Trigun Review

The bait and switch is the whole design. Trigun opens as a comedy, with a blond idiot in a red coat eating donuts, two insurance agents chasing him across a desert planet, and a bounty so large that towns are leveled trying to collect it. Satoshi Nishimura lets that run long enough to be convincing, and then the show turns. Vash is a pacifist for a specific reason rather than as a quirk, and once the series says what that reason is, every earlier gag reads differently.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood is the argument it needs. A priest with a cross shaped machine gun who kills when the arithmetic says to, he exists to tell Vash that a rule kept perfectly gets other people killed, and the series never lets either man win the point outright. Knives is a thinner villain than the ending requires, and the last stretch compresses Nightow's manga into a shape it does not quite fit.

Madhouse works cheap here. Backgrounds are lovely, the desert carries real heat, and then a fight resolves in held frames and reused cuts because the money went somewhere else. Tsuneo Imahori's guitar score does more than the animation to sell the western. What carries the show is Vash, one of the few anime leads whose central choice stays genuinely expensive right to the last scene.