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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:
- Action Girl (Mirielle, Kirika, Chloe)
- Almighty Janitor (The most ruthless, efficient killing machine the world will know is...a Japanese schoolgirl. With abandonment issues.)
- Alone In A Crowd (Kirika comments that even when she was "normal", everything felt wrong. Mireille directly refers to this trope; and as Kirika stares at her in astonishment at her wise words; Mireille admits Hemingway came up with it first.)
- Almost Lethal Weapons (Very, very averted.)
- Armor Is Useless (Partially averted at the end, when one of Altena's priestesses wears a Bullet Proof Vest. It allows her to take multiple chest shots without injury, but unfortunately doesn't protect her from neck wounds.)
- Ancient Conspiracy
- Anti Hero
- Aya Hisakawa (Chloe)
- Badass Adorable (Kirika is an almost perfect example of one. Mireille, although very pretty, doesn't quite make the cut, being neither as approachable nor in need of a hug as her partner. Chloe is more of a...)
- Little Miss Badass, (what with her having a vaguely nasty streak).
- Back To Back Badasses (Kirika and Chloe slaughtering the Soldats footsoldiers
stupid dedicated enough to try and surround them.)
- Bloodless Carnage
- Brainwashed And Crazy (Kirika, from episodes 21 to 25.)
- Break The Cutie (Kirika and Chloe.)
- Broken Bird (Everyone, but specially Altena.)
- Bring Out Your Gay Dead (Chloe)
- Bullet Sparks (Depending on the episode's budget, this is either played straight or averted very nicely.)
- Career Killers
- Catch Phrase: A minor example, but the director told Kirika's voice actress to insert "There we go." whenever she thought it fit.
- Click Hello
- Close Call Haircut (three times, twice to Kirika and once to Mireille)
- Complete Monster (The show plays with this trope. Mireille, by the end of the series, thinks of Big Bad Altena as a Complete Monster, actually explicitly stating this to Altena's face. However, part of the point of the series precisely is that Altena is not this trope. The true horror is that she seems to genuinely love all her wards and followers (especially her right hand and adoptive daughter, Chloe), but doesn't hesitate for a moment to use them like chess pawns. Even when she has the entire population of a Basque village lie down and die to prove a point to Kirika, her preternatural motherliness prevents her from becoming this. Altena exists to answer the question "is it possible to act like a Complete Monster without being a Complete Monster"? IT IS.)
- Crowning SOUNDTRACK Of Awesome
- Contract On The Hitman
- Creepy Child (More than one, but specially the teenaged Lady Silvana)
- Cry Cute (Kirika-chan. Aww poor baby.)
- Dark Action Girl (Chloe, Lady Silvana. Arguably Kirika in "True Noir" mode as well.)
- Defusing The Tykebomb (Mireille does this to varying degrees throughout the series; as a result, in the climactic episodes, she manages to break Kirika's brainwashing at the last second.)
- Dissonant Serenity (Altena takes this to new heights. No mere Emotionless Girl, she has an aura of gentle motherliness and regal tranquility. Her theme music is among the most powerful, least melancholy pieces in the entire soundtrack, and an exercise in undiluted awesome at that. Did we mention she is the Big Bad?)
- Dramatic Wind
- Elite Mooks (The Knights of Paris and the Soldats High Priestesses are both highly trained Bad Ass armies - yet they're dispatched as easily as any of the several dozen nameless minions the protagonists have killed thus far, rendering their "elite" status something of an Informed Ability. To be fair, one Priestess did have to be shot repeatedly to no avail due to the armour she was wearing and finally took a blade to the back of the neck, which is about as elite as anyone whose name isn't Mireille, Kirika, or Chloe gets in this series.)
- Emotionless Girl
- Enfante Terrible (Kirika, Chloe, Silvana)
- Extraordinarily Empowered Girl (as one fan put it: "Kirika isn't a ninja, she is a witch.")
