Review for Black Lagoon: Complete Season 1

Introduction

You may be surprised to see Black Lagoon back on UK shop shelves, but it's a very welcome return for this action show, an anime that stands above its peers in terms of content, character and sheer balls to the wall attitude. The first time around, MVM released it in the UK, both the first series and the Second Barrage. The problem was in the timing of it. Black Lagoon was one of the last series to be licensed by Geneon in the US before they stopped distribution. Its localisation and dub was a fraught affair, full of delays. It meant that when the show did get to MVM, they had a shorter window than usual to release it. Licenses have a typical duration, allowing for a set lifetime of releases for a show, and back in the mid 2000s, that was from single volume release to collections, to budget. That would normally take 3 or four years, but MVM put Black Lagoon through its lifecycle in half the time, going from six single volumes, to two series collections, to one Complete Barrage boxset in little more than eighteen months, and it sold out really quickly. A lot of fans missed out, and it's been pretty much out of print ever since.

Then in 2010 something special happened. Roberta's Blood Trail, a 5 episode OVA that continues the adventures of the Black Lagoon crew was released in Japan, and to go alongside the Blu-ray release of that series, the original 24 episodes were re-mastered for high definition release. Roberta's Blood Trail sparked interest in the show once again, and in the US, Funimation picked up the rights to the OVA and the first two series too. But it's Kazé who are first to the finish line when it comes to releasing it all outside of Japan. They've picked up the series and are releasing it on DVD, and they are releasing it on Blu-ray as well. Unfortunately, there are one or two snags. The first is that we have to wait on Funimation for the dub of Roberta's Blood Trail. The rest of Europe gets it on the same day as the original series, but in the UK, we'll have to wait until 2013 at least. The second thing is that Black Lagoon's original series dates from 2006, not exactly an era replete with high definition television anime. Ergo Proxy also dates from 2006, and it's practically the first. You have to wonder if the Blu-ray of Black Lagoon is really worth it...

The life of a salaryman, or white-collar worker isn't an easy one. Years of hard competitive education just to get your foot on the first rung of the corporate ladder in a big firm. As the lowest of the low, you get the toughest work and all the abuse from the higher ups. You spend years of your life, make sacrifices of your family and free time, pledging eternal loyalty to the company, all in the hope that one day, you'll be the one doing the abusing instead of being abused. Then, while acting as a courier, you're kidnapped by mercenaries for the sensitive data disc that you're carrying, disowned by your superiors as an unfortunate loss, get caught up in battles and gunfights with the mercs your company send to retrieve the disc, and start a new job as a pirate. Okay, so that doesn't happen to your average Reginald Perrin, but it does happen to Rokuro Okajima, in the acclaimed anime Black Lagoon. This Blu-ray collection collects the first season of Black Lagoon, all twelve episodes spread across two discs, chronicling the adventures of unlikely white-collar pirate Rock, borderline psychotic gunman "Two Hands" Revy, Vietnam vet Dutch, and tech specialist Benny.


Disc 1

1. The Black Lagoon
2. Mangrove Heaven
All Rokuro "Rock" Okajima had to put up with was hard workdays at the office and abusive superiors until the fateful day he was chosen to act as courier for a data disc. The Black Lagoon mercenary group waylaid his vessel, and captured the disc. A simple act of piracy grew more troublesome when mercenary Revy decided to make a little money on the side and ransom Rokuro as well. The pirates are just middlemen, and intend to take the disc to the Russian mafia, who will ransom it back to Asahi Industries. Asahi is having none of this, and they hire mercenaries of their own to destroy the disc, Black Lagoon, and throw Rokuro to the sharks. As compensation, he does get a post-mortem promotion though.

