Early Reins

Original Title: same
Romanized: Early Reins
Literal:

Plot Synopsis

Margaret Hart is a young sheriff-in-training in the dusty Old West on her way to her first assignment. When a group of bandits attempt to rob the train she's on, Margaret is thrown in with Laura, a seasoned gunslinger, four civilian women, and an injured Union officer working together to defend the train and keep themselves alive.

Quick Review

Rating: 1.5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2008-07-05

Early Reins doesn't look very substantial, and it's not--a stock girl-riffic action western boiled down to its essence. The short movie is essentially one long action sequence involving a huge horde of bandits unsuccessfully trying to stop a train full of women and guns. The budget is low, and the required suspension of disbelief is high, but the action actually isn't bad--there's some intelligence and strategy to the shooting. There isn't anything else, though--the technical presentation is unremarkable, there's no setup or plot to speak of, and only two of the colorful cast even mosey by character development. For language, you get your choice of decent but forgettable Japanese or cheesy western accents and some grating minor characters in English.

In the end Early Reins is exactly what it looks like: Generic, passably fun western action fluff. There's just enough cleverness to the action to keep it interesting, but nothing at all to make it memorable.

US DVD Review

The DVD has a bright, fairly clean transfer (much better than some of AnimeWorks' DVDs of the era, although there's still a touch more color noise than you'd expect in an all-digital production like this), and similarly clean stereo sound in both languages, plus a subtitle track. Extras consist of a textless opening and ending sequence and a "making of" video that demonstrates (in relatively dry detail) how the computer models of the train and scenery were done.

Content Guide

AnimeWorks calls it 13-up, and that seems about right mainly on account of a reasonable amount of blood and a high body count.

Violence: 3 - It's not gory, but there is definitely some blood to go with all the shot-up bandits.

Nudity: 1 - A few mildly revealing outfits.

Sex/Mature Themes: 2 - The bandits briefly manhandle some of the women early on.

Language: 1 - A sprinkling of mildly coarse language.

Notes and Trivia

The gunslinger Laura is voiced by Aiko Mitsumori, a '90s-era Jpop singer-songwriter. It's her only anime role (or other showbusiness activity since the '90s, for that matter) that I can find.

It was released straight to DVD in Japan; the title is written in English even on the Japanese packaging.

The making-of featurette shows that a couple of shots make use of a computer-modeled 3D landscape with hand-painted textures, a technique that at the time Early Reins was made was usually only seen in drastically higher-budget productions, most notably some Ghibli films.

Availability

Available in the US on bilingual DVD from AnimeWorks.

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