Let’s get this out of the way: Blackfox is a movie, not a series, and I’ll be analyzing it as its own thing. The basic premise involves a girl (young woman? Coming-of-age narratives can make that hard to place) who is the heir of a ninja clan in the vaguely cyberpunk-lite techno future on a mission to avenge the murder of her family with the help of a trio of artificially intelligent animal robots her dad made. Opposing her are a mad scientist who was her father’s rival and the mad scientist’s daughter who has powerful psychokinetic abilities.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard the basis of the plot, I was interested not because it necessarily sounded like it would be good (though it didn’t sound bad), but because in some ways it didn’t even sound real. If you asked someone who had only a tangential understanding of anime – the sort gained by pop-culture osmosis in geeky or speculative fiction circles and not actual experience – to make up an anime plot synopsis, I think there’s a good chance they’d come up with something pretty close to the pitch for Blackfox: ninjas, psychic powers, robots, and revenge. Blackfox, however, isn’t something just made up off the cuff; it’s very much real. The question is, is it any good?

The opening is extremely promising. Blackfox throws viewers right in the action, showing a little girl being chased through darkened hallways by some kind of ninja is a snarling, black fox mask. After some time fleeing, though, the little girl shows she knows her stuff and starts to turn the tables, using blinding powder, flips, kicks, traps, and even bombs to fight back against the masked assailant. For four whole minutes – which may not sound like much written out but is actually an eternity in film time, especially right at the very start of a production – there is no dialogue of any kind, and the entire story is told through the visuals and animation. It’s actually kind of beautiful; you could probably cut after the first couple lines and have a good short film. However, Blackfox continues.

The little girl is Rikka, who will grow up into our main character and who I will just call Rikka even though she uses a bunch of other names over the course of the show. We see that the long intro was a “game of hide and seek” (obvious ninja training) between her and her grandfather, the current head of the ninja clan and seemingly its only active member. Rikka then goes to visit her father in his private lab and is introduced to the animal drones: a dog, eagle, and flying squirrel who she’s to make friends with, a task made easier by the fact that they can talk as well as cloak themselves in the image of flesh and blood animals. Rikka’s basic conflict, to begin with, is that she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps as a scientist, while her grandfather expects her to take up the family’s ninja ways.

Cut immediately to years later. Rikka is on her way home from taking entrance exams to go to the school her father went to, and is also expecting a cool sixteenth birthday party. Little does she know that there are some party crashers: a vague former business associate of her father who wants to use the animal drone technology for evil… and his private army of military goons. By the time Rikka arrives the ninja dojo is smashed and there’s plenty of blood everywhere. She goes down to meet up with her father in his lab, but the enemy forces catch them there and a clash occurs with both standard gun-toting goons and a mysterious cloaked figure with psychokinetic powers, in which both Rikka’s father and grandfather are brutally killed right in front of her. The animal drones, at least, manage to get her the heck out of there and take her to a little safehouse where she throws away her future and name to take up grandpa’s fox mask and set off on a quest for revenge

Cut immediately to six months later (though you wouldn’t know quite how long at first) and Rikka is now working as some kind of apprentice detective, using her ninja skills and high-tech gadgets to find rich peoples’ cats while looking into her own case on the side and rooming with a kind of odd little girl. Luckily enough, it seems like she’s about to get a break in that murdered-dad-and-grandpa case.

At this point, the astute reader may have noticed something of a problem. It can be hard to really understand Rikka’s emotions because we skip over what should be at least a couple potent emotional transformations. We meet her as a small child only to catch up with her as a late-teens character, which is practically a different character entirely, and we have to just sort of assume whether not she actually resolved that whole finding her path deal. Then she suffers this hideous trauma and is left broken with nothing but her animal robot friends and a burning desire for revenge, only for us to catch up with her when she’s already got a secret identity thing going with a daily life on one side and a main quest on the other. Frankly, you get one of those; both is a little grating.

I understand why they did it; Blackfox would end up kind of bloated, as a film, if we had to actually see Rikka growing up, and might even bloat if we had to see her establish herself in the city and start investigating the problem, only to realize she needs time and money both to actually crack the case and go after the villains who did this to her. We do, however, still lose something by not getting that material, especially the second set of material. Since we come back to Rikka playing around with a lost cat, it takes away some of the weight and gravitas from her revenge motivation, and makes her harshness when she actually does pursue it just a little bit harder to empathize with. It’s just fortunate that the fast-forward storytelling stops once we have her in this new phase, because it’s an issue that would compound with every new instance. I’d be more forgiving, but I think there was fat elsewhere in the story that could have been trimmed to get some of Rikka’s transformation into her post-family-slaughtered identity.