- Falling Chandelier Of Doom
- Fanservice (Surprisingly little, given the setting and characters.)
- Flashback (There are Flashbacks in flashbacks in this series, done completely straight.)
- Foe Yay: ( Lady Silvana aka the Intoccabile gives Mireille an excessively long (and open-mouthed) Kiss Of Death. And beforehand, when they were children, she was very obsessed with Mireille, traumatising her for life.)
- Gangsta Style
- Good Eyes Evil Eyes (Kirika's Moe Moe eyes become more like Chloe's narrow ones as she comes under the True Noir's influence)
- Grey And Gray Morality
- Growing The Beard (the show improves quite dramatically after the St Petersburg episode.)
- The Gunslinger (Mireille)
- Gun Fu (Kirika-chan's elegant and deadly primary style of combat, with a lot of...)
- Gun Kata (...thrown into the mix as well.)
- Hard Cut Flashback
- Heroic Bloodshed (Cited by Bee Train studios as one of the main sources of inspiration for this series: Just switch Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee from The Killer with Kirika and Mirelle respectively and you'll have a John Woo film starring beautiful girls.)
- Heterosexual Life Partners (Mireille and Kirika. If it isn't Les Yay to you.)
- Hidden Eyes
- Honor Before Reason
- Houko Kuwashima (Kirika)
- I Know Kung Fu
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy (Justified by Altena's goal.)
- Improbable Aiming Skills
- Kill Em All ( The show ends with two thematic gunshots, creating debate in the fanbase of whether the pair actually did get shot. Bee Train also gave an Or Is It ending to .hack//SIGN that wasn't real.)
- It has also been suggested that the sound effects used for those two gunshots were the same ones used specifically for Kirika and Mireille's pistols, not those used for the weapons of the generic grunts, adding to the potential for alternate interpretations.)
- It's accepted by the fanbase by now that this is the case. Berettas and Walthers have quite distinct sounds, and somebody actually bothered to do sound analysis of this. Given that both guns were gone at this point this seems to put the Kill Em All into doubt.
- Kirika and/or Mireille Is About To Shoot You in much of the artwork.
- Knight Templar (Altena)
- Kotono Mitsuishi (Mireille)
- Kuudere (Mirielle can be interpreted as this)
- Laser Guided Amnesia (Kirika.)
- Laser Sight
- Les Yay (Complete with the "sharing-one-bed" routine, and the pushed together hotel beds
 sequence.)
- In addition to the Les Yay between Kirika and Mireille, there are also significantly less subtle examples between Kirika and Chloe and Mireille and Lady Silvana.
- Lipstick Lesbian (Mireille, depending on how much you read into the Les Yay)
- Lovely Angels
- Magic Skirt (Especially Mireille's)
- Mafia Princess (Mireille used to be one; Silvana could very well be described as one.)
- Meaningful Name (Chloe's name sounds a lot like "Kuroe" or "Black" in a Japanese accent. "Kiri-ka" is very similar to "one whose job is to kill.")
- MIB
- Mind Rape (It's heavily implied that this was a major part of Kirika and Chloe's training.)
- Moe Couplet (Mireille and Kirika in their happier moments, especially early in the show.)
- Moe Moe (Poor Kirika-chan)
- Moe Stare (Rosalie Hammond in Episode 4 and fake!Kirika in Episode 1. This expression is symbolic of innocence about to be shattered in Noir.)
- Multinational Team (sort of)
- My Revenge Is Mercy
- Mysterious Past
- Myth Arc
- Narm (Altena's scene in front of the volcanic vent with her hair and skirt blowing around made more fans laugh than think it to be dramatic as intended and spawned comments of "Octopus!" and parody fan art of her imitating Marilyn Monroe)
- Odd Friendship
- Ominous Latin Chanting (When the choir starts singing "Salva Nos," rest assured that the body count is about to skyrocket.)
