009-1, Volume 1 - Anime District
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"masterfully crafted"
"if you love retro anime, I'd recommend you give 009-1 a viewing"
Review - 009-1 Vol. 1
Reviewed by Richard Brownell on 9.5.2007.
Score: 7/10
This review is the hardest I've had to write for AniDis thus far. 009-1 is an incredibly important work in the history of manga. It's regarded as the first manga created for adults, young adults to be precise. And to top it off, it had a very progressive stance on women and their "usefulness" when it was published in the 60s. It's an important work. And it would be so much easier to review it if Ishimori Entertainment had done a bad job with it. If new director Naoyuki Konno had made the transition from manga to anime a painful one, I could simply write off this show as a failure and move on to the next review.
But that's not the case. Without having read the manga and being able to comment on specifics, 009-1 is a masterfully crafted anime. It would be hard to make a case that the visuals are subpar, that the characters designs are not true to manga creator Ishinomori's originals, that the spy feeling is not present throughout the show. No, 009-1 is not bad by any means. But, and you knew a "but" was coming, it actually suffers a bit because of its storyline.
Bear with me before you start writing that hate mail. As somebody who did not read the original manga, I can only judge the anime on its own merits. And while the manga was progressive for its time, the anime feels dated. It's not the setting, which is a world where the Cold War never ended and the West Bloc is stuck in a never-ending war with the East Bloc. It's not the visuals, which are actually refreshing with how retro they are. It's actually the characters, who are all rather flat; and the episodic stories, which never challenge the viewer in any way, just showing them a quick spy story. Before you know it, the credits are rolling, and you never got pulled into it.
The main character of the show is 009-1, a cyborg secret agent who gets sent on the most difficult and dangerous missions that the West Bloc can give her. She's a part of the nine number group, all nearly identical looking hottie cyborgs, though we mostly only see 009-1 in this volume. 9-1, as she's usually called, is your typical spy. She's all business, only getting personal with her targets to get close to them so she can take them out more easily. Spies were all the rage back in the 60s of course, but nowadays there needs to be something more than simply being a spy. When we do get a seemingly closer look into 9-1's personality, it's her tricking a nearly blind man into ditching the device he uses to see better so that she can kill him. So her real personality is that she's a jerk.
The scenarios in each episode are either the same or similar to ones that we've all seen many times by now. The good part is that they're usually done very well. The third and fourth episodes in particular are plots that are now fallback plots when writers can't think of another story, but they're still rather entertaining. The third pits 9-1 against a hitman with a style all his own who seems to be unbeatable. The two of them are tasked to kill each other, but neither can win despite even having dinner with each other. The fourth episode has the top agents of the East and West Blocs being drawn into a castle filled with dangers with each of them hoping to get the spoils within.
One of the most interesting parts of 009-1 is the world it takes place in. This is not a sci-fi vision of the future written by a 21st century writer living in modern day Japan filled with iPods, electric cars, and HD video game systems. This is the vision of the future by a Japanese manga artist who lived through World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It's got an unusual combination of real (and accurate) weapons of the 50s and 60s combined with the technology that people of the 60s imagined would be coming soon. Ray guns abound. It's this type of vision you can't get from any story written today because no modern writers have the same perspective as Ishinomori.
In that sense, because 009-1 is so well done, it's a success. There's certainly room for 009-1 to open up its characters and have deeper plots. I may grow to love it. But as it is, it's mainly something for people who love retro manga/anime and if that's you, I'd recommend you give 009-1 a viewing.
Posted on Friday, September 14, 2007 (Archive on Sunday, October 14, 2007)