After a fairly savage interrogation of a corporate mook, Rikka ends up outside a facility that’s supposed to be tied to the raid on her family – during the day, so she’s pretending to be an upstanding citizen – and gets accosted by a guard. While she’s failing to talk her way out of the situation, help comes in the form of a young woman on the other side of the fence, who gives her a plausible excuse and sends the guard off. After that the two girls spend some time playing chess and Rikka kind of feels like she’s made a friend, though the other girl, Mia, is quick to warn her that hanging around the facility might not be a great idea.

That night, Rikka heads out to raid the facility properly, presumably having gathered all the intel she needed about things like the camera system on her daytime visit (She does, after all, have robot animal friends to scan things). As she breaks in, we also see a mad scientist alluded to earlier, one with a grudge against Rikka’s father, start to perform experiments on his psychic-powered daughter. If you already guessed that’s both Mia and the mysterious psychic who aided and abetted killing Rikka’s family, you get no prize because it’s really, blindingly obvious from the moment we see Mia in the first place. True, they did kind of hide her face on the raid, but not well. Surprises are not exactly Blackfox’s strong suit, but then on the other hand I’m not sure it’s even really trying for most of those sorts of moments.

Rikka reaches the bowels of the instillation and finds that evil applications of her father’s technology are not in short supply, in the form of car-sized, six-legged, wolf-like robots with frickin’ rotary cannons attached to their heads. But before she can blow it all to hell, Mad Scientist and Mia show up, and while Mia doesn’t want to fight after she recognizes Rikka, dear dad has a mind-controlling shock collar on her to give the action scene an explosive climax anyway – betraying her clearly already tenuous trust in the process, but he doesn’t exactly care about that. Overall, the fight was pretty well done, with lots of dynamic motion and a good ebb and flow to the fighting, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say there weren’t a couple of moments that felt kind of paint-by-numbers. For instance, there’s a moment in the fight where Rikka has an opportunity to kill Mia (after finally noticing who that is) and of course she’s not allowed to actually do it. Credit where it’s due, though, Rikka’s rage and grief are given a more serious treatment than they would be in some other pieces since she has to be stopped by her dog robot friend, rather than just stopping herself. Though on the other hand, in the aftermath of the fight, swept out of the collapsing building by flood water, she has another chance to off Mia and actually resolves, for herself, to not do it then.

Instead, Rikka takes Mia back to her apartment to convalesce, and while Rikka’s demeanor is initially frostier than Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell (… that’s pretty frigid. Read a book.), some big eyes from her cute little roommate convince both of them to stick around for a little bit.

The mad scientist dad also escaped the disaster scenario, which is about when I realized for certain what I’d already expected: Blackfox is never going to get to its real villain. The corporate former co-worker of Rikka’s dad, who actually led the raid on the lab and incited the murder and mayhem, briefly alluded to the mad scientist having been driven mad by dad’s genius, but set himself up even more, declaring he’d “changed” and giving a positively demonic lop-sided grin before sending in the armed forces. He’s clearly the real target for Rikka’s vengeance and the ‘true’ villain of Blackfox… but he’s never confronted in the movie, much less defeated. More on that later.

Mia calls her dad and tries to convince him to turn over a new leaf, saying they should turn themselves in and try to make things right, to which dad agrees, asking where she is so they can meet up. After a moment of hesitation, smoothed over with promises to give up his research and not make her sad again, Mia gives him the location.

If you immediately guessed that he’s going to betray his daughter’s trust again, you also get no prize. The mad scientist then uses a jury-rigged apparatus to give himself psychokinetic powers, and what shows up is one of those big mech wolves, which fairly effectively shoots up the entire apartment complex in another decent action scene before Rikka makes the surprisingly intelligent decision to lead the incredibly dangerous death machine out specifically and emphatically for her blood away from populated areas – namely to the expansive set for our final conflict, Rikka’s old ruined home/ninja dojo on the outskirts of town.

