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For the crime drama genre of films, see Film Noir

People are dolls, exhausted from their dance...

Noir. It is the name of an ancient fate: two maidens who govern death; the peace of the newly-born their black hands protect.

Nineteen-year-old Mireille Bouquet is a professional assassin operating out of Paris under the pseudonym "Noir". Obsessed with the unsolved murder of her parents when she was a child, Mireille finds an unexpected clue when she receives a mysterious message from a sixteen-year-old girl in Japan named Kirika Yuumura. She flies to Tokyo to meet Kirika, and they team up, both professionally and for the investigation of their respective pasts.

Between the various contract killings that keep food on their table, Mireille and the amnesiac Kirika (who is a deadlier assassin than Mireille herself), delve into their own pasts. Discovering one confusing lead after another, they soon find themselves plunged into a dangerous world of both organized crime and international conspiracies spanning centuries of history. At they end, they will discover who they are, what they mean to each other, and the secret behind the name "Noir".

Noir is not for everyone. Despite the fact that the frequent gunplay is all but bloodless, it is still terribly violent — there are cold-blooded murders in almost every episode, many of them committed by the "heroines" of the series. (There are jobs they refuse, and jobs they take which they regret, but for the most part, they kill coldly, efficiently and professionally.)

If you can get past the amoral employment of the main characters, though, there is much to reward you. The plot is intricate and convoluted, threaded through with history and myth, with just a touch of mysticism to add a mysterious flavor. The characters are cleanly drawn and compelling — especially the amnesiac Kirika, who agonizes over the fact that she feels nothing about the killings she's performed, and wonders if anything she knows about herself, even her name, is true. And the music is gloriously beautiful, lush and rich with surprising sources and influences — from the simple musicbox melody that is the key to Mireille's memories to the techno-trance version of the Catholic Mass (in Latin, yet!) that is the soundtrack to every gunfight. The artwork is on the high end of average — surprisingly good for a TV series — and never degrades as so many other shows do. Definitely worth a look.

If you enjoy Noir, you should definitely look into Madlax, a somewhat similar (though far more mystical) series by the same animation studio, Bee Train. Sticking to what they know, Bee Train also produced a third similar series, El Cazador De La Bruja, which is more down to earth still. All three series together are also known as Bee Train's "Girls With Guns Trilogy".

This show provides examples of:


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