Among the many screenings that caught my eye at New York Anime Festival, few exceeded my expectations as thoroughly as Mardock Scramble. The trailer for this La Femme Nikita-esque SF adventure made it look like a flashy, dim-witted shoot-'em-up, but that's the problem with using a trailer as your sole piece of evidence for judging the value of a show or movie: they can make any show look like an action vehicle. The reality of Mardock Scramble is that it's at least as interested in the plights and personalities of its characters as it is in the ways they can tear up the scenery.
The premise, when reduced to a synopsis, sounds downright absurd. The setting is some unnamed super-metropolis of the near future. There, a teenage prostitute named Balot has ended up in the company of the wealthy but obviously deranged Shell. Right before he murders her, she's rescued by a private investigator and his shape-shifting sidekick Oefcoque, and is resurrected in a new cyborg body. This body gives her the ability to alter her surroundings, to use Oefcoque as a super-weapon, and to do a great many other things that probably void her warranty. Over time her shy and retiring persona takes a backseat to a more aggressive one, and she goes gunning for Shell -- who just happens to be working hand-in-hand with Oefcoque's old partner, Boiled.
What's interesting is how the story pays attention to the many implications -- ethical and psychological, for instance -- of bringing her back to life. This stuff takes up the majority of the running time of the first installment; it's only in the final third or so, when Balot goes gun-crazy, that things shift into overdrive. By then, we've come to care enough about Balot and her friends that what happens has real emotional impact. Based on what I see, the two remaining installments in the series are going to be well worth the wait.
Another version of Scramble was to have been launched in 2006 as a direct-to-video release courtesy of anime studio GONZO (Basilisk), with character designs by noted artist Range Murata, but the plug was pulled early on. Both versions were adapted from Tow Ubukata's novels (image above), the first of which is slated for release in English in January 2011. Ubukata's also been responsible for the storylines behind a number of other anime projects, including Le Chevalier D'Eon and Heroic Age.
Images: Top: © VIZ Media LLC. Bottom: © Serdar Yegulalp from slides provided by Aniplex during their presentation at New York Anime Festival 2010.
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