What follows is a shockingly long series of action sequences. They are still good sequences, but pretty much everything from the 1-hour mark of this hour and a half (including credits) movie, when the big robot appears at the apartment, almost to the end is battle after battle. Not totally without pause, but without a good chance to catch your breath between moments of violence and moments with the immediate threat of violence, since it is all one big sequence. And that’s something I am… so very torn on. On one hand, that is exactly what you want out of the climax of an action film; lots of cool fighting, explosions, super-powers, and so on. On the other hand, it can be a bit much, and not every moment lands as well as it could because there are so many in such quick succession.

The basic layout is this: After they lead the mecha to the ruins, Rikka and Mia fairly quickly disable it. Almost immediately, the mad scientist catches up with them and knocks Rikka out cold with a blast of psychokinetic power (leveling most of a building in the process). Mia confronts her father about his constant betrayals to protect Rikka, and is rather coldly told off. They start to fight, ascending into the sky to have a powers duel in the background while Rikka wakes up. Her animal drone friends clue her in that the flashes in the sky mean she has to help Mia, but before she can she stumbles on something in a lower level of the ruins: A holographic recorded message from her dad and grandpa, basically telling her that she has the brains and skills to inherit both her father’s principled scientific endeavor and the mantle of the ninja clan, and the two of them worked together on an especially awesome birthday gift for that interrupted birthday. Why the plan wasn’t to tell her that in person… I guess it’s the techno-future equivalent of a card. Whatever. Watching the message the whole way through also reveals the hidden gift: a sleek new ninja suit with all the high-tech gadgets in the world and a very cool looking black fox mask in a style that conveniently lets certain camera angles see her face to convey more emotion than grandpa’s old full-face mask, while still plausibly concealing her identity if necessary. Power-up acquired, Rikka emerges to help take on Mia’s dad.

Rikka saves Mia from an oncoming loss and then fights her mad scientist father, showing off her new suite of abilities and generally being awesome to save the day, at the end leaving him lying in that typical movie sort of critical condition where the target is too badly hurt to move but you the viewer can’t really tell if they’re about to get up or about to expire. Mia approaches and she and her father have a heartfelt (if extremely brief) little conversation where she admits he’s still her father whatever he’s done (like trying to kill her just minutes earlier) and he apologizes, seemingly ready to die in his daughter’s arms as Rikka withdraws to stand atop the rubble that used to be her home… Only to have mad scientist dad betray his daughter yet again, slap the collar on her, and for a bonus lap spend whatever life he had left to possess her body through that machine, sending her into a berserk fury carrying out his last wish to destroy everything Rikka’s dad made, especially Rikka.

Class act, mad scientist dad.

The final bout against Possessed Mia is pretty quick as of course Rikka knows she needs to break the collar and not hurt her friend, and it’s staged well, jamming in even more cool action cliches that hadn’t gotten used yet like running up falling rocks, Rikka giving a shouted monologue about what she’s fighting for, that kind of stuff… but it still feels like just a little much. The betrayal moment is the third time in the movie (or even more depending on how you count a couple scenes) and the fight is the fourth one to cover the 20-minute span of rolling action. Rikka already got her new ultimate power and took it to the main antagonist (of this movie, if not her arc) – without outright killing him or needing to be reminded to not outright kill him no less. I feel like the writers could have just made the last couple hits of that bout feel a little more epic, maybe with Rikka actually responding to his lunatic babble about her father, and it would have been a satisfying climax. He didn’t need to come back for one extra hit. It’s the film equivalent of that jerk video game boss where you deplete its health bar and maybe even the victory fanfare starts playing (or at least the boss music cuts out) except, gotcha, you still need to give the blasted thing one more little bit of drubbing. It’s a minor quibble, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

And then we’re into maybe the most fascinating part of Blackfox: The denouement. I know how weird that sounds, but it really is curious: Rikka and her roommate get a new place to stay from her detective boss who was barely in this, the evil corporation holds a press conference where the real villian appears, is revealed to be both the president of the company and the mayor of the city, and shows off being the ever-problematic villain with good PR while showing the audience his demon smile again in case you forgot. We see him look at footage from where the roommate briefly intruded on the final battle only to declare he finally found AMD00 (when Rikka’s animal drone friends were 01-03.) True, when Rikka was in the safehouse the camera lingered on a #00 container and the roommate came out of nowhere post-time skip, but it’s still a very curious reveal to drop in your last couple of minutes. He gives some vague menacing talk about Rikka, only for us to cut to Rikka in her ninja getup and Mia and the robot friend roommate in fancy costumes of their own, revealing that Rikka has taken up the name “Black Fox” for herself, vaulting into the night and the end credits with unnclear immediate goals but an obvious interest in taking down the real evil as hard as that might be. It’s a lot of stuff for probably less than five minutes of screen time! And yes, that is where the movie ends.

