Apr 29, 2023
This will not be a systematic review, but rather I would like to share with you my experience of the anime and a story that is an experiential journey matches wonderfully well with the roadless journey Nadie and Ellis set out on.
The Storyboard:
Whoever made the storyboard for this series deserves a ***damn award - I dare say it's on level with what you'd expect from Paul Verhoeven. Forget Dutch angles, these guys push it to the limit for intensity. Besides being great at building tension and letting intensity rise (through shots, shot sequences and -development, together with the music), they also have a wonderful
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sense for the calmth and poetry of life, expressed in various ways, which involves storyboard and animation jointly reaching that experiential wavelength of the aesthetic of life.
Guns:
Nadie is a bounty hunter, so one shouldn't be surprised that there's a lot of lead-slingin' in the anime. There is a wide variety of guns, I'd estimate on par with that of Black Lagoon. The guns used are classics (*gun spoiler: 1911, Desert Eagle, Berettas, revolvers, M60, uzis, I think also M16s or ARs, a Browning machine gun, Glock and perhaps Browning 9mm), they are drawn beautifully and also the action is great (from the slide mechanism and its speed to the effect of getting hit by a bullet), as far as Nadie's gun is concerned they even considered mag capacity - key animation did some good research, I'll say. And on one occasion the slide mechanism of Nadie's gun is slowed down, clearly for dramatic purposes within the ambience of the scene, so the viewer can really enjoy its beauty. (*gun spoiler: there's also one gun -I'm no expert- which I think is not based on a real gun, but invented by key animation and which looks like a fusion between an AK and an uzi, perhaps with a design hint of HK. If invented by key animation, they did a great job, cause it looks pretty great as a whole and I could be convinced it's based on a real gun.)
If you like Black lagoon or Jormungand for this reason, El Cazador de la Bruja will set your soul ablaze, like the burnin' desert heat under which Nadie and Ellis's fates enroll.
References/parodies (*this section is a spoiler):
The series also contains references to other movies or anime. At least I've noticed these references: Rambo and also one small nod to Revy from Black Lagoon.
Of course Nadie's design reminds of the design of Jo from Bakuretsu Tenshi.
The Music:
The music is good and a great match for the various ambiences they intended to create. Exciting music during the action, nicely rhythmically combined with storyboard and other sound, wonderfully sense-prickling attention-holding music while intensity and tension continue to rise.
The Story / The Concept / The Setting / Characters and -Development:
The story is set in southern North America, Mexico to be precise - the desert, certain streets, the house colourings, tacos and the phrase 'amigo' capture this, as well as Nadie's design of course. This setting is not too common in anime and therefore adds a nice flavor - it also works well with the story and the journey through the desert.
The story concerns the journey of Nadie and Ellis through the blazin' desert heat, where multiple different characters with different backgrounds and associations come to interact with Nadie and Ellis with varying intentions and goals, interrelated, sometimes in line with each other, sometimes opposed, which allows for enough characters, character development and elements to keep the story interesting, without inserting so many characters that it would become too much to properly develop within the span of episodes available. Character development primarily concerns Nadie and Ellis, though other characters have also got varying degrees of character development.
The concept of the story / the anime involves a bounty hunter, witches (as the title indicates), science, ancient Inca stones and all this in a modern setting. How they thought through the concept of a witch, developed it in this anime and how they related all these different elements to each other is very original and quite interesting. I resist the urge to develop this in depth, for my intention is not to spoil - now, seek out El Cazador de la Bruja and uncover these hidden truths yourself!
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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