Elfen Lied: Vector One
Sex/Nudity: Very High, no sex
Music:
Runtime Episodes: 25m/13
Overall Rating: B
Artwork: B+
Story: B+
Comments:
Voice Acting English: D
Voice Acting Japanese: A -
Genre: Child abuse
Extras: Clean opening and closing, character artwork, production artwork
Date Reviewed: 8/9/05 Last Updated: 10/25/09
Basic Premise: A woman being held under tight security and having torturous expiriments done on her for years escapes the facility from which she was being held. Her desire is to destoy, but as she escapes she receives a bullet to the head and her personality is submerged and a new innocent personality is born.
Review: The DVD starts out with carnage in what looks to be a high security facility. Thre is a nude woman being help in a very highly secured prison and even her head is encased in an iron mask. She, Lucy, is not defenceless however. Guards all around her are shooting her and never hitting her as the bullets seem to either bounce off or just stop in midair. Guards around her are decapitated without any visible sign of weapons or reason.
As she makes her escape she receives a bullet wound to the head and falls into the ocean. The guards have lost her and were unable to find her. She is later found naked as she was when she was making her escape by two friendly people on the beach named Kohta and Yuka. They see that she is wounded and bring her over to their house and help her out. They take good care of her and clothe her, but see that her mind is like that of a newborn. She can only speak one work, Nyu, and so decide to call her Nyu. She does not understand about bathrooms and pees on the floor when she arrives at their house. She does not seem to understand the purpose of clothes and may absent mindedly expose herself. I never found any of the nudity to be of a sexual nature, but only one of the indications that something is very not right with her. Nyu does not even know how to eat and is like an infant and has to be fed.
The organization that imprisoned her sends out soldiers to hunt her down and kill her or capture her. One day later one of them finds her and as she is being beaten up and is about to be killed her old personality comes forth and violently kills her pursuers in very violent ways. Lucy is a very violent and angry woman who wishes to destroy all people who are not like her. Just as quickly an emotional trigger causes her to reveret back to Nyu. As Lucy was fighting her pursuers a 13 year old girl, Maya, witnesses the carnage. She saw how Khoto was beaten down and how Nyu was attacked and almost killed, but then the tables turned as Nyu became Lucy again; not that she knew who any of these people were.
The story seems to be one of child abuse as we see Lucy was froma facility where she was turtured for what is hinted at as all her life. We see Mayu who is a run away from home and probably from an abusive home as well. Nana, a character to be introduced later in this DVD, is a girl like Lucy, and had expiriments done on her that were torture. She calls her torturer papa though even though she is not. Even Khoto seems to have a dark past that he is unwilling to remember and has a remarkable ability to block out the past. In that sense I like the series so far in that it is an issue that seems to not be addressed much in anime the vast amount of anime out there.
There is a lot of nudity and graphic vilence in this show, but it is well done and well placed I think. No matter how I look at this series I can't help but give it anything better than a B rating. There was no part of it that could not have been done better.Still it is a fun series and I am curious to see how it turns out for everyone involved. There is a bit of the harem theme going on in this series, but not a lot. The harem part was over played just a little.
Conclusion: This is a fun series to watch, but I don't know if you would want to buy it though. I am gong to continue to watch this series as it comes out however. One unique thing about it is that it seems to be a story about child abuse. All of the reccomendations listed below are better and you would probably enjoy Les Miserables better.
Publisher: ADV
Related Website: elfen lied.net
Where Found: amazon, rightstuf, adv, suncoast video
Copyright: 2004/2005
Author: Mamoru Kanbe
If you enjoyed this anime try: Gunslinger Girl, Saikano, Noir
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