Review for Aria the Scarlet Ammo

Introduction

Last night I finished watching Iria for review. Today I start with Aria... I wonder if it’s a glut of anime that’s causing a title shortage, or just a lack of imagination in writers. Anyway, Aria: The Scarlet Ammo has absolutely nothing to do with Iria: Zeiram the Animation. Also it must be stated that Aria: The Scarlet Ammo has no connection to Aria: The Animation, Aria The Natural, or Aria The Origination. Those three belong to a wholly different franchise. Also, the fact that Rie Kugimiya voices the titular Aria, who happens to be a pint-sized, flame haired tsundere, has nothing whatsoever in common with Shakugan no Shana. Anyway, Aria: The Scarlet Ammo is a high school harem show with a difference. The girls in this harem carry guns.


Most people would consider a teenage girl jumping from the top of a skyscraper to be a bad thing, but for high school student Kinji Tohyama, when Aria H. Kanzaki makes her leap, she turns out to be a lifesaver. Kinji and Aria attend the exclusive Tokyo Butei High School, an academy designed to recruit and train the next generation of super detectives, the ultimate crime-fighters and gumshoes. It’s the only high school where being armed is a school rule, and where school uniforms have to be bulletproof, as its students are quite naturally the targets of the criminal fraternity. It’s why Kinji needs saving that fateful morning as he cycles to school. Someone placed a bomb on his bike that would explode if he stops pedalling, and if that isn’t incentive enough, he is pursued by a robotically controlled Uzi sub-machinegun.


This is no simple assassination attempt though. There’s a serial killer on the loose, the infamous Butei Killer, and Aria wants to team up with Kinji, make use of his special skills (Kinji’s detective skills are enhanced when he’s turned on) to find the murderer. It’s personal for Aria. She’s up against a deadline for one thing, but for another thing, the authorities think there is no case, that they have already taken the Butei Killer into custody, that suspect being Aria’s mother, Kanae. The only problem is that Kinji is tired of being a target, and he wants to quit being a Butei altogether.


Thirteen episodes of Aria: The Scarlet Ammo, plus extras are presented across two discs by Manga Entertainment.

Disc 1

1. La Bambina
2. Aria the Quadra
3. First Mission
4. Butei Killer
5. Butei Charter Article 1
6. Maiden of Hotogi Shrine
7. Caged Bird

Disc 2

8. Durandal
9. Honey Trap
10. Special Training
11. Infiltration
12. Vlad
13. The Butei Come and Train at a Hot Spring

Picture

Aria: The Scarlet Ammo gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer in the PAL format, as sourced from Australia’s Madman Entertainment. The image is clear and sharp throughout, and the anime’s bold colours come through without flaw. It’s a solid transfer, but the animation itself never really does much to challenge the limits of the DVD format. The character designs are simple and formulaic, while the world design is pretty generic too. The animation is comparatively simplistic, and does enough to tell the story but little more. Once in a while, especially during an action sequence, the budget gets pushed out a bit, but that really only serves to emphasise how mediocre the rest of the anime is. Aria is a show that looks ten years older than its actual vintage.

Sound

It’s the usual Funimation suspects of DD 5.1 English and DD 2.0 Japanese with optional subtitles and a signs only track. The 5.1 is really quite a solid upmix, as it throws the show’s various action sequences and effects around the soundstage with abandon. The actual English dub, something I sampled ten minutes of, is your standard comedy anime dub, with agreeable voices and enthusiastic performances. There’s a lot of unintentional humour though in the English language pronunciation of Butei, and I kept being reminded of John Bigboote from Buckaroo Banzai. My language option of choice was the original Japanese track, and I just couldn’t get away from Aria = Shana because of the way Rie Kugimiya plays the tsundere aspects of the characters. I was actually counting the number of times Aria would actually say ‘Shut Up!” in a row, just to see if she would actually hit the full Shana, but that was always avoided. If there is a niggle with these discs, there is the tendency to hit subtitle overload when there is more than one conversation going on simultaneously. There can be up to four lines of subtitles on screen at one time, and it becomes difficult if not impossible to tell which subtitle is assigned to which conversation. At times like this, different colour subtitle fonts would be a godsend.

Extras

Both discs get static menus, and jacket pictures to look at when the discs are at rest in compatible players.

Disc 1 has two commentaries to listen to, beginning with episode 4, which has voice actors Luci Christian (Riko), and Todd Haberkorn (Kinji) talking about the story and their characters, and the apparent laxness of airline security.


The episode 6 commentary has ADR director Zach Bolton join Todd Haberkorn and Leah Clark (Aria), this time to take a look at the voice actors’ perspectives on recording, rather than the show itself.

Disc 2 has the rest of the extra features, although these merely amount to a promotional video, the English language trailer, original commercials, and the textless credits.

Conclusion

It’s the wrong Aria, Gromit... I mean Manga. You really should have licensed Aria the Animation and its sequels instead, as that has a lot more critical appreciation to it. Aria the Scarlet Ammo on the other hand is... well I want to say fanwank, but that is a simplistic, crude, and slightly inaccurate description of this show. However it does feel put together by committee for a specific fan audience, a collection of cool bits strung together with little thought to narrative, character, plot or continuity. That it’s actually adapted from a set of light novels rather than just the resulting sludge when a set of anime tropes are minced together in a blender is the biggest surprise. This is formulaic low budget claptrap with its only redemption that it’s nigh on impossible for its harem formula not to entertain to some degree. You can put your brain on idle, put a disc of Aria The Scarlet Ammo into your player, and lose 20 minutes of your life without regretting the loss.


SPOILERS!

It’s impossible for me to explain just why I found this show so dispiriting without discussing its plot and its characters, hence the spoiler warning.

The premise is potentially an interesting one, that of schools created especially to train the world’s master detectives. In execution though, it’s just another harem anime, with its male protagonist, Kinji Tohyama afflicted with a rather useful, if embarrassing ailment. Normally he’s a rather average trainee detective, but if he gets turned on by an attractive girl, his powers of deduction multiply greatly, as does his lack of humility. As if an anime ever need to actually justify fan service! The problem with the detective schools is that they become targets for criminals that want to eliminate their adversaries before they graduate. Hence everyone in school is required to be armed, and why uniforms are bulletproof. I must admit that the sight of a schoolkid holstering a couple of guns as he steps out of the door in the morning left a sour taste in my mouth, but this is anime, not Columbine.


Besides, shooting people is funny, as tsundere Aria reminds us, going on a shooting spree whenever she’s annoyed, threatening to pump Kinji full of holes, and getting aggrieved at his audacity at wearing bulletproof clothing. Aria’s the heroine of the show, and she rescues Kinji and takes him on as a detective partner, a deductive intellect to balance her instincts. She’s looking to clear her mother’s name, as she’s been framed for the murders committed by the Butei Killer, and sentenced to a few hundred years in jail. Aria has to solve crimes one by one to get her mother’s sentence reduced incrementally. The first target for her deductions is the Butei Killer. The Butei Killer turns out to be Lupin IV. Yup, that Lupin... only this Lupin is a she, an evil little vixen who’s targeting Aria H. Kanzaki directly to prove herself as exceeding her birthright. She’s all about using Kinji to get Aria, the reason being that Aria too has a birthright. The H stands for Holmes, as in Sherlock Holmes, and if the descendant of Arsene Lupin can defeat the descendant of Sherlock Holmes...


Around this point Lupin IV is revealed to have prehensile hair. Yes, she can use her hair to grasp things, including the swords that she fights with. Three episodes in, and we learn that the detectives and their foes have supernatural abilities, which wasn’t in the mission statement at the start of the series... Which is when Joan of Arc shows up... By the end of the show, all the evil murdering villains have turned into heroes, and it’s revealed that the evil murdering they did, either never really happened, or the writers just don’t remember what they wrote four episodes previously, and everyone teams up to fight Count Dracula.


Never have I so loudly and vehemently yelled at my television set, telling an anime in no uncertain terms to go forth and multiply. If you don’t give two monkeys about what you watch, if all you want from your anime are character stereotypes, clichés, and copious fan service, then by all means you’ll get some entertainment value from Aria The Scarlet Ammo. It does what it does with gusto and passion, and the animators make the most of the butts and boobs required to satisfy the male otaku demographic. But woe betide anyone that actually spends thirty seconds thinking about this show. The last thing you need while watching it is a reminder that it was probably put together by a bunch of primary school kids playing make believe.