ViVid Strike!, directed by Junji Nishimura. Written by Masaki Tsuzuki. Music by Yôichiro Yoshikawa. Starring Eri Kitamura, Inori Minase, and Mamiko Noto. Seven Arcs (). 12 episodes of 23 minutes (approx. ). Not rated.
Available on Amazon Prime.
ViVid Strike! is the fifth anime series in the main continuity of the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise. On the one hand, that hardly matters because this series is designed to stand alone: No previous knowledge of Lyrical Nanoha is necessary to understand and enjoy what’s going on here. But on the other hand, despite a radical departure from the previous incarnations of the franchise, ViVid Strike! takes Lyrical Nanoha back to its roots, back to the core concept that made the franchise so enormously popular in first place—magic-powered little girls viciously beating each other to a bloody pulp in the name of friendship.
Indeed, although it is not without its problems, ViVid Strike! is arguably the strongest entry in the long-running franchise, or at least the one with the clearest vision … as well as the most brutal violence.
Synopsis
I have previously reviewed three Nanoha titles, Magical Girl Lyrical Nahoha, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s, and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. Another anime series, ViVid, follows those, but is apparently unavailable in English. Although it would undoubtedly fill in a few gaps here and there, knowledge of ViVid is not necessary to understand ViVid Strike!
Nanoha herself does not appear in this series; she was already an adult in StrikerS, so the franchise has now moved on to the next generation. Nanoha’s adopted daughter, Vivio Takamachi, whom we first met in StrikerS, is now an accomplished professional fighter in mixed martial arts, training at a place called the Nakajima Gym.
But the story isn’t about Vivio; instead, it focuses on Fuuka Reventon. A surly tween orphan with latent magical powers and a knack for brawling, Fuuka has a propensity for violence that’s landed her in a tight spot: Having lost both her job and her home, she ends up on the street but soon has a fateful encounter with a girl with the unlikely name of Einhard Stratos (another character from ViVid), who takes her in and gives her both a place to live and a place to work—at the Nakajima Gym.
The girls of the gym, of which there are several, are competitors in the “under fifteen” category of magical mixed martial arts. Unlike the mages of the previous series, who mostly fought with weapons or long-range magic blasts, these girls prefer bare-knuckle combat with feet and fists. After bringing Fuuka to the gym, they turn her into a punching bag, hooking her up to a protective device (a handwavium that prevents injury without blocking pain) and using her for sparring practice.
After some initial reluctance, Fuuka becomes an enthusiastic novice, going through grueling hours of training to refine her natural talent.
She gets extra motivation when she discovers that a girl who had once been her close friend, Rinne Berlinetta, is also an MMA fighter. Rinne and Fuuka had lived at the same orphanage, and Fuuka had often defended Rinne from bullies before a wealthy family took Rinne in. Rather than finding the easy life, Rinne suffered from harassment at school, a kidnapping attempt, and the death of a close family member. Possessed of her own innate magical talent, she finally snapped: After almost killing three girls who were picking on her at school, she came under the wing of a martial arts instructor and subjected herself to torturous training in the hopes that learning to fight might ease her pain.
After finding out about Rinne’s tragedy, Fuuka makes it her personal mission to restore her friendship with Rinne by beating some sense into her—literally. She and the other members of the gym enter a tournament that Fuuka hopes will result in her being able to confront Rinne in the ring. Multiple fights ensue, building inevitably to the bone-crunching showdown between the two estranged childhood friends.
Analysis
It’s stupid. And I love it. The plot is decidedly simple, but ViVid Strike! for that reason lacks some of the problems that earlier plagued the franchise. StrikerS, with its excess of characters, convoluted plot, and impenetrable technobabble, acted as if it expected the audience to read a textbook ahead of time. Compared to that, ViVid Strike! is refreshingly undemanding: It promises to be a cartoon about cute girls slugging each other, and that’s exactly what it is, nothing more and nothing less.
Also, although the plot is not exactly unique or sophisticated, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a magical girl show with this exact concept before. Certainly, plenty of anime series revolve around martial arts tournaments, but a magical girl martial arts tournament that draws inspiration from real MMA fighting is not something I’ve encountered anywhere else. Imagine the UFC with big-eyed waifs instead of tatted-up thugs, and you have the basic idea of ViVid Strike!
Just as in the previous series, there are a lot of characters, and they look a lot alike, but in this case it doesn’t matter: You can forget who most of the girls are and still easily follow the story. At least I did.
Combat
Although it does use a number of shortcuts such as still frames and recycled animation, the fighting in this show is excellent. Someone with a greater technical knowledge of martial arts than I have might be able to pick it apart, but at least to the layman, the bouts are convincing. With one exception (to be discussed in a moment), ViVid Strike! stays away from both the big light flashes and the wire-fu chop-sockey that are typical of the genre. The fights are up-close, one-on-one, and uncompromisingly violent. They look like real fights. The action direction, handled in large part by veteran animator Makoto Iino, is competent, expertly using a combination of wide shots and dramatic close-ups. If there’s any real flaw in the fighting, it comes from an excessive love of uppercuts to the solar plexus, which happen two or three times in every bout.
Criticism
The series is not without flaws. The aforementioned animation shortcuts become more obvious as the series progresses, which is unfortunate because it ought to build toward more eyepopping action sequences rather than fewer. It does, however, give us something that previous Lyrical Nanoha shows promised but failed to deliver: A knock-down, drag-out grand finale between the two central antagonists. In Lyrical Nanoha A’s, Nanoha failed to go all-out against Vita, and in StrikerS, the climax was simply unfocused. But in ViVid Strike!, Fuuka and Rinne get the chance to take out their pent-up frustrations on each other—for three episodes, no less.
The Climax
The finale is fun, but imperfect. It dips into excessive sentimentality, punctuating the fights with heartfelt monologues and poignant flashbacks; but the show is, after all, about friendship as well as violence (and friendship through violence), so it needs most of this to set up for the conclusion even if it overdoes it.
The final fight also returns to the look and feel of previous Nanoha titles, and this isn’t a good thing: Instead of fighting in the ring, Fuuka and Rinne fight in a post-apocalyptic urban hellscape, and instead of the (mostly) convincing techniques used in previous bouts, they kick each other through walls and punch each other hundreds of feet into the air. The exaggerated action is very Nanoha-esque, but it doesn’t fit this particular show.
The Creepy Parts
ViVid Strike! also sees the unwelcome return of something that Lyrical Nanoha had been without since the first few episodes of the original series: lolicon. The girls all have transformation sequences in which, before they enter the ring, they change from children to adults. Given that they’re specifically “under fifteen” fighters, that sounds like cheating, but magically increasing your age is apparently a legal move in MMA. Magical girl transformations in general and Lyrical Nanoha transformations in particular have always involved nudity, but they were previously non-graphic and unprovocative. The transformations in ViVid Strike!, however, are plainly meant to be titillating, usually focusing on how the girls’ breasts expand as they age up. The show at least does not attempt to distract us with fanservice during the actual fights, but its use during the transformations is unfortunate—and also puzzling since this franchise has already demonstrated that it can keep an audience without such cheap tactics.
Conclusion
Although unusual in concept, ViVid Strike! is a distillation of the basic idea of the magical girl warrior: It is about young girls who first strip their clothes off in public and then find friendship through violence. It’s absurd, of course, but it’s successful for the same reason the previous series in this franchise were successful: It plays its silly tropes completely straight. In the world of Lyrical Nanoha, a couple of preteen girls trying to restore their damaged friendship by repeatedly punching each other in the face is serious business. Never once does the show make any snide jokes or give us a knowing sideways glance that would break the spell. This, I think, is why Lyrical Nanoha has endured for more than a decade: It panders to fans while pretending not to. It is self-aware but never acts self-aware. It carefully maintains a façade of sincerity.
And by gum, it works.
ViVid Strike!
Amazon Prime