3. Ring-Ding Ship Chase
A blind statue of a Buddha stands guard to the port of Roanapur, home of Black Lagoon. It's a fitting symbol for the city of pleasure, populated by those living outside the law. Rock is still trying to find his feet in a town where everyone tries to get one over on everyone else. Dutch walks the streets, trying to learn the lay of the land following their most recent adventure. It seems not everyone appreciates the fact that he has dealings with the Russian Mafia, who are the newest arrivals in Roanapur, and are shaking up the status quo. Black Lagoon's latest mission seems straightforward enough, pick up a package from some Vietnamese, but in actuality it is a lethal trap.

4. Die Rűckkehr des Adlers
5. Eagle Hunting and Hunting Eagle
6. Moonlit Hunting Grounds
When Rock happens to mention in passing that he once went scuba diving, it's enough for Dutch to put a plan into action. There is a U-Boat that is just asking to be salvaged, and a gift of scuba gear has a whole heap of ulterior motive attached to it. At the end of the Second World War, a U-Boat Captain was assigned the mission of returning a Japanese officer to his homeland; only the boat was sunk just short of its destination. At the last minute, an SS officer had joined the voyage, carrying a rare painting, a painting that is in high demand among certain collectors. At the location, Revy and Rock don their diving gear and head for the U-Boat, while Benny and Dutch monitor from the surface. Which is when the Fourth Reich shows up…

Disc 2

7. Calm Down, Two Men
Office frictions can be stressful at the best of times, but for Black Lagoon they can be positively lethal. Dutch's approach to office relationships is simple, put all the bad eggs in one basket, and then see which one doesn't crack. Revy and Rock have to spend the day together running errands. Rock's attempts at lightening the mood just serves to make Revy's trigger finger itchier, then he goes and really annoys her by resolving a tense negotiation without anyone having to die.

8. Rasta Blasta
9. Maid to Kill
10. The Unstoppable Chambermaid
Rock's office expertise is put to good use again, overseeing a cargo exchange, weapons for goods. Only this time the goods offered in payment are a little boy named Garcia. Before Revy's babysitting skills get out of hand, Dutch tells Rock to look after the kid, supposedly an orphan, and not to get attached, as it's only merchandise that they are transferring. But reverse Stockholm syndrome sets in anyway and Rock gets a little too attached. It's a good thing too, as he learns that the boy is no orphan, he's heir to the wealthy Lovelace family, and the Colombian mafia took him to put pressure on his father. The odd thing is that there are no ransom demands. The clients have been lying to Dutch again, and he doesn't take things well, deciding to hold on to the boy until he can figure things out. Meanwhile, Garcia's nanny Roberta is in town looking for her lost lamb.

11. Lock 'n Load Revolution
12. Guerrillas in the Jungle
When extremists target a US embassy, it means an emergency job for the crew of the Black Lagoon. The Chinese Triad have gotten their hands on some sensitive intelligence documents, and had their headquarters blown up for the privilege. It's information that the CIA would love to get their hands on, especially as the terrorists have a particular grudge against the US. Dutch is to deliver the case to the CIA on Basilan Island within two days, but the terrorists have them in their sights. Even with a host of decoys, they are still tailed to the island, so while Benny and Dutch play follow my leader, Rock and Revy sneak onto the island, only for Rock and the briefcase to be captured as soon as they land.

Picture

What is HD, and what is Blu-ray, and what does it all mean for Black Lagoon? These are the questions at the heart of this release, and I'm going to have to waffle a bit here. In Japanese anime, HD refers to any resolution greater than the native 480i of NTSC television. It's exorbitantly expensive to animate at the full 1080p of HD television, and most HD anime is animated at a lower resolution and scaled up. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood for instance was animated at 540p (ironically while this is HD in Japan, in the 576i PAL UK territories, it would still be considered SD). I still have the original MVM release of Black Lagoon, and did a quick compare and contrast, and I can tell you that there is no extra detail on the Blu-ray compared to the DVD. Black Lagoon is a show with bold animation, strong colours and striking outlines, and the fine detail that you would expect from a higher definition show just isn't there. I have to say that Black Lagoon is an SD show presented on an HD medium.

