I've hardly made a secret of my love for Kill La Kill in the past. It remains one of my
favourite shows, and likely always will. There's one simple reason I find it so interesting
to talk about though, and it lies outside of the artstyle, plot, music and characters,
though I love them all. That reason is that it surprised me. It surprised me more than
any other show has and likely ever will.
So, to look at why I found it so surprising I want to explore my assumptions and how Kill
La Kill broke them.
Moderate spoilers ahead.
Assumption 1: fan service ruins everything
Of all the assumptions I'm going to list here, this is the one that I still have trouble
getting over. Fan service sucks, and the sorts of fandom it encourages are pretty gross.
Say I want to buy a Kill La Kill t-shirt. I could spend hours looking for a t-shirt
that celebrates the characters I love, or I could just buy a t-shirt that celebrates
certain... aspects of the characters I love.
My assumption was, and to a certain extent still is, that fan service undermines characterisation,
that it adds nothing to the characters and only adds value for a certain subset of any
given fandom.
Enter Kill La Kill.
For many, myself included, the first impression Kill La Kill will leave is from scenes like
this. Or this.
While I was also struck by the artstyle and enamoured by what remains the best introduction
any character has ever received...
I was predominantly left with an impression that was based on those scenes I mentioned
earlier. This was an assumption that took a while to break, but break it did. With a
relentless stream of partial nudity it eventually became background noise, and then when said
nudity was, very much to my surprise, justified in the narrative and the themes it explored
I had to admit - I was wrong. Here was a series that used the visual language of the very
media that gave rise to this assumption that also justified that use and even celebrated it.
Kill La Kill is hardly subtle, boasting a narrative in which clothes literally consume
people, conformism is mandated and free will controlled by fashion companies. Class structures
and the priveleges associated with those at the top of them are recognised and enforced
by the clothes people wear while the group fighting such class structures goes by the
name "Nudist Beach". It's not subtle, but it was more than a conflict between sentient
clothing and a group of nudists, it was also a clever deconstruction of class structures,
fascism and the fashion industry, and if that narrative and those themes are conveyed through
the fan service that I found so uncomfortable in the first episode then so be it.
Assumption 2: I don't 'get' comedy in anime
Whether anime is a medium, style or genre remains a popular debate and one I plan to
discuss in future, but the comedy in all the anime I'd watched prior to Kill La Kill
just hadn't clicked with me. Whether it was Code Geass or the comic relief in Cowboy Bebop
and Death Note I either didn't like it at all, or thought it was the worst element of
the series.
Kill La Kill not only leant heavily on jokes and puns, some of which didn't even properly
translate into English, but it also lacked the darker moods that I enjoyed in Cowboy
Bebop or Death Note. It was distinctly lighter in tone, and initially I had assumed this
would be a problem.
As I watched through it though I become quite taken with the irreverent dialogue, whatever
Mako's performances could be called and I loved the way the tone of a scene could switch
on a dime from delightfully stupid to pretty metal...
and sometimes both at the same time. The gags would fold upon themselves, each repetition
deriving more and more from a simple premise as the show built its own comedic vocabulary,
and most importantly it never took itself too seriously. In short I loved it, and I've
since come to appreciate comedy in other anime such as the delightful Aggretsuko which itself
surprised me quite a bit, but that's a discussion for another video. Kill La Kill surprises
me at every turn, its fan service, initially so on the nose was, at least outside of a
few scenes, quite easy to get used to and its comedy both stood alone and enhanced what
surrounded it in ways I hadn't expected. There was one thing that I came to expect though,
something that had me excited for every episode. Its style.
Assumption 3: Anime is stylistically stagnant
Before watching Kill La Kill I thought Anime all felt the same. Sure a series might have
characters with a more or less realistic style or with a more or less bizarre haircut, but they
all felt similar somehow. I'm not saying that Naruto and Death Note are similar in any way,
but it felt like that. Somehow they seemed to hide the shortcomings of animation and
to use its strengths in the same ways - to use music cues, animation techniques or certain
shotsto communicate the same things. Again, they aren't similar at all, but it felt like
they solved the disparate problems they faced in production in similar or expected ways.
Kill La Kill and Trigger, the team behind it, took many of those solutions and flipped
them on their head. The static frames and rigid compositions that made scenes more simple
to animate were traded out for chaotic, character filled tableus and rapid cuts between key
frames. Rather than sticking to a single genre's tropes of character design some characters
looked more at home in a comedy and others in a drama yet somehow both worked together.
Corners were still cut as they have to be in most animation, but they were cut differently.
I could go on about the visuals, but digibro better expressed pretty much everything I
would have in the video linked in the card above.
On top of using tweening and well integrated 3D animation to create a unique tone without
adding significant effort in production, Trigger also used music in an interesting way. While particular
tracks are still asociated with particular characters or tones as in other anime...
Trigger didn't hide their music in the background, but rather made a statement or even a joke
out of it. What shone through was the confidence Trigger had in each track and how they used
them. Kill La Kill has style in spades, and while it isn't true that other anime doesn't,
only Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo even come close to having the style that I loved
in Kill La Kill. Trigger just had a tremendous amount of confidence in their abilities and
stylistically went out on limbs another production company would have avoided at all costs.
Assumption- er, I mean - Part 4: Conclusions and Confidence
That insane confidence pretty well sums up Kill La Kill as a whole - it was confident
where other shows were complacent. It took ridiculous ideas like nudists fighting a clothing
company or a school that enforced class structures through uniforms and backed them up with wonderfully
stupid notions like fashion equals facism and somehow it managed to knit them together
into a show that was stupidly entertaining with a nearly coherent set of messages about
capitalism, materialism, class and, because I haven't said it enough times already in
this video, and only said it once in this really long sentence, fascism.
[I felt pretty dumb doing that]
It was such a huge surprise not only because it had a plot under the surface of endless
stupidity, not only because that plot had some surprisingly interesting themes, not
only because those themes were explored through surprising perspectives and not only because
it broke the assumptions I outlined in this video. It was so surprising because it felt
effortless. Every episode offered a new surprise, every minute a new feast for the eyes and
every character a tremendous amount of satisfaction, be that satisfaction comedic, cathartic or
Kiryuin.
I'd better stop here before I descend into even more nonsensical rambling about fetish
imagery, fan service and fascism, but I would love to know what you thought of Kill La Kill.
Am I just an idiot justifying my fandom through a tangled mess of political ideology? Were
my assumptions about anime justified or totally misguided? Whatever your take I'd love to
hear your thoughts.