User blog:RRabbit42/Review: Kill Me Baby


 * Introduction

Every so often, I'll write movie reviews on a different website and I've recently expanded it into doing reviews of TV shows for series that have been completed so I can look at the entire storyline as a whole. I'll repost the ones for anime series here in my blog.

I will give everyone fair warning. I don't write reviews as soundbytes or provide TL;DR summaries. Some of them are the same length as articles you'd read in a newspaper or magazine.

Each word is carefully considered and I think it will be worth your time and interest if you see it through.

Review: Kill Me Baby

One of the important elements of any TV show is the theme song. From the bar where everybody knows your name to the friends that pledge to be there for you, from the stirring and majestic Star Trek: The Next Generation instrumental theme to the discordant and militaristic theme used for season three of Babylon 5, they stick with us.

The theme needs to be memorable and the really good ones will have you singing or humming the tune. This works well in many cases. However, for MASH, it’s important to remember that the TV show used an instrumental version of “Suicide is Painless” from the movie. Likewise, suddenly singing “Kill me, baby!” out of the blue in an energetic and enthusiastic manner is going to get you some strange and worried looks.

Those three words are how the theme song of Kill Me Baby starts and it has what seems to be very common in many anime series, which is to include some English phrases amongst the Japanese lyrics. The energetic and enthusiasm continues right on to the end.

Kill Me Baby (KMB from here on) is a slice-of-life anime series based on the slice-of-life four panel manga series of the same name. This means there’s no over-arcing, multi-episode plot. Whereas Babylon 5 was “one story told over five years” (plus the pilot movie, a few additional TV movies, some novels and some comic books because there wasn’t time to tell the entire story in five years, according to the guy who created it), KMB is lots of tiny little plots strung together with little or no connection to each other. You run through a few minutes of how Yasuna Oribe keeps buying popsicles because the stick could have “winner” printed on it, split it up with a background scene with “another day” or “lunchtime”, and go on to the next micro-plot.

The cast is also fairly micro, too. Yasuna’s a high school student with “no learning ability”, so every morning, she tries to greet her friend, Sonya, in a friendly and physical way (hugging, tapping Sonya on the shoulder, etc.). Every morning, Yasuna gets another lesson in why it’s not a good idea to sneak up on an assassin.

Yes, Sonya’s an assassin. How is someone that’s trained to kill so easily scared of things like dogs and cockroaches? Beats me. For whatever reason, she’s in the same class as Yasuna. Most of her time is spent in the school, the same classroom, in fact, so you begin to wonder if she ever goes out on assignments. You’d almost think that she’s lying about being an assassin, but she’s got the skills to pay the bills and she’s quick to demonstrate if questioned. She doesn’t like being questioned.

Rounding out the group is Agiri Goshiki, a ninja from the same organization as Sonya, who comes across more as a charlatan or huckster. She doesn’t look or act like a ninja. From the way she talks, I’d almost think she’s been smoking something (a lot of somethings, actually). She usually hangs out in an unused classroom at the school. Why? Dunno. Whatever organization she and Sonya work for, they must have a lot of downtime.

There’s one more character, named “Unused Character”, that has made it her mission to do something memorable so that she will be included in the main cast. It irks her that she knows she’s a nobody character, so every so often, she tries to pull a “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan”, with no success.

Almost everyone else is so unimportant to the micro-plots that they’re usually drawn as black outlines filled in with white. The main three (four?) are drawn in a chibi style.

The slice-of-life format makes it easy to pop in the KMB disc and spend a few minutes enjoying Yasuna’s, Sonya’s and Agiri’s antics as you’ve got time. After finishing the 13-episode series, I haven’t decided if the title sequence having more action in it than the series itself is considered bait and switch or if it’s just an adventure that didn’t happen to be in the series. Stick around after the end of each episode to hear some complicated pearls of “wisdom” and the screwball title given to the episode.