- Only A Flesh Wound (Mostly averted. Kirika gets shot a few times over the series, and it seriously compromises her ability to pull off her usual feats of death-dealing. In one episode, she has to tape her gun to her hand since an arm wound has rendered her incapable of gripping the weapon properly.)
- Panty Shot (or, more accurately, the lack thereof)
- Parental Abandonment (Mirielle's parents are dead. Nobody know what happened with Kirika's. And when she found herself as an amnesiac schoolgirl, nobody posed as a parent, despite her having an apparently forged picture depicting them. This makes the "abandonment" feeling worse.)
- Peek A Bangs (Silvana)
- Playing Against Type (TARAKO usually plays Moe Moe characters. She plays Altena here. Uuuuh...)
- Fun fact: Mashimo Kouichi, during recording, referred to Tarako as "Altena-chan". I swear.
- Same with Tiffany Grant, her English VA, who is best known for Asuka and other young characters. The voice director, who happens to be married to Tiffany, said that he knew she could pull off Altena when she spoke in her sleep about putting a body on the table.
- Psycho Lesbian (Chloe, possibly Silvana)
- Rape As Drama ( Altena's Start Of Darkness)
- Red String Of Fate (Except it's black.)
- Schoolgirl Lesbians
- Screw Destiny (Mireille near the end of the series)
- Shout Out (a visual shout-out to Zardoz of all things: the word 'Noir' in print (diegetically) is often 'bubbled' across the screen in the same way that 'Zardoz' was.)
- In an early episode, Kirika and Mireille walk into a shop. We can see the shop name backwards in the window. "Bee Train."
- In a bizarre digression in the second episode, when Kirika is chopping vegetables in Mireille's kitchen, she's wearing an apron with...uh...the Wu Tang Clan symbol on it. We're...really not sure why.
- Small Girl Big Gun
- Take My Hand (The ending. "I'm begging you to live...")
- Tear Jerker ( Chloe's death)
- That Liar Lies ( The response to Chloe telling Mirelle that Kirika killed Mirelle's parents.)
- Troubled But Cute (The sad but adorably cute Kirika.)
- Trigger Phrase ("Receive the final guidance." *gunshot*)
- Twenty Minutes Into The Future (While made in 2001, internal detail indicates the series is set around the year 2010. Not that it's actually noticeable and overall it seems fairly contemporaneous.)
- I'd classify this as Next Sunday AD because the World Trade Centre is visible in an Aspect Montage in the New York episode and the characters still use francs rather than euros.
- Also, in Episode 6 a current newspaper article about the 2000 Presidential Election is visible on the screen.
- Tykebomb (Again, Kirika.)
- Viewers Are Geniuses (Do you enjoy digressions into the history of the Mafia, ethnic minorities in the former USSR, the nature of sin and redemption, how to make wine with mediaeval technology, all sorts of Author Appeal about the Catholic Church, and more? If so, Hamartiology: The Anime is the show for you!)
- Villains Out Shopping (Altena is mostly seen in the beginning of the series...picking grapes, writing letters, and taking walks in the sunshine. This has the effect of making her more creepy than the previous mafioso punks and thugs.)
- And while she's one of the protagonists, the first thing you see of Mirielle is her out in sunny Paris, doing her grocery shopping and motoring back to her apartment on a sunshine-yellow scooter. Then you look over her shoulder as she opens her e-mail. For her job. As an assassin.
- Kirika and Mireille enjoying a spring day, eating ice cream cones in the park... while planning their next hit.
- When She Smiles (Kirika-chan, Over Nine Thousand in sheer cuteness when she smiles for the very first time in Episode 6).
- The Woobie (Kirika practically holds up a sign that says "Please Hug Me!!" whenever she is crying. Chloe also gets in on the Woobiedom in the final arc, and even somewhat before that.)
- Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds (Kirika. Holy shit, Kirika.)
- Xanatos Sucker ( Chloe.)
- Yumi Touma (Silvana)
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