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Gunsmith Cats is a manga, telling the action-packed story of gunsmith/bounty hunter Irene "Rally" Vincent and her teenaged partner Minnie May Hopkins, a precocious explosives enthusiast with a penchant for hand-made grenades that emit pink smoke.
Three OVA episodes were made, which is not nearly enough to get into the extended story that runs through the original manga (and its sequel series, Burst). Instead, it settles for being a short, episodic, high-energy action-adventure story with a lot of fast cars, loud explosions and vigorous gunplay. Created by Kenichi Sonoda, the famed character designer for Bubblegum Crisis, Gunsmith Cats is descended from an OVA called Riding Bean. Riding Bean featured Rally as the partner of Bean Bandit, a professional wheelman with a soft spot for kids. Bean would later appear in Gunsmith Cats first as an adversary, then later as an ally and friend of Rally's.
While otherwise not incredibly outstanding ( hey!), Gunsmith Cats is noteworthy for the degree of research and accuracy it possesses. The action takes place in Chicago, and the entire animation team visited the city to scout locations and take reference photographs. So accurate is this attention to detail that many Chicago fans of the series can identify specific intersections, and even the time-period the anime was made by certain key features, most notably the construction scaffolding that surrounded the Field Museum of Natural History during that building's renovation. Also, all the cars and guns are rendered with precise, technically-accurate detail, and their sound effects recorded especially for the anime from the real thing (for example, the roar of Rally's Shelby GT-500 Mustang was recorded off an actual GT tricked out with exactly the same options as its animated counterpart).
Gunsmith Cats contains examples of:
- Action Girl: Rally and others
- Arm Cannon: Bonnie, after her first run-in with Rally and May.
- Armor Is Useless: Subverted; body armor is shown to be highly effective on countless occasions, most dramatically by Bean Bandit. His Bullet Proof Jacket is completely impervious to handgun rounds, and it's allowed him to survive salvos of nearly everything from shotgun slugs to armor-piercing rifle fire. Of course, he can only wear it because he has Super Strength; Misty could barely lift it, and the jacket was heavy enough to break her foot when she dropped it.
- Indeed, armor is so not-useless that for a lot of people it probably borders on Reality Is Unrealistic. At one point in the manga, a character muses about managing to survive the injuries he sustained because he was wearing a really good leather jacket... when, in fact, there's a reason that people wear motorcycle leathers, after all.
- Carried way beyond the point of silliness with the titanian plate in Bean's bandana. Even if it could stop a bullet he still should have been knocked unconscious.
- Of course, immediately after taking that shot, he body-checks a compact car into submission.
- Artificial Limbs: Rally's signature move tends to have catastrophic consequences for the recipient.
- Author Appeal: In a huge way. The author of the manga has said that pretty much everything that appears in it, from the guns to the tricked-out cars to the way the girls look, reflects his various interests and/or fetishes.
- The Berserker: Present in the Riding Bean OVA, when Bean got really pissed at Semerling for hitting him with a fragmentation grenade. Later, she tries to run him over. Bean shoulder-checks her car and not only stops it cold, but pops it right off it's front wheels!
- Bad Ass: Bean, who casually shrugs off stungun shocks, gunfire, and punches to the junk. Ow.
- To a much lesser extent, Riff-Raff. Bean specifically said one of her punches hurt more than the stungun.
- Bang Bang BANG: Averted; all gunfire uses actual recordings of the real weapons made specifically for the show.
- Big Damn Heroes: Sonoda isn't afraid of the dramatic just-in-the-nick rescues. Everyone gets their chance to do it at some point... Rally, May, Bean, Riff-Raff, practically everyone but the pure villains.
- Blasting It Out Of Their Hands: This trope is present, but it's shown to require multiple shots; firearms don't deliver enough force to knock stuff around because Reality Is Unrealistic. Rally finds it simpler to simply shoot off the weapon's hammer. Or its safety. Or the shooter's 'fingers.
- Blown Across The Room: Averted for the same reason as above. Instead, the author goes to great extent to point out the internal damage bullets can do even with armor.
- Bounty Hunter: Technically, Rally's a gunsmith, enabling Sonada to geek about guns. He knows that most people prefer car chases and gunfights to this, so bounty hunting is actually her side job.
- But Not Too Foreign: Rally is an unusual case in that she's half English and half East Indian, though whether her father was from Pakistan or India itself was never made clear. This actually makes her a Token Twofer in Japan But Not Too Foreign in Chicago where the series is actually set. AND they significantly lightened her skin tone for the anime, making her Not Too Black as well..
- Catch Phrase: "This sucks."
- Canon Immigrant: Inspector Percy emerges onto the scene in Gunsmith Cats Burst, a character only before seen in the OVA Riding Bean. Amusingly, not a whole lot has changed in his quest to stop Bean Bandit, although he's a little more homicidal.
- Chase Scene: Lots, often involving gunfire, insane car tricks, and - at least once - a missile launcher.
- Cool Car: Several. May's Fiat was never actually sold in America, and Bean's car, the Buff, is a car he had custom built for a million dollars.
