It's set on a wild and desolate planet called Gunsmoke, and is very much an Old West kind of plot, but with many science fiction elements. The protagonist, called Vash the Stampede, is a mysterious nomadic character with a bounty on his head, who everyone believes is a bad guy but he's actually the good guy. Just about everyone on the planet carries a personal firearm of some kind, because it's a dangerous, mostly lawless place. The firearms themselves are also interesting in their own right. Some of them are real guns, others are not necessarily real, but are realistic, and others are quite fanciful. It seems that no two characters ever use the same kind of gun. Vash himself carries a large revolver that I would call realistic yet fanciful. It uses the common .45 Long Colt cartridge, yet fires from the bottom of the cylinder instead of the top (unusual, but there are real revolvers like that). However, that part on top houses another kind of entirely different weapon that has nothing to do with conventional firearms.
The opening theme does not have a "full" version. It was written as a 90-second instrumental piece just for this show--as far as I have been able to determine. Here it is.
I'm going to skip the short version of the ending theme. It will suffice to say that it is a 90-second extract of the full version, using only the first stanza and one chorus. It was composed by Tsuneo Imahori, a Japanese guitarist and composer who has scored several anime series and video games. I have not been able to determine is he is the singer of this song, or if someone else sang it. The title is "Kaze Wa Mirai Ni Fuku," or in English, "The Wind Blows Toward the Future." This song has some of my favorite lyrics and are perfectly suited to the theme of the anime. The full version is below, followed by an English translation of the lyrics.
La la la la
la la la
la la la la la la
Underneath the blue sky, the wind blows toward the future,
As if embracing the rays of the sun.
Merely wandering along,
I leave behind only a trail of footsteps.
As long as there's a breeze brushing my cheek and grass to lie in
I don't need anything else, and I'll smile with satisfaction.
Sleeping, gazing at
The never-ending future...
La la la la
la la la
la la la la la la
I can hear the sound of waves, touching my heart,
Selfishly aimless, like drops of rain.
The setting sun quietly reassures itself of everything,
Then sinks into the distant sea, as if giving it a kiss.
Wandering towards
The dream of a never-ending future.
La la la la
la la la
la la la la la la
That opening is cool. I've never seen Trigun before, but if I had seen that in my young, more impressionable days, I would have probably been suitably impressed.
ReplyDeleteThere are revolvers that fire from the bottom of the cylinder, Rhino is one of them (actually, the only one I know of). Interesting concept, to keep the recoil in line with the arm, pushing straight back instead of back over the hand.
ReplyDeleteTrigun sounds kinda like the short story Lone Star Planet I found several years ago, at least as far as settings go. In this one, as soon as humans managed interstellar space travel and discovered uninhabited Earth-like planets, all of Texas packed up and left to start a new homeworld. The storyline itself, is that a special agent from Earth is sent to the planet Texas to investigate the death of their last ambassador.
The Mateba is another one.
ReplyDeleteThis story is a little more complicated, I think. They are space colonists, but they crash-landed on the planet because of sabotage, most of the original colonists were killed in the crash, and the current population are the descendants of the survivors. However, no records were kept and no one knows how they all got on this planet, except for Vash and a few others.