I’ve heard that Blackfox was originally intended to be a full TV anime but that the ambition was scaled back to a movie, possibly out of concerns regarding its market viability – it’s an original property, after all. And you know what? I believe it. Blackfox is a contained and well-structured story as a movie, but it’s also very clearly intended to be part of something bigger. Rikka’s story is clearly not done, and what’s left should be much bigger and harder for her (even with her new friends) than what came before. It feels like where we’d be about four episodes into a twelve episode show. And, at the same time, there are elements I feel might be artifacts of a story originally intended to be told in a different form. The second time skip, for instance, would have been much more tolerable if it were an episode break, because you allow more discontinuity between episodes of a show than between scenes of a single movie. The fact that Blackfox repeats certain story beats, like Mia’s father betraying her trust so many times or Rikka taking so many new names, would also be more forgivable if the repeated beats happened in units of story that were meant to be viewed in separate sittings. And the overloaded denouement, rather than coming out in the space of less than five minutes, would probably come out over the course of an entire episode after the battle with the mad scientist marked the end of one, giving the reveals and changes of status quo time to leave impacts, where here they have to be crammed into the small space because they serve to drum up interest for the next installment rather than making the one they’re in better on its own.

Further, there’s a mechanical regularity to how Blackfox is laid out. The battle in the underground lab starts at exactly 45 minutes, not a second early or late, and while the final sequence isn’t quite at one hour on the nose, it’s damn close. The beats of both the action and the story are incredibly by the book and while there are some very creative ideas in the background of Blackfox and a clear interest in expressing a style and environment, it doesn’t go too far with anything that could be seen as a creative risk. The robot roommate and the implications of the true villain are glossed over or hidden, while the film is instead predicated on Rikka’s basic (if very understandable) revenge motivation and a mad scientist who’s motivation is a fairly single-noted “destroy target”. Blackfox’s biggest sin, honestly, is that it plays everything totally safe. It can’t quite grasp greatness because it doesn’t take any creative risks that we can see… but if you were a creator who knew your baby would never get to see the light of day in its full glory if this tester outing didn’t do well, wouldn’t you play it safe?

Speaking of that next installment or full glory outing… I really want to see it. I enjoyed what Blackfox had to offer. The characters were simple and not incredibly deep, but they were also charming and I can’t say they didn’t have any dimensionality. The action could be laid on a bit heavy, but the fighting was done well pretty much all the time. The plot had a very basic motivation from our hero, but could get a lot more dynamic with the actions of a powerful and engaging villain. I want Blackfox, with its basic strengths, to have the breathing room to take some creative risks and show us something really great. The main villain, the one we didn’t fight, strikes me as some sort of hybrid of slimy corporate charm, political scope and influence, and clearly something else for whatever the hell the metahuman power he so kindly hinted at actually is. The human robot is huge; while there was some talk about the animal drones being intended as friends rather than servants (some of it decent) they did ultimately fit into the plot largely as Rikka’s tools of the trade, while the roommate character was, even if not dwelled on, built up more as an independent character with her own interests and aspirations unlike the other animal drones who mostly want to help Rikka. Mia has a lot to deal with, too, I want a legit chance to see her come to terms with her father’s death and his abuse of her that lead up to it. In a lot of ways, I’m reminded of Little Witch Academia, a franchise that started with a couple ‘proof of concept’ features (though I don’t rightly know if they were intended as such) and ultimately bloomed into a full show that I should spend some time talking about some day.

I really hope Blackfox does well, because right now it’s B+ material: it does a lot of things in an incredibly standard way, but it executes its standard elements well. It gives us what we want to see, but it doesn’t really challenge us. It’s a good action movie for a younger crowd (yes, I do say younger; there may be quite a bit of blood everywhere when Rikka’s family is murdered, but not everyone everywhere has the MPAA’s tendency to faint dead away if somebody spills ketchup), but it’s too constrained to be something more.

But what would happen if you took the shackles off the creator and the training wheels off the production? I can’t guarantee that there’s be a a marked upgrade, that it would try new things and launch itself into true A or A+ material, rather than retreating to the comfort and safety of the formulaic or stumbling over itself, but I think there’s a good chance it would actually rise to the challenge, and as a viewer I’d certainly look forward to anything new that comes out of Blackfox in the future.