- Cool Garage: Bean has a sweeeeet one, with dozens of cars, mostly Fords.
- Cool Guns: Sonoda's very fond of awesome firearms.
- Cowboy Cop: Bill Collins.
- Doing It For The Art: Oh yes.
- Eighties Hair: Riff-Raff, of the "punk" variety. Of course, like her spiritual sibling Lufy from Gall Force, Riff-Raff is basically double-dipped in eighties style.
- Fanservice: Occasionally heading right into out-and-out porn, in May's case. Who, you know, is a prostitute.
- Fight Scene
- Fingore: One of Rally's favorite methods of incapacitating someone firing at her is to blast the shooter's trigger or cocking finger off.
- Gun Porn: See Shown Their Work.
- Guns Akimbo: Rally says that firing two guns at once isn't practical because it decreases aiming accuracy.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Rally can hit anything with a handgun. Anything.
- Inspector Zenigata: Percy in Riding Bean and Burst.
- It Works Better With Bullets
- Karma Houdini: Goldie gets off with some light injuries and amnesia.
- Actually, it's worse. It's implied that she's been lobotomized.
- Except she apparently got better in Burst...
- And she gets to walk off into the sunset with Misty!
- Lolicon: Subverted with Minnie May. She's an adult woman who, as a young prostitute, took growth-retardant drugs to allow her to appeal to lolicons.
- Some translations claimed it was so her boyfriend could recognize her when he came back. Other translations admit that the boyfriend is, himself, a bit of a... well.
- The Dark Horse translation reverses this, saying that her hormone therapy is to age her. This implies that she has Turner's syndrome (only 1 X chromosome).
- Doesn't that make her trickery of using the pregnancy test later mean that she doesn't? Granted, the therapy-to-promote-aging thing came from Dark Horse, but they should have caught the implications then.
- Lovely Angels
- Mad Bomber: May, a tiny bit. She's obsessed with grenades to the point of having them scattered about the gunshop/home.
- Made Of Iron: Bean Bandit.
- Mind Control: Goldie's weapon of choice.
- Minor Injury Overreaction: Radinov's reaction to having her earring shot off.
- Dunno, seems to me she was reacting to the fact that the bullet nearly went through her head.
- Moral Event Horizon: Goldie had done some pretty bad crap in the past, but it was about the point that she blackmailed Rally by threatening to have Rally's brainwashed father give her cunnilingus that one realizes she is, in fact, a Complete Monster.
- If the part where she brainwashes teenage girls - and in one case, a much younger boy - and makes them kill their families, so that they remain her willing drug slaves because reality is too horrific to go back to, didn't give it away...
- Bonnie crosses it when you first see her, whacking cops in her intro and other unsavory things. Granted, they're mooks, but still.
- Radinov. Full stop.
- The Mafia: Goldie.
- Names To Know In Anime: Michiko Neya (Rally), Kae Araki, (May), Aya Hisakawa (Becky), Yoko Soumi (Radinov), Hideyuki Tanaka (Bean Bandit), etc.
- Old Retainer: Dennis Tombari.
- Psycho Lesbian: Goldie again.
- Psycho For Hire: Radinov.
- Race Lift: Rally's half-East Indian heritage is generally held up by the way the manga gives her a dark grey coloring, but the anime (and, hence, most color graphics) insist on giving her the same coloring used for Japanese characters and caucasians.
- The anime is actually a bit better about this, in that Rally's skin tone is darker than most of the other caucasian characters in the show.
- Speaking of which, Rally was a blonde in Riding Bean, and therefore got one for the series.
- Rare Guns: The series as a whole is fond of this trope, as is spiritual predicessor Riding Bean. Some examples:
- In Riding Bean, an extremely rare Semmerling manually operated repeater is used.
- In the anime, Radinov uses a rare British Welrod silenced pistol. Probably the worst example, as they Did Not Do The Research; the Welrod's trigger guard appears between shots (meaning it changes from a Mk.II to a Mk.I), as does the entire front half of the silencer.
- Rally's signature pistol is a Czech Army model CZ75; a rare pistol with near-mythical stature amongst gun otaku.
- Then there's Rallys' personal gun collection, which is virtually a modern arms museum in itself.
- Renegade Ukrainian: Radinov.
- Scary Black Man: Gray.
- Shown Their Work: See Gun Porn.
- Ship Tease: The biggest tease for Rally/May is actually in the first volume of the manga, starting in the first chapter, and then the teasing mostly trails off afterward.
- There's also Rally/Misty, which is highlighted by Misty actively pursuing Rally.
- Small Girl Big Gun: Usually averted, unless your threshold for "big gun" is pretty low. Rally several times points out that guns, stocks, and grips need to be chosen with the size of their user in mind, and her preferred pistol isn't a particularly large one.
- The Windy City: The series' main setting.
- Word Of Gay: Rally is actually a lesbian (although, apparently, a celibate one).
- Wrench Wench: Rally is a gunsmith after all, and she's shown teaching May in the manga. She's never shown working on her own cars though, though she does wank over its capabilities at times.
- Not literally... at least not on page.
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