Noir - Vol. 1 (DVD)

A regular guilty pleasure, Noir is 26 episodes of um, err… well, girls with guns. Well, not exactly, this is, of course, why it works. Like so much anime you have to work within generic conventions and Noir is no exception. On the surface you expect this volume, being the first five of twenty-six twenty-five minute episodes, to be full of dubious fan-service (a term applying to the use of rather gratuitous flashes of sex / nudity, etc., I quote: "unnecessary to a storyline, but designed to amuse or excite the audience"). Noir, thankfully, manages to avoid all this and instead hooks the audience through vertiginous plotting, depth of characterisation and the ...  Read the complete review