Early Reins

This anime is if Bullet Train and the Old West had a child. The only difference is that it has way less gore and not that memorable. In this specific instance, I watched it dubbed. The dubbing isn't great. It falls flat with emotions and accents. The rich girl and southern girl has very stereotypical accents that define their archetype. It takes me out of the emersion sometimes with how poorly the lines were delivered.

The main characters aren't very memorable. The girls are archetypes that's made to interact with each other. Their thought process are pretty simple and do not have a lot of depth ... to their character. This makes it a no-brainer watch. It makes the plot fairly simple to follow and a feel-good movie. It took the characters 2/3rd of the movie for them to introduce themselves to one another. It's long overdue; it should've happen at least 10 minutes into the movie when everyone meets. I am pretty horrible with names, so having characters say each other's names usually helps me. But the characters never really refer to each other by name.

I do enjoy the soundtrack. Each song goes well with the mood it is trying to portray. It has the energy of early 2000s video games (well, the ones I have played). The animation is pretty good to how lesser-known this movie is. There are frames moving every few seconds. Stills don't stay still for long. There's always something happening.

I wouldn't go out of my way to watch this again. But if someone where to put this on as background noise, I wouldn't mind it.

Early Reins is an original OLM OVA from the early 2000s. That's right. This is from the Pokemon, Figure 17 & Gunsmith Cats studio. A lot of their works I've reviewed have been pretty middling so, let's hope this isn't the one that gets really bad.

Story:

The narrative is simple enough. It's America in ye olde Western times where everyone wore stupid hats and Sheriff Bart overcame racism to be the greatest, most charming Sheriff of all time. Our story sees a passenger train with union soldiers aboard get overrun by former confederate bandits. The group takes six women and a decorated union soldier ... hostage and tries to divert the train's cargo to their encampment. Unfortunately for them, their female hostages include a rookie Sheriff and a highly skilled gunslinger.

The story has one major narrative issue. Basically, at the end of the thing, we get a twist that hasn't been foreshadowed at all, doesn't make a lot of sense and comes across more as their way of de-escalating a conflict between two of the major characters than as something that was planned from the start.

With that being said, the OVA is pretty compelling from start to finish. The pacing is well done with the way OLM uses rising action and quieter moments to build up to the climax. There is also one twist that does work to kind of balance out the one that doesn't. Part of why the narrative works so well is that it has a lot of elements you would expect from a Western, like the train robbery, gun play betwixt bandits and western heroes and so on. but it also subverts the expectations for those tropes by giving you heroines instead of heroes. It also does have a good ending point where they could potentially do more with it but it still feels complete.

Characters:

The most interesting characters in the OVA are the young Sheriff, Margaret, and the one-eyed gunslinger, Lola. Aside from that, the characters are fine. They're a bit under-developed but considering that the OVA is only 45 minutes long and they have to fit in all that Western action, they couldn't have gone much beyond archetypes, realistically.

Art:

The artwork is a little dated. In the sense that there are older OVAs like 3x3 Eyes or Bubblegum Crisis that look better than this. The character designs are good. They look like they could be in the Wild Arms games. The action sequences are largely decent as well. They can be a little choppy at points but they still look good and suitably epic. The backgrounds aren't all that great. Mainly because the big backdrops are the train cars and a big expansive Desertscape with basically nothing in it.

Sound:

The actors are pretty skilled. Kawakami Tomoko, Yanagihara Aiko, Takeuchi Junko and the rest all give solid performances. The music is very much in keeping with the Western aesthetic. It's pretty good but not something I'd listen to outside of the anime.

Ho-yay:

There's the tiniest modicum of potential romantic tension between Lola and Margaret but it's really played more as them working together and gaining a mutual respect than anything else. Maybe if this got a proper full anime it would go further.

Areas of Improvement:

1. This OVA should definitely either be longer, thereby giving more time for character development or they should have had fewer major characters and developed the ones they had better.

2. You need some degree of foreshadowing for a big story twist. Something the viewer can look back at and say "oh, that makes sense now." A twist that comes out of nowhere just feels like an ass pull.

3. The animation could stand to be smoother. While the choppiness isn't bad, it is noticeable.

Final Thoughts:

Early Reign is pretty good. It has all the action you'd expect from a Western with a simple but compelling story and some decent characterisation. Overall, I'll give this one a solid 7/10. If you want to see an anime Western consider giving it a go.

You know what's a rarity in anime and manga. The western, as in the genre. Sure, you get a lot of anime inspired by westerns, like "Cowboy Bebop", "Trigun", "Gun X Sword", "El Cazador de la Bruja", "Outlaw Star", and "Coyote Ragtime Show", but nothing that's just a straight up western. Sure, there are a few manga that are westerns, such as "Gun Blaze West", "Green Blood", "Miriam", and "Angel Gunfighter", but since there is a lot more manga, you're bound to get more variety in manga, but the genre is still few and far between, and it's certainly an untapped genre when it comes ... the mediums of anime and manga. But one of the anime to pop up that is a straight western is 'Early Reins'.

Set during the early 1800s, the early years of the United States of America, Early Reins takes place entirely on a train en route to Sunshine Hill, shortly before it gets hijacked by robbers. While the soldiers onboard are caught unawares, the tables are turned as several women on board manage to stand up to the robbers and fight back. The heroine of this story, Margaret Hart, a young woman determined to become a sheriff, but lacks experience.

Unfortunately there isn't much to say about the anime outside of it's basic plot synopsis without spoiling specific details, since it's only 40 minutes long, barely long enough to qualify as a movie, there aren't any more episodes beyond this OVA, or even a manga to fall back on to read more of if you happened to really like what Early Reins has to offer.

Since it's so short, all of the good things that I could say about it feel like backhanded compliments due to just how short it is. The fact that it not only has an all female cast but each one of the characters has a distinct personality is nice. Even the English dub giving the cast era appropriate accents is a nice touch, as cliche as it is. But that's where my compliments end.

While a lot of it looks alright, it clearly uses early digital painting, which gives it a flat look, and some of the animations are clearly underdeveloped. It also came out when CGI was first being used on a wider scale for anime, and it clearly didn't have enough money put into it to make it look good, since there was no real guarantee if it was going to make it's money back.

I know that it seems like my review isn't exactly all that fair towards Early Reins, but that's because all there is a test pilot for a series that clearly never got off the ground. I actually liked this OVA, and it certainly has a lot of charm to it that a lot of other anime doesn't. It would have been neat to see our main characters as they went about their daily lives in an old timey western town, with each episode featuring a new conflict for our main characters to deal with and see the characters interacting with each other, or have a character centered episode.

Honestly, there should be a few more western inspired anime. Even though Japan doesn't really have the history with westerns that America does, the fact that several anime and manga, weather it be through it being a dedicated western or simply one of the things to influence it, have done a good enough job that I feel anime and manga could easily take the genre on under the right person or people.