This isn't necessarily a waste. Here we come to the question about the differences between Blu-ray and DVD, and how Black Lagoon was transferred to the HD medium. There have been several up-scaled discs in the US, which has muddied the waters when it comes to buying anime on Blu-ray there. Manga admirably stated early on that they would avoid this practice. But if Black Lagoon is an SD show, surely it means that these discs are up-scaled? The thing is that those US Blu-rays were up-scaled from SD masters, which isn't what happened here. The Japanese who created the Black Lagoon Blu-rays apparently went back to the original source animation, which has all the picture information in, not just that necessary for DVD release, and worked from there.

To store images on DVD you have to compress the data, average out the picture information to squeeze it all in. This results in loss of quality, which can manifest as compression artefacts, pixellation, and noise. Ideally you want a one-to-one mapping of each pixel in the frame, a bitmap. Believe it or not, this wouldn't even fit on a Blu-ray. There still has to be some compression, but it's a lot closer to the source material than DVD can manage, or indeed even the SD masters that DVD is sourced from. What does this mean for Black Lagoon? Comparing the DVD to the Blu-ray, and taking into account that the MVM DVD is a standards converted affair, I had a look at one scene, six minutes into episode 4, where Rock looks at some text on a sheet of paper. It's a static scene, which the DVD can render quite accurately. The exact same picture detail is apparent on both DVD and Blu-ray. In comparison take the opening credit sequence, where newsprint is moving around the screen in a random motion. Pause the Blu-ray at that point, and you'll have no problem reading any article on that newspaper. Pause the DVD, and the motion has introduced compression artefacts, mosquito noise, and pixellation that render all that text illegible. On the Blu-ray, the only such signs of compression are a rare moment of aliasing on slanted edges (it's practically constant on the DVDs), and some colour banding, and my suspicion is that these signs are inherent in the source material. Incidentally, the aliasing gets a little strong on episode 6, but otherwise you hardly realise it is there.

These aren't even the most important differences between the two formats. The old MVM DVD has an NTSC-PAL standards conversion, and the new Kazé DVDs may be the same, or they may be 25fps PAL discs, with 4% speed up. Both will have compression, and both have the comparatively limited colour palette of DVD. The Blu-ray's colour saturation is such that it brings this anime to life. The contrast is amazing, and I was spotting detail, appreciating imagery that had never even registered on the DVD, and because compression is minimised, the finer details of the show, especially in the backgrounds all really pops out. Darker scenes in particular have so much detail in that it's like watching a different show. There was one scene in the second episode where the camera looks down onto the surface of a lagoon, and you can see the sunlight dancing on the wavering water. It looked so real, in a way that I never perceived on the DVD. The second thing is that this Blu-ray presents the animation progressively at 24 frames per second. There's no interlacing, no flicker, just smooth animation. You can pause the anime at any point, and you'll have a perfect image to look at, unblemished by blended frames, combing artefacts, or compression.

Black Lagoon had some of the best animation I had seen in a television anime back in 2008, and it still holds up well today. It's fluidly and dynamically animated, the attention to detail is astounding, especially with the military equipment. This may be the anime of choice when it comes to gun porn, with Revy's Cutlasses getting special attention. It's an action packed show, with plenty of gunfights, explosions and chases to be getting on with. The character designs have had a lot of thought put into them, and are particularly effective with a cast of grizzled and battle worn mercenaries. CGI texture mapping comes into its own here, as I doubt the plethora of scars and tattoos adorning some skins could have been possible were they animated traditionally. It may be an SD anime, or close enough, but it looks astounding in HD.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR and aren't necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

It's a Kazé disc, meant for release across Europe, which means if you should explore, you'll find language options of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and the original Japanese, along with subtitles and signs only tracks in all the European languages. It all locks up as well, so you can't chop and change subtitles or audio on the fly. No English subtitles for the hard of hearing English dub fans I'm afraid. The English subtitle track is the same subtitle track that is present on the MVM discs, this time presented in a discreet white font. There is the odd format error that occasionally introduces unexpected spaces in words, but otherwise it's perfectly legible.

All of the audio tracks are LPCM 2.0 Stereo, encoded at 1.5 Mbps. The audio has the edge on the DVD experience in terms of clarity and fidelity, and the stereo separation is on a par with those discs. English dub fans may be disappointed at the lack of the 5.1 audio track that came with the DVDs, as while the quality of the English stereo track is better, you will miss those bullets flying around the soundstage and the explosions in that surround mix. I'll never be a fan of English dubs, but Black Lagoon's is near passable, with some impressive performances. I think the English language actor chosen for Dutch is perfectly cast, and if some other performances are a little too typical of dubs, they don't detract from the show.

I did come across one problem with the European dubs. If I selected them and started an episode, or pressed play all, the first couple of seconds of audio would drop out each time. Skipping back would play the audio completely, so I guess this is a problem with how my player reads the discs, not an audio drop physically on the disc. I had no such problem with the Japanese audio.

Extras

As I said, this is a Kazé release, so the discs are locked up tighter than the Bank of England. If you happen to stop the disc, it won't resume on play, but will restart from the beginning. As for extras, you get absolutely nothing with these discs, although choose the French or German menu options when you insert the disc, and you will get them auto-playing some trailers.

So here I list what you do not get.

The Japanese Blu-rays came out with seven short omake extras, little comedy animations featuring the Black Lagoon characters to provide a little more incentive for Japanese DVD owners to upgrade. We do not get these.

The first season of Black Lagoon on MVM's DVD was identical to the US Geneon discs (The Second Barrage downgraded the English audio and ditched an extra), so you'll notice what's missing from that the most.

The Geneon versions of the episodes had English language opening credits on the episodes. The Blu-ray has the original Japanese (The Japanese weren't going to go back and up-scale the English translated credits to Blu-ray). The MVM discs end with a 2-minute translated English language credit scroll for the four episodes on that particular disc. There are no such translations here.

From those MVM DVDs, you also miss out on the 4-minute Mell music video, a 16 minute Making Of featurette on the English dub, textless credits, and 4 minutes of promotional videos for the show and the soundtrack CD.

As I mentioned, Funimation have the rights to Black Lagoon in the US, and have promised a Blu-ray release of their own. It will be interesting to see what their discs turn out like. A lossless English surround track for instance would trump this release.

Incidentally, it's just a personal opinion, but I really dislike the cover art for this and the Second Barrage Blu-ray releases. Overly-cartoonish imagery and screen-captures on the front of the case fall flat in comparison to the original moody and atmospheric MVM covers. The Complete Barrage DVD release from Kazé out the same month looks a whole lot better too.

Conclusion

Hollywood is daft. You hear about movie companies optioning anime and manga properties for live action development, and they always go for the big name fan favourites, the Dragon Ball Zs, the Bleaches, the Cowboy Bebops, the Akiras, anime and manga that may look good in animated form, but will either be too expensive to bring about in live action, or will look stupid in the live action medium. Most of the truly anticipated adaptations, like Battle Angel Alita and the aforementioned Akira never get out of development hell, while those that do get made split fanbases right down the middle, with complaints that Hollywood just doesn't get it, or that the character of the original is replaced by homogenised Westernised pap. They should just make Black Lagoon. It is an over the top, serialised Hollywood action movie in animated form, which just happens to be in Japanese. The characters are truly cosmopolitan, the stories and settings have broad audience appeal, and the action comes straight out of an eighties action flick, the sort that would have Arnold Schwarzenegger one line-ing his way through an ethnic minority of cannon fodder. To its credit, Black Lagoon also caters for modern sensibilities in the way that it explores the mindsets of its characters, and the way they relate to each other. It's deeper than a Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal flick, but it will make sure that a s***-eating grin remains plastered to your face for the duration.


Even better, it hasn't aged at all in the past few years, and it's even more fun to watch on these Blu-rays than it is on the old DVDs, if simply for the awesome image quality. I analysed and dissected the stories when I reviewed those DVDs, and you can look those reviews up on this site if you want more detail. But watching them again is like getting reacquainted with old friends. You're reminded of all of the finer qualities that you appreciate. It rarely puts a foot wrong in these twelve episodes, while the brilliance of the Nazi arc and the Roberta arc just can't be understated. There's always a vicarious pleasure in watching members of the Master Race being blasted into their place by a veritable vengeful angel of death, while the Terminator allusions for the relentless maid in search of her young master still elicit giggles today.

Where Black Lagoon really excels is in the depiction of its characters, all larger than life and completely mercenary, but the show also takes the time to put across something of their inner lives as well. At the centre of this is the pair of Rock and Revy, the salaryman turned pirate who looks like a fish out of water, but somehow manages to find a place in this den of mercenaries without sacrificing his principles. He's idealistic, honourable and kind, which rubs Revy completely the wrong way. Revy's the two-handed gunman, who takes great pleasure in her excessive acts of violence. She comes from a troubled background, but managed to pull herself out of that hellhole by creating her own brand of hell. She takes no crap from anyone, is utterly fearless, and utterly remorseless. Bitter experience has taught her to take what she needs, that money is power, and only the fittest survive. It doesn't hurt that she's dead sexy when she's dealing out death. But in a change from the usual female anime psychopath, she doesn't get off sexually on the violence. She's just a plain and simple thrill seeker. That Rock brings a little humanity into her hate filled vision of the world infuriates her no end. And one of the best episodes in this collection is one of the quietest; Calm Down, Two Men, where Rock and Revy have to spend the day together.

The other characters that you will encounter in the show are just as fascinating, pirates with their own code of honour making a living on the wrong side of the law. In Black Lagoon, Dutch is the leader, a former army veteran who is pragmatic and disciplined, albeit with a twisted sense of humour, while Benny looks almost as out of place as Rock. Also of interest are the Russian Mafia, led by Balalaika, who are the top dogs in Roanapur. I could go on for pages about how much I love this show, and as I already have in my DVD reviews I should turn my attention to whether you should buy this Blu-ray.

The bottom line is that Kazé are giving you nothing but the episodes, and they are asking a lot for them. The complete series collection which gathers both seasons onto 4 DVDs retails at £50, which is a little excessive for a re-release. Put into context, when Black Lagoon was first released, single volumes retailed for £20 each, and six volumes would have cost you £120 before discount. But the Blu-rays split the show into two separate seasons, and the RRP is £40 each. Again, there's nothing but the show on the discs, in terms of content you get less than the original release, and you miss out on the Japanese Blu-ray extras. In my opinion, both the DVD and the Blu-ray releases for Black Lagoon are marked about £10 too high.

Price aside, Black Lagoon is a show that should be on the shelf of every action fan, it simply is peerless. If you have never seen this show before, get the Blu-ray. If you don't have a Blu-ray player, buy a Blu-ray player for this show. Should you double dip if you have the MVM discs? I would be very sorely tempted, despite the vanilla nature of these discs. The sound is good, but the video... Let me just say that my wallet is very grateful that not all SD anime up-scales to Blu-ray are this good. If all SD anime on Blu-ray was this good, fans would be tearing down the doors of distributors, demanding that every old SD anime show be re-mastered for HD presentation. The colours, contrast, clarity, low compression, and true 24 frames per second progressive animation makes this show look so good that you'll whimper. But you know, I really want to see what Funimation does with their release of Black Lagoon. If they get the extra features, if they can source a lossless 5.1 English audio track, then I can see some UK Black Lagoon fans triple-dipping.