Black Cat

Information of Anime

Black Cat, whose real name is Train Hartnett, is from a large assassin organization called Chronos.  The elite members of Chronos have number tattooed on their body & Black Cat is number XIII because a witch cursed him with the abilities of a cat.  Their jobs is to assassinate figureheads that disturbs the peace.  One night, he met a sweeper named Saya Minatsuki who started to change him.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Train use to follow orders from Chronos without problems until he met Saya on the roof.  Since then, he has been visiting her up there at night.  It started to change him a bit.  On one of his assignments, he was to assassinate Eve, a young girl developed as a bio-weapon.  Sven Volfied, a gentleman-type sweeper who has seen Train in his past jobs & possesses a grasper eye, goes to stop Train from killing her.  He feels that Eve is just a young girl that doesn't understand the outside world.  Sven learns about this from a thief named Rinslet Walker, who is assigned to destroy the lab making these bio-weapons.  Although the lab was destroyed & the mastermind is killed, Chronos let Eve go free.  From here, he decides to leave Chronos.

During this time, Train becomes more open with Saya.  We also learned how he joined Chronos.  Because Chronos can't let Train go, they assigned some elite members to bring him back or kill him if he refuses.  Creed Diskence, a member of Chronos who proclaims to be Train's partner, doesn't like Saya & calls her a witch for changing Train.  At the same time, he was thinking of getting him to join his new group that will terminate Chronos.  Aside from Train leaving Chronos, Creed is now labelled as a traitor to the organization.  Creed kills Saya which angers Train, leading them to a fight when Train is left wounded.  Luckily for him, Sven & Eve were there & Eve saves Train who was protecting some children around the fighting area from an oil blast.

As Train recovers, he develops his cold attitude again when Saya is now dead.  Although Eve believes he should be trusted, she seems to care for him.  When members of Chronos came chasing her again, Train saves her from time to time.  Here, he decides to work as sweeper with Sven.

The story starts to shift a bit with Creed's new group, Apostle of the Stars, becoming a threat to Chronos.  This lead to them hiring Rinslet into find out some information about the group.  It seems that it consists of members from the Tao race; a race that uses magic to fight & was eliminated a long time ago.  A drink is distributed among the group provides them with superhuman powers.  Thinking it's too much, Rinslet hires Sven & his group to help her.  Along the way, this makes Train angry as he finds out that it's Creed's group & wants to get him.  However, Creed still continues to persuade Train into joining his group.  Creed has grown to become a serious threat that a large bounty is placed on his head for sweepers.  Thanks to an alliance of sweepers, Train manages to find the location of the Apostle of Stars.  However, it turns out the leader of the sweeper alliance is a Chronos number.  The alliance was used to distract the Apostle of the Stars while the Chronos numbers sneak in.  In the end, Train defeats Creed & ends the Apostle of the Stars.  However, the head of the Chronos, Mason reveals his colours to a couple of the Chronos numbers when some of the Apostle members gather behind him.  With it, Chronos falls apart & Mason captures Eve to complete the Eden Project  by sending her paradise, Eden. 

Meanwhile, Rinslet finds the creator of Eve, who is a clone of her.  We learn that Eve was developed for the Eden Product & possesses a threat that wasn't suspected.  Because of this, she tried to stop the project by destorying the lab but a scientist, who now works with Mason, stole the plans away which is resulting to the current chaotic problem.  Because of Eden's powers of absorbing life from humans to create paradise & the threat it possesses, the sweepers, Chronos numbers, & Train & crew team up to take Eden down.

The show ends in a strange way.  In the last episode where the climax occurs, the show switches back & forth between the battle & what each character or team are doing when the battle was over.  As a result, you know beforehand that the battle was successful for Train & company.  The show ends by showing what each character or team are doing now as they go their own separate ways.

My Personal Review

Black Cat is a good series.  It has a lot of action & comedy at the same time.  A very good balance of the two genres.  However, the anime does have some bloody scenes which may turn off some viewers.  These include blood & body parts flying around or lying around the place.  However, it doesn't happen a lot.

Animation

The drawings are pretty good & the character designs tend to change a lot.  From full form to cute SD-like mode.  The characters look cool & really have unique style.  Examples are the change in clothing wear of Train & Creed.  They really match their personalities.  However, those round things on Train's jacket look strange.  They look like doughnuts to me.  What I didn't like were the size of the hands & head.  Some times Eve's head looks a bit big & her hands looked quite small.  Although she is a bio-weapon that transforms her body, it doesn't mean her body should go out of propitiation most of the time.  The colour tones on the characters are colourful, but not bright.  It has that dull shade to prevent the background & characters from overlapping. 

The backgrounds are pretty good.  It's more of a manga feel than reality.  It's not very detail, but still enjoyable to look at.

The animation movements are quite natural at times, but most of the time it's unreal.  The running is closer to leaping at fast speeds. Air combats & jumps are superhuman like.  This is acceptable since most of the enemies in the show have these superhuman powers.  The movements is very smooth & flowing.  It provides a lot of a heart-pounding action when you see the fights.

Sound

The sound effect are a mix of reality & cute.  Most of the time, it's cute.  The times where it sounds real is when serious situations & battles occur.  The volume level is good & there is hardly any fuzzes heard.

The voices really changes a lot on some of the characters.  They go from serious/normal to cute.  Train is pretty much an exception.  When he was with Chronos, he had a tough man sound that fitted his character.  When he became a sweeper, his voice changes as if a different seiyuu voiced it instead.  It went from mature to teen.  However, it's not a bad thing.  It's just the change seems sudden & completely different.  As for the rest of the characters, the seiyuus did a fine job portraying their characters.  It matches them well.

The music is ok.  It isn't exciting to listen to & it doesn't influence the mood much.  It's got a Western cowboy style& rock theme to it.  The first ending sound really made the show go out of place.  It's really on the cute side.  It didn't feel right at first when I started watching the show until later on during the Eve mission arc.

Story

The story will focus heavily on Creed's organization & Train fight against them in the first arc.  In the second arc, it seems Train will fight against Chronos numbers when the head of the Chronos number reveals his plans.  The story is very well written to tie the two arcs together.  It flowed very smoothly.  However, the way the ending is written is strange.

Showing you the ending result when we are presented with a climatic decisive battler really wreaked the mood.  Although it's predictable to assume that the good guys will win, the writers should at least keep it aside to let the viewers build up some suspension.  after the battle, I felt something was missing.  The ending felt like it wasn't tying up the loose ends properly.  It's nice to see what the characters are doing now, but it would have been nice of the writers to make one more episode to show how their lifestyle is now.  It's very strange to see this show go from 52 episodes to 23.  I'm assuming that the show either didn't have enough in the budget at the end or the show wasn't very popular.

Overall Conclusion

Black Cat is an anime I would highly recommend watching.  If you like action with a lot of comedy on the side, this is for you.  Even if you don't like action or fights a lot, this is still enjoyable.  The only thing is how body parts & blood are shown on screen at times.  It may be too violent for some.

Black Cat gets a eight out of ten from me.  This score & review will change when I'm finished watching the show.  The story is well written & I like how Train is developing on his character.  Another thing that keeps me attracted to this show is the amount of comedy it has.  One problem I may have with Black Cat is it's length & ending.  From what I've seen originally, I felt this show will last up to 24 or 26 episodes.  However, it's reported to go for 52.  But in the end, it 's cut down to 23 which is a strange number since a lot of anime series tend to end at the 24 or 26 mark.  An extra episode could have been used to improve the ending a bit.

Last updated on December 19, 2007