The attention to detail in Gunslinger Girl is quite gratifying. The show isn’t outrageously slick-looking, but it rises to the challenge of action scenes every time, and still finds time to copy newspaper pages onto the screen.

There’s an early run of incidental football imagery in the first few episodes, with the trip to the Uffizi marking a shift toward highbrow culture, paving the way for some climactic Beethoven. Despite the fact that a reprise of John Barnes’s bit on ‘World in Motion’ would have been so much more appropriate.

The last episode is a little wonder, focussing unapologetically on the characters rather than the action. With the (reportedly turdish) second season in mind I was torn between a feeling that this ending was very much right and a niggling feeling that a lot of important areas felt underexplored. The whole ‘child killers’ thing is obviously prone to discomforting the viewer, but I still felt that things like the way the ‘conditioning’ worked and the extent of surveillance used on the girls weren’t fully addressed. Oh, and the bad guys weren’t much cop (although in mitigation the Japanese word for terrorist does appear to be terroristo).

The mixture of satisfaction with the shape of the show and niggles with some of the events within it, and for that matter the conflict between curiosity regarding the blanks in the setting and the renowned shittiness of the further story, reminded me of Ga-Rei Zero. And as was the case with that show the enduring feeling is fondness for the cast (Triela!).

Something both of these shows do is set an aesthetic and then consistently nail it. Gunslinger Girl’s pastel-realism does a great job of grounding the show, even when it’s indulging in gun-toting tourism (sniping from the Mangia Tower!). Despite not exactly being a stylistic show stopper there were plenty of moments of pleasing visual device which seemed to come from a genuine love of the setting. There’s something intimate about the show that’s pleasing, and which makes it feel just right as a curious little 13 episode pleasure.