, release, reception and fall into oblivion - has enough to teach artists and their audiences, and everyone who values art. I'm talking not just about anime right now, I'm talking about art in general.
So, what can the case study of of Black★Rock Shooter (TV) teach us?
It teaches us that your work may be absolutely brilliant and years ahead of its time, but if it fails to meet the audience that would enjoy it, it will never attract enough attention and will never produce any impact. Not only the general public does not talk about this masterpiece, the entire anime industry has absolutely ignored it - despite there are enough things to learn from in Black★Rock Shooter (TV), especially its advanced CGI animation. But since this masterpiece hasn't found the right audience and was forgotten, no one ever will think of Black★Rock Shooter (TV) when asked for something similar to Madoka☆Magica, no one will ever compare its music written by Hideharu Mori to the works of Yuki Kajiura, no one will suggest Black★Rock Shooter (TV) when asked about good CGI anime, no one has even tried to replicate Black★Rock Shooter (TV)'s CGI because the industry itself is not aware of the existence of this gem, too. To fall into oblivion is the fate of a work that can't gather enough attention. Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is not the only brilliant work that was undeservedly forgotten - there must be many more are out there which I don't even know anything about.
It teaches us that if you can't even convince the audience that your work is great by advertising it as something only for "the chosen ones", it will never gain enough attention. It is not necessarily quality that makes luxury things luxury, it is also the reputation of the brands that produce these things (google "expectation bias" and "Supreme clay brick" if you don't believe me). There are thousands of people who enjoy certain works of art just because these works have reputation of being prestigious or trendy. Such people - probably the majority of their audience - would not love them otherwise, even if they were the very same works but without the flashy attention-grabbing sticker that says "for cool kids only".
It teaches us that the absolute most of people doesn't care much about the art they consume as long as it is something accessible and easy to digest, and you don't even need to create something brilliant to satisfy the needs of the general public. Kill la Kill is a prime example of such work - created by a director of Black★Rock Shooter (TV), it simply catered to the popular demand for flashy action with minimum drama. It banged despite not having brilliant CGI sequences, not being extremely visual and graphic, not brilliantly referencing a cult classic show... Why even bother when you can create just another safe work of mediocre quality? I can speak here as an artist too - when I was a hobbyist writer, I was shocked to learn that my most popular works were wish fulfillment fantasies that were simply found relatable by my audience, and soon stopped writing at all.
It teaches us that, unfortunately, sometimes artists should learn to suppress their morals and create more accessible and popular works to earn enough money and attention to create something they'd really want to create. Even Ordet, despite its founder Yutaka Yamamoto claiming how they would be creating something "better than moe", soon started to produce moe stuff - despite they still were doing it with passion and it was (probably) really better than the regular moe, it was still moe.
Finally, it teaches us that some art may simply be above us, and we should always ponder if it is really bad, or is just beyond our comprehension. Sadly, we still don't have an objective measure of "goodness" or "badness" of art, despite having objective measures in hard sciences, and it is unlikely that someone would even want to develop it. Having such a measure would definitely help to determine whether a work is bad or is just beyond its audience, and to discover a vast amount of brilliant works unjustly overlooked by the general public. Maybe Black★Rock Shooter (TV) is really not great, and its flaws are unforgivable and are just beyond me? I can't tell.
Black★Rock Shooter (TV) definitely suggests even more to learn from, but I guess I've already said everything in this review that really matters. Watch Black★Rock Shooter (TV), see my tragic mahou shoujo interest stack on MyAnimeList for shows similar to Black★Rock Shooter (TV) and Madoka☆Magica, and don't forget to donate to Yutaka Yamamoto. Thank